Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong
What really causes addiction -- to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do -- and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the w... posted on Jul 07 2020, 21,533 reads

World At Dawn
"At dawn, the world rises out of darkness, slowly, sense-grain by grain, as if from sleep. Life becomes visible once again. "When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think anymore," Claude Monet once lamented. More light! Goethe begged from his deathbed. Dawn is the wellspring of more light, the origin of our first to last days as we roll in space, over 6.684 billion of us i... posted on Jul 06 2020, 3,603 reads

Advice from 100-Year-Olds
Three centenarians were asked the secret of their longevity. With simple grace and wisdom they give us an insight into the optimism and humor that sustain them. as they each share what is most important to them. They exemplify the value of listening to and learning from the lessons of one's own life as they remind us to "keep right on to the end of the road".
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The Dynamic Mystery of Relationships
"The more open, present and awake we are, the less objective our relationships become. So-called relationship becomes simple relating. The noun transforms into a verb -- an apparent thing opens up into an alive process. If I no longer take myself as an object, I also cannot make you into one. Nor can I create what is happening between us into something. We may call it friendship but it is really a... posted on Jul 04 2020, 6,466 reads

Hidden Stories: Paintings by Diane Ding
Painter Diane Ding reflects, "Painting this series was a healing practice. I do my art and hope it can spark my imagination in new ways, and only then do I hope the work can spark reactions in others to inspire a love of life and of life's mysteries. Humans are imperfect in many ways, but we are, deep down, one and the same; we share blood from genes from long ago, and we have no true reason to di... posted on Jul 03 2020, 2,218 reads

A Pandemic Poem-Prayer
Phyllis Cole-Dai is a writer and poet, perhaps best known for 'The Emptiness of Our Hands', a spiritual memoir chronicling the 47 days that she and co-author James Murray practiced "being present" while living by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. On her 58th birthday earlier this year, she wrote 58 one-line pandemic prayers and crafted them into a poem. You can read it here.... posted on Jul 02 2020, 45,058 reads

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
"I am the youngest of eight siblings. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty, environmental devastation, and greed that are quite beyond the most creative imagination. Sometimes it all feels a bit too much to bear. Once a person of periodic deep depressions, a sign of mental suffering in m... posted on Jul 01 2020, 9,742 reads

What Did Sisyphus Dream Of?
"In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to endlessly try to push a large rock to the top of a hill, an activity Zeus had rigged so that as it neared the top, the rock would roll away from Sisyphus. The story captures the ultimate in frustration and activities that take all of our energy but with no end in sight. The whole exercise was rigged against Sisyphus from the outset. The poor s... posted on Jun 30 2020, 4,669 reads

How to Support Antiracism in Yourself & in the World
"Today, the serious and deadly problems caused by our racism are even more obvious than they were in 2016, and as people in the United States and across the world gather to protest racism and police brutality, I thought it might help to give you good things to read, people to follow, organizations to support, and ideas for creating the kind of serious structural change that's required for an antir... posted on Jun 29 2020, 14,906 reads

Zora Neale Hurston: How It Feels to Be Colored Me
"A genius of the South, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist"--those are the words that Alice Walker had inscribed on the tombstone of Zora Neale Hurston. In this essay (first published in The World Tomorrow, May 1928), the acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God explores her own sense of identity through a series of striking metaphors."... posted on Jun 28 2020, 4,029 reads