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

John Welwood: On Spiritual Bypassing & Human Relationship
"When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and dev... posted on Jun 27 2020, 4,300 reads

People Helped You Whether You Knew It Or Not
In 1964, William "Lynn" Weaver, joined 13 other black students in the integration of an all white high school in Tennessee. From the first day he was told he did not belong and he started to believe it until Mr. Hill, his former seventh grade science teacher, started tutoring him outside of school. Some of his other former teachers joined in this effort. Years later he discovered that Mr. Hill wa... posted on Jun 26 2020, 2,575 reads

Amisha Harding: The Accidental Activist
"Amisha Harding was reluctant to join the crowd after seeing how some protesters clashed with police, vandalized property, and left shattered glass and burning cars in their wake opposite Centennial Olympic Park early in the Black Lives Matter protests. She took heed when Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms held a press conference and said, "If you love our city, go home." It was her love for her h... posted on Jun 25 2020, 4,431 reads

No Victims, No Heroes: We Are Each Other
By some definitions, Jolanda van den Berg might be dubbed a philanthropist, a social entrepreneur, a life coach, or even a mystic. But Jolanda's expansive life resists reductive titles. Over the past quarter century her work has transformed the lives of thousands of children in Peru, supported by her three highly-rated hotels. She has 80 locals on payroll, and offers 1:1 sessions with people going... posted on Jun 24 2020, 6,042 reads

Totto Chan: The Little Girl at the Window
"This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an ideal school in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom, and love. This unusual school had old railroad cars for classrooms, and it was run by an extraordinary man--its founder and headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi--who was a firm believer in freedom of expression and activity. In real life, the Totto-chan of the... posted on Jun 23 2020, 3,975 reads

The Taste of Wild Water
"There is a special kind of shadow that happens in deep woods that are old and have been left
undisturbed. Underneath the canopy of ancient hardwood trees the greens are deeper, the soil
blacker, the smells richer. And there is a shadow that is over everything, calling out that there is a deeper world than the human of which we are a part. Something came out of that place and entered... posted on Jun 22 2020, 2,633 reads

The Poet & the Scientist
"My father has collected the most substantial body of fish-based Index of Biotic Integrity data for a watershed of its size anywhere in the world. This is an accomplishment he can claim. Though there are too many dull, qualifying words inserted between those superlatives -- or at least thats what I think..." So begins this poet's lovely piece on her father's work.... posted on Jun 21 2020, 3,135 reads

The Very Best Way to Pray for Peace
When a CIA analyst began an interfaith quest for citizen diplomacy by standing shoulder to shoulder with a veiled woman, and listening to the Imam ask, "Don't we all bleed when we're hurt?" she was grateful to be praying alongside Muslims instead of interrogating them in Afghanistan for the CIA after 9/11. She continues to work with Muslim communities in the belief that peace in the Middle East ca... posted on Jun 20 2020, 19,533 reads

Lonnie Holley: The Man is the Music
Prolific artist, musician and lover of Mother Earth, Lonnie Holley treasures the discarded and nurtures the neglected, finding healing in the transformative power of art. This short documentary is not so much a portrait of the prolific artist and musician, as an experiential reflection on art as a way of life. Atlanta-based Holleys work is a product of the environment in which he was raised Jim Cr... posted on Jun 19 2020, 1,852 reads