The Monkey and the River
"The simplest and hardest thing to do each day is to be here --fully, completely, without turning away. There's a story I love about a master who sends his apprentice to meditate by a river until he's learned all the river has to say." Mark Nepo shares more in this short piece.... posted on Feb 29 2020, 11,563 reads

A Window as Wide as the World
"One afternoon, my two-year-old daughter and I idled around our apartment complex in Bangalore, watching a dragonfly hover over a thorn, when suddenly she began pointing toward the fringe of lawn below. There, a cat leaped at a wiry viper hatchling as it peeped out of its hole..." This evocative short piece describes a mother and daughter's glimpse of urban wildlife.... posted on Feb 28 2020, 2,462 reads

What Baby Boomers & Millennials Can Teach Each Other
For the first time ever, we have five generations in the workplace at the same time, says entrepreneur Chip Conley. What would happen if we got intentional about how we all work together? In this accessible talk, Conley shows how age diversity makes companies stronger and calls for different generations to mentor each other at work, with wisdom flowing from old to young and young to old alike.... posted on Feb 27 2020, 7,130 reads

How the Jump Rope Got Its Rhythm
The jump rope may be a simple object but for countless generations it has served as a powerful symbol of culture and identity for African American girls and women. The skipping rope is a steady timeline upon which girls add rhymes, rhythms and chants, creating a space that is uniquely their own. It is a word of mouth and word of body treasure passed down from one generation to the next, with influ... posted on Feb 26 2020, 1,992 reads

Accepting What Is
"When the word acceptance enters a room, but is never far behind. But what about suffering and injustice? What about the pursuit of our personal goals? What about our individual and collective potential? As soon as the idea of acceptance surfaces, we seem to, ironically, brace ourselves against it as though it will render us incapable of anything other than complacency and apathy." This thoughtful... posted on Feb 25 2020, 13,313 reads

How Craving Attention Makes You Less Creative
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has gotten more than his fair share of attention from his acting career. But as social media exploded over the past decade, he got addicted like the rest of us -- trying to gain followers and likes only to be left feeling inadequate and less creative. In a refreshingly honest talk, he explores how the attention-driven model of big tech companies impacts our creativity -- and s... posted on Feb 24 2020, 5,784 reads

First Aid for Spiritual Seekers
Forms of religious devotion are shifting and theres a new world of creativity toward crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue ... posted on Feb 23 2020, 4,358 reads

Refugee Docents Bring a Global Museum to Life
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology -- known as The Penn Museum -- has hired refugees and immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and Central America as part of their "Global Guides" program. More in this story by NPR.... posted on Feb 22 2020, 2,671 reads

The Soul of Care
Arthur Kleinman's wife, Joan, began to struggle with a rare form of early Alzheimer's disease at 59. Eight years after losing her, the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of psychiatry and of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School chronicles their journey in "The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor." The... posted on Feb 21 2020, 5,074 reads

Learning to Move from Strength Instead of Strain
As a young man he trained for a decade in the classical dance form of bharatanatyam. As an adult he studied yoga, and ran a studio of his own. One day he announced he was going to observe his students in silence, and see what arose. It was a radical decision, and for Gert van Leeuwen, it led to the birth of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy - a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice that ... posted on Feb 20 2020, 5,105 reads