Speaking of Nature
"We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, "It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery." Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to m... posted on Jan 19 2020, 5,561 reads

Shaped by a Silky Attention
"A request for concentration isn't always answered, but people engaged in many disciplines have found ways to invite it in. Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady prese... posted on Jan 18 2020, 5,372 reads

Overcoming the Brain's Negativity Bias
Why are we waylaid by criticism or unable to get past a minor snub from our best friend? Thats our negativity bias. We humans have a propensity to give more weight in our minds to things that go wrong than to things that go rightso much so that just one negative event can hijack our minds in ways that can be detrimental to our work, relationships, health, and happiness. Overcoming our negativity b... posted on Jan 17 2020, 15,720 reads

Seeking Wholeness in a Time of Brokenness
Reverend Victor Kazanjian is the executive director of the United Religions Initiative (URI), a global grassroots interfaith peacebuilding network. URI has more than a thousand multi-faith groups working in over a hundred countries with a million volunteers to build bridges of cooperation between people of all faiths and cultures. Victor is ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church and was tra... posted on Jan 16 2020, 3,955 reads

Finding Chika
Renowned author Mitch Albom introduces us to a story of love, a story about the making of a family through love. He shows us that the rules of what a family should look like don't matter as long as there is love bringing them together. He introduces us to Chika, who became the much beloved daughter of he and his wife Janine after Chika's mother was killed in the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Chika'... posted on Jan 15 2020, 2,053 reads

Micah Mortali: Rewilding
"Micah Mortali is the director of the Kripalu School, and a longtime wilderness guide. With Sounds True, he has published Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Micah about humanity's growing disconnection from the earth and how "rewilding" can help slow that trend. They talk about rewilding both as ind... posted on Jan 14 2020, 8,182 reads

Kahlil Gibran on Befriending Time
"There is something odd about this notion of time as property. We are asked to give things time; we speak of taking time time off of something, time toward something. But how do we give or take this fine-grained sand that slips through the fingers the moment we try to cup it? Perhaps time is not so much the substance in the hand as the substance of the hand." Maria Popova explores Kahlil Gibran's... posted on Jan 13 2020, 10,177 reads

Why I Run
"It is just after 4:00 am. I was dreaming about Missoula, running around Mount Sentinel just before dawn. I threw on a blue hoodie and began reciting in my sleep why I run." Inspired by Terry Tempest William's evocative reflections in "Why I Write," long-distance runner and writer Nicholas Triolo offers this lovely stream of consciousness exploration of why he runs.... posted on Jan 12 2020, 11,581 reads

Orion's 25 Most-Read Articles of the Decade
"From 2010 to the present, Orion Magazine has produced over fifty issues full of personal essays and science reporting, poetry and book reviews, photography and art, all responding to the most pressing issues facing the planet. Here are the 25 most-read Orion articles published within the last decade."... posted on Jan 11 2020, 11,624 reads

The Reason I Jump: A Book by a 13-Year-Old Boy with Autism
"The thirteen-year-old author of this book invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that you're hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend. I'd like to push the thought-experiment a little further. Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders ... posted on Jan 10 2020, 4,450 reads