Finding a Way Back
Breast cancer does not ask you if it is part of your plan for life. When the diagnosis comes, your plans must change to accommodate. And how do women find their way back into life without cancer as it's center point? Colleen Webster, a DailyGood reader, shares her experience leading a retreat she organized for breast cancer survivors where she had to travel a similar journey. While she planned for... posted on Jul 22 2019, 5,032 reads

The Teachings of Grass
How do we relate to the land that sustains us--as a source of belonging or as a source of belongings? As the planet teeters on the brink of environmental collapse, botanist, teacher, and author Robin Wall Kimmerer urges us to consider our broken relationship to the Earth and the hard choices that lie before us by examining the history of her Potawatomi ancestors. Through cultivating the sense of r... posted on Jul 21 2019, 2,773 reads

A Gathering of Men with Robert Bly
In this interview between Bill Moyers and poet Robert Bly, they explore the confusion men feel about their roles in society and in their inner lives. In retreats like A Gathering of Men, their sense of loss is met with a sense of hope. Men learn from one another through sharing and listening to the wisdom, writings, and poetry of men like Bly. A father figure at these gatherings, Bly is an essayi... posted on Jul 20 2019, 4,350 reads

How Doctors Use Poetry
While doctors are educated to focus primarily on medical science, some are beginning to expand their outlook and focus on something greater: language, in particular, poetry. While the Hippocratic Oath many physicians take requires them to "remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug",... posted on Jul 19 2019, 2,878 reads

Soft Power: A Magnetic Approach to Practice
"The desire to be in control is a normal survival response, but what I love about the art of aikido is that we can move beyond survival to a vast and universal perspective in which all life is connected and interwoven. Such an orientation is not self-conscious. Since it relates to the connecting aspect -- that of the space and energy -- rather than individuals, there is no thing that needs to be o... posted on Jul 18 2019, 9,334 reads

Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson
"For years I have been not so much envisioning Emily Dickinson as trying to visit, to enter her mind, through her poems and letters, and through my own intimations of what it could have meant to be one of the two mid-19th-century American geniuses, and a woman, living in Amherst, Massachusetts. Of the other genius, Walt Whitman, Dickinson wrote that she had heard his poems were "disgraceful." She ... posted on Jul 17 2019, 4,510 reads

How to Have Difficult Conversations
What if collective introspection would help us to better persuade, to better advocate for a more beautiful world? What are the tools we need to disagree better? How can we improve our ability to listen and learn - especially from those we disagree with? Marcela Lopez Levy asks powerful questions to inspire us and perhaps even entice us in having more difficult conversations. Join her on this journ... posted on Jul 16 2019, 10,417 reads

5 Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives
Every hero and innovator stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before. But sometimes the power of influence one has on another is subtle or indirect. Perhaps it is a life spirit shared by Helen Keller in her autobiography that inspires a scientist to fully engage in her study of plants. Perhaps it is a shy physicist who plants the seed in a student that he, too, can aspire to something gr... posted on Jul 15 2019, 2,152 reads

When Old and Young Connect
"Forty years ago, the eminent Cornell University professor and child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner famously concluded, Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her. The benefits of a caring adult mentor on childrens well-being have been reinforced in study after study, as well as reports from youth themselves--including research I was engaged with early in my ... posted on Jul 14 2019, 7,052 reads

The Work that Reconnects
In this hour-long tribute to "The Work the Reconnects," Pat van Boeckel explores the stories of activists who have used Joanna Macys writings to enhance and support their service and their lives. Van Boeckel does not flinch in describing the devastation now facing the world or equivocate on the justification for despair. Despite the trauma inflicted on the earth and ourselves, she gently leads us ... posted on Jul 13 2019, 2,321 reads