Tolu Ilesanmi: Cleaner and Life Artist
"Tolulope Ilesanmi was a cleaner. He left banking in Nigeria and came to Montreal, where he did his MBA and then started a company, Zenith Cleaning. Tolu considered everything about that company a mystery its people, its practices, its purpose. He said to himself, I will contemplate this thing with awe and curiosity and gratitude until it is done with me. Eventually he wrote down this sentence: C... posted on Jul 16 2022, 1,969 reads

David Whyte: Blessings
"David Whyte's "Blessing" poems are interpreted through a visual journey across the Irish landscape in this short film by Emmy-winning filmmaker Andrew Hinton. Musician and composer Owen O Suilleabhain, who has collaborated with David Whyte for over a decade, offers a reflection on the music that inspired the creation of this short film.... posted on Jul 15 2022, 3,859 reads

Ada Limon: Trust Poetry
"I am most free when I am writing poems. Theres a quote from C.D. Wright that says It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside of us that would be free and declare them so. There is so much we hold in every day. Going to the post office and smiling through the small aches of human existence, trying to acknowledge the suffering of the world while still buying dinner and admiring the win... posted on Jul 14 2022, 1,940 reads

Woodworker Anoo Kulkarni: Answering the Heart's Call
"For many years, I wondered what it really meant to 'follow one's heart'. I was very curious to know what it felt like. I was certain it would be extraordinary, with an air of mystery. Something lofty and noble, a higher purpose. It would be a dramatic turning point after which all the pieces of the puzzle would fall neatly in place. I would no longer feel torn, there would be no guilt or self-dou... posted on Jul 13 2022, 3,948 reads

Bringing Back the Delight of Poetry
"The American poet William Stafford was often asked by friends, readers, students and colleagues: When did you become a poet? The response he regularly offered was: "The question isn't when I became a poet; the question is when other people stopped." Stafford was articulating what many poets believe: that the roots of poetry (rhythm, form, sound) go far back -- both personally and culturally -- "t... posted on Jul 12 2022, 2,880 reads

Agnes Callard: A Philosophy of Change
"We can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value wise, from the people we are now. There was a time when we were not even aware of the existence of some of the people, activity, institutions and ideology that now figure so centrally in our lives. Maybe we had different political views or no political views at all. Maybe we used to be religious or used not to be. ... posted on Jul 11 2022, 2,039 reads

Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
"Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves --those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive: truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by. It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so rem... posted on Jul 10 2022, 2,576 reads

How We Wrestle is Who We Are
"My son Liam was born ten years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round as a cucumber on steroids. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn't. He was missing a chamber in his heart. You need four rooms in your heart for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three, so pretty soon doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it d... posted on Jul 09 2022, 2,807 reads

Grateful Voices
"Grateful Voices is a video project highlighting the stories of seven individuals with seven different life stories, each of whom finds gratefulness amidst pain, suffering and all of life's challenges. For one participant, gratefulness is "like a friend sitting next to me." Whether it be through loss or the acceptance of a disability, they express the gift that it is to be alive in any given momen... posted on Jul 08 2022, 1,870 reads

The Paradoxes of Healing
Lissa Rankin, MD, describes herself as a skeptic. She is a Western-trained ob-gyn, linear thinker, and evidence-informed scientist. In the same breath, however, she also describes herself as a mystic an open-hearted, spiritually alive, empathic healer who has witnessed countless miracles of healing and has also experienced them firsthand herself. What follows is an excerpt from her book, "Sacred ... posted on Jul 07 2022, 7,262 reads