Why I Vote
Poet Nikki Giovanni explains why she will always vote. She tells the story of Civil Rights Activist Fannie Lou Hamer, born in rural Mississippi in 1917. She lost her job because she registered to vote. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white delegation, led by Senator John Stennis, to the 1964 Democratic Convention. What happened next motivates Nikki... posted on Nov 02 2020, 1,060 reads

What Is Solidarity?: Reflections on Justice
"Etymologically, solidarity comes from the Latin word solidus, a unit of account in ancient Rome. It then merged into French to become solidaire referring to interdependence, and then into English, in which its current definition is an agreement between, and support for, a group, an individual, an idea. It is essentially a bond of unity or agreement between people united around common cause. True ... posted on Nov 01 2020, 6,569 reads

Voting as an Expression of Love and Gratefulness
"Though we typically think of voting in purely political terms, we can think about every choice we make as a vote and every moment in our lives as an election. We vote with our bodies, energy, money, time, attention, and more. How do our choices reflect our values and our vision for the world? When we explore voting and democracy as ongoing opportunities to choose our values and participate in col... posted on Oct 31 2020, 4,703 reads

Creating Magic from Fragments
For all of us who have ever gathered a collections of fragments, scraps and bits; formed them into little beings and spent precious magical moments with these friends we've formed. This bittersweet little gem is for us.... posted on Oct 30 2020, 3,183 reads

Last Child in the Woods
"Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature." More from Richard Louv in this excerpt from his celebrated book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorde... posted on Oct 29 2020, 3,380 reads

I Am One of Everybody
"This bright red coat warms me in winter not only because of what it's made from but also because of what its covered with: hundreds of signatures, all scribbled in black or silver ink. Last time I counted, people had signed my coat in at least eight languages besides English, from Arabic to Hindi to Dakota to Chinese. Most of the signers have been complete strangers to me. What they've had in com... posted on Oct 28 2020, 8,339 reads

Climate in the Boardroom
"How does one witness to businesspeople about climate change? Climate change is a problem for the collective and the long term, whereas business often requires a ruthless focus on the individual and the quarter. Climate change is an ethical catastrophe whose solution almost certainly requires a profoundly moral response, but talk of morality in the boardroom is often regarded with profound suspici... posted on Oct 27 2020, 5,499 reads

Thomas Merton and the Language of Life
"By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and speaking to us in a great variety of linguistic forms, such as an alphabet, grammar, syntax, cipher, book, and secret language. This is probably because language renders us conscious, envelops th... posted on Oct 26 2020, 6,067 reads

An Evolutionary Transition is Coming-- Are You Ready?
"Through the evolution of human consciousness, cultural evolution has the potential to move from being a largely unconscious process pushed forward by our biological conditioning to a fully conscious process pulled forward by our visions of a better future. By coming to understand the process in which we're embedded, by extrapolating those trajectories we can tack more closely to the wind, chartin... posted on Oct 25 2020, 9,354 reads

Shelter for the Heart and Mind
"How can we keep walking forward, and even find renewal along the way, in this year of things blown apart? How can we hold to our sense of what is whole and true and undamaged, even in the face of loss? These are some of the questions Sharon Salzberg, a renowned teacher of meditation and Buddhist practices, has been taking up in virtual retreats this year, which have helped ground many on hard day... posted on Oct 24 2020, 7,832 reads