Seven Ways to Help High Schoolers Find Purpose
How do we bring engagement, real-life lessons, and a sense of meaning into teens' lives? Patrick Cook-Deegan discovered after years of experience and research that the most fulfilling and useful real-world lessons are not being taught in typical high school classrooms -- like collaboration, passion, and learning from failure. In a system that values extrinsic rewards over internal values, students... posted on Dec 12 2017, 47,297 reads

Head, Heart and Hands: 25 Years of Schumacher College
Inspired by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's vision, Schumacher College uses head, heart, and hands to teach its student body not only knowledge but wisdom by encouraging creativity and service. Set in the grounds of the historic Dartington Hall in rural south west England, the college has gained an international reputation as much for its pioneering approach to student life as for its innovat... posted on Dec 11 2017, 9,329 reads

Social Bite: Cafes Helping People Out of Homelessness
In the hustle and bustle of daily life, it's easy to forget about our homeless population. In the United States alone, in just one night there are over half a million homeless people, a quarter of whom are children. Worldwide, an estimated 100 million people are homeless, with a total of 1.6 billion are lacking adequate housing. Scottish entrepreneur Josh Littlejohn wanted to make a difference in ... posted on Dec 10 2017, 12,689 reads

The Greatest Danger
"Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, "what do we most need to do to save our world?" His answer was this: "What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying."...What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions. Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor, making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, howev... posted on Dec 09 2017, 60,273 reads

Who Do You Choose to Be?
There have been other historical times that were volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and leaders arose to guide people through them. We are again in one such time. Margaret Wheatley calls on each of us to step forward to serve, rather than withdraw into denial and self-protection. She implores us to become leaders who create islands of sanity where good work still gets done and people enj... posted on Dec 08 2017, 24,045 reads

How Nature Makes Us Healthier and Happier
Studies show that communing with nature is beneficial for your health and your life socially, psychologically, and emotionally. The article in Yes Magazine discusses what these research studies have found regarding the benefits nature provides.... posted on Dec 07 2017, 16,499 reads

At the Tip of Time's Arrow
Close your eyes and imagine this moment, right now, as the tip of an arrow called eternity. What do you see? What do you imagine? What do you sense but have no words for? Dive into this meditation on time by Nicos Hadjicostis and look through his eyes into the infinity of time and what implications is has for how you live this very day.... posted on Dec 06 2017, 8,041 reads

Lunar Wisdom: An Interview with Anthony Aveni
According to cultural astronomer Anthony Aveni at Colgate University, the moon and the sun are in a cosmic dance that defines our very relationship to life. Yet in modern western culture, we barely know the moon's cycles, nor pay attention to the effect it has upon us. Aveni has explored the meanings attributed to the sun and the moon in cultures around the world and contrasted that with our own. ... posted on Dec 05 2017, 12,941 reads

Suiseki: The Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation
It's a tradition in Japan: suiseki are natural stones that suggest natural scenes or animal and human figures. The stones should not be modified and are displayed as found (a single cut is allowed). When someone finds a stone that embodies such a quality, it's collected and a display base, usually wooden, is crafted for the stone to sit upon. The tradition arrived from China where scholar's stones... posted on Dec 04 2017, 27,458 reads

Open Source Seeds
At a time when the monopolization of genetic resources by corporations is reducing diversity and limiting the variety of seeds available to farmers and gardeners, OpenSourceSeeds is licensing seeds to make them available to the commons in perpetuity. Working within German laws, they developed a licensing agreement with the express purpose of creating a new repository of genetic material for farmer... posted on Dec 03 2017, 6,839 reads