Returning to the Whole
"What time is it on the clock of the world?" My mentor Grace Lee Boggs used to ask this question all the time, to anyone who came to visit and learn with her, in any meeting she attended, or speech she gave. She wanted us--her students, comrades, and community-- to keep a wide, long lens about our work. To remember, all of the time, that this moment is not the only moment. Human development moves ... posted on Jun 30 2022, 3,767 reads

Monkey Stories, the Best Kind of Stories
"When the monkeys come we have to quickly close all the windows and close the doors that lead to the balconies because if we don't, the monkeys will come in and steal all our stuff. With their crinkly hands and perfect little finger-nails they reach in and grab whatever they can--safety pins, fruit, glass beads. If the doors are open they walk in and take entire bunches of bananas off of the dinin... posted on Jun 29 2022, 3,746 reads

Scaling We: A Journey of Heart-Centered Deliberation
"Traci Ruble is a psychotherapist and the founder of an extremely successful community listening project Sidewalk Talk. One day, in the fall of 2015, Traci and 27 other listeners took their therapists chairs out into the streets of San Francisco, offering the gift of listening to anyone who wanted it. There seems to have been a huge need for that offering of sympathetic, non-judgmental attention,... posted on Jun 28 2022, 1,786 reads

Returning to the Art of the Unknowable
"Colin Tudge is a science writer and broadcaster who is best known for his work on agriculture and the environment, with books such as 'Feeding People is Easy' and 'The Variety of Life'. His latest publication, 'The Great Rethink,' advocating a radically new approach to food production, was reviewed by Beshara Magazine last year. In this article, he argues that at the root of our contemporary prob... posted on Jun 27 2022, 1,852 reads

We All Have a Brush
"Kazuaki Tanahashi is a Japanese calligrapher, translator of the Zen master Eihei Dogen's Shobogenzo (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), and a deeply committed peace worker, who is active in the United States. Known also more simply as Kaz, he approaches all of his work with both thoughtfulness and fluid spontaneity. His methods, emphasizing the inherent power of each moment, and of every breat... posted on Jun 26 2022, 1,755 reads

Barbara Kingsolver: The Urbicene
"Kin la Belle, the Congolese call their capital, and Ive looked for Kinshasas beauty. The Congo River, pulse of a planet, fifteen miles wide as it courses past? Abdims storks wheeling overhead, hippos lolling in the rapids below the caf where I had lunch under the gaze of giant orange-headed lizards? All beautiful, I thought, but was gently corrected. Beasts and crawling creatures dont really belo... posted on Jun 25 2022, 2,078 reads

The Night Is Just Beginning
Vocal artist Mariana Sadovska traveled along the front lines of the first invasion of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2016, giving benefit concerts and meeting people in the war-ravaged area. Based on her journey, she created a unique musical story - The Night Is Just Beginning - that is all too relevant today. This excerpt of the performance, called "Tovye Imya" (Your Name), beg... posted on Jun 24 2022, 1,535 reads

How Animals See Themselves
"In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexkll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexkll called the Umwelt an animals bespoke sliver of reality. A ticks Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the he... posted on Jun 23 2022, 2,677 reads

Grieving Beneath the Stars: Mourners as Spiritual Teachers
"When I heard my dad was dead, there was a breaking--a shattering inside of me that felt so violent I could almost hear it. I woke up to a knock on my front door in the middle of the night, and sat up in bed, sure something was wrong. It was my older brother. He said he had bad news. "Really bad." And then the words left his mouth: "Dad had a heart attack, and unfortunately, he passed away." Like ... posted on Jun 22 2022, 4,368 reads

Stonehenge: A Summer Solstice Experience
"I wanted to watch the sunrise on the summer solstice from Stonehenge, ancient druid temple, aligned to the solstice, keeper of mysterious magic yet unknown to us. A picture of Stonehenge had been my desktop screensaver more than 15 years ago, and walking amongst these stones had been a long cherished dream of mine. So when I realized that I could be there on this special day when they allow peopl... posted on Jun 21 2022, 3,238 reads