Into the Chrysalis
"Chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form and come out as a butterfly is a cliched image of transformation, but holy crap. Stop for a moment and really think about that. Does the caterpillar know this is going to happen? If it does that shows some tremendous trust. If it doesn't, then that shows some incr... posted on Apr 9, 10524 reads

Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being
Physician burnout, depression, and suicide are tearing at the fabric of our health care system, which Dr. Mukta Panda has witnessed firsthand, written about, and sought to address for years. She is a physician, speaker, and facilitator whose work seeks to transform the heart of patient care and medical education. In her latest book, Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being, Dr. P... posted on May 18, 5529 reads

Life in the Time of Cholera: Lessons on a Pandemic
"As sirens fill the streets of London, George Prochnik recalls a revolutionary poets account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris. While watching history repeat itself in devastating refrain, George wonders: What is hysteria? What is necessary passion and courage? How can we respond both lucidly and compassionately?"... posted on Oct 23, 4403 reads

Click Here for Unconditional Love
On Sue Cochrane's website is a button that says "Click Here for Unconditional Love"- it leads to a selection of writings that offer exactly that. It isn't just the words of Sue's stories that touch the reader, but the wordless energy behind them. Sue Cochrane survived a traumatic childhood to become a pioneering family court judge. Throughout her career she strived to put the heart back into the b... posted on Feb 15, 0 reads

The Defiant Tenderness of Surrender
"There are so many courageous people just making breakfast in the morning, going to work, taking care of their families, trying to do online teaching. Holy God. I mean, I just wish there was a cosmic scorekeeper for all of the billions of people doing their everyday acts of courage. I suspect that what we're looking at in the sky at night aren't stars, they are evidence and markers of all those co... posted on Mar 15, 5436 reads

The World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane
In July of 2020, beloved ServiceSpace friends Kozo Hattori, and Sue Cochrane, came together for a virtual conversation in the presence of community. Both were navigating stark realities with cancer. Their luminous exchange was threaded with laughter, insight, tender truths, poignant moments and profound life-wisdom. Kozo peacefully "changed address," on March 1st, 2021. His transition came just we... posted on Mar 2, 8566 reads

Making Children's Books Amid Loss
Even as artist and celebrated children's book author Nancy Carlson coped with her husband and best friend's devastating degenerative disease, and navigated bankruptcy, this resilient author continued to produce her captivating children's books. More about her story of courage and creativity here.... posted on Oct 26, 2520 reads

Solitude: The Seedbed of Self-Discovery
"In her Journal of a Solitude (public library), May Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality."... posted on Nov 4, 5035 reads

Finding the Courage for What's Redemptive
"How to embrace what's right and corrective, redemptive and restorative -- and an insistence that each of us is more than the worst thing weve done -- these are gifts Bryan Stevenson offers with his life. He's brought the language of mercy and redemption into American culture in recent years, growing out of his work as a lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. Now th... posted on Nov 20, 2812 reads

Listen: Four Love Songs
Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmentalist. Her many books and awards include Holdfast: A Home in the Natural World, and Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change, and, most recently, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. In the following essay, "she considers the looming loss of wild mus... posted on Nov 21, 3721 reads

Atlas of the Heart
"Researcher, academic and best-selling author Brene Brown has spent the last two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy. Her TEDx talk, "the power of vulnerability", is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with more than 50 million views.In her sixth and newest book, Atlas of the Heart, she takes us on a journey through 87 of the emotions and experiences that ... posted on Dec 26, 5983 reads

On Generosity
"Twice this week I was rendered speechless by the power of unexpected generosity. The first was an actual gift from someone I barely knew, and the second was a story of survival that took such courage to write that I experienced it as a gift. The gift was brought by one of my students, from her mother who I only met once. It was her mother's way of saying thank you to me for loving her daughter so... posted on Feb 2, 4093 reads

Writing a Better Story
"When I wrote the song Writing A Better Story I was in the process of doing some very deep inner work, which included stories of personal trauma but also legacy burdens that had been carried for generations and finally given to me. There are stories I carry and you carry that support us, sustain us, inspire us to be kinder better people and work for the better kinder world. There are stories we ... posted on Feb 17, 5012 reads

Resilience
This beautiful video was developed by a group of National Park Service staff and interns to explore the trauma, resilience, and beauty of the African American experience in our country. The story of black history in America may have been lost and forgotten at times, but this film uses beautiful photography and the words of Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" to illustrate the beauty and courage of ... posted on Mar 5, 2786 reads

Revolutions and the Politics of Being
Anthony Siracusa studies the power of successful and enduring social movements from the grist of deep life experience. He has spent his life practicing -- and then studying and teaching -- how ordinary people find courage and the in-dwelling light that compels them to assert their power and humanity in the face of deprivation, dehumanization and injustice not principally as a form of protest, adv... posted on Mar 23, 2726 reads

Writing a Better Story
There comes a time when we choose what stories we tell ourselves personally or as a community. "So let us all honor the stories that gave us courage and personal grounding, the stories that brought us here, the finest ones the ancestors carried for us until we could carry them for ourselves. Let us acknowledge the stories that its time to finally release, to name the dragon so that the dragon can... posted on Apr 1, 2262 reads

Giving Your Heart Over to Real Change
"In this podcast, Sharon Salzberg joins Sounds Trues founder, Tami Simon, to discuss her recent book, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World--and how you can begin to bring the core of your being into your work, your community, and your life. Sharon and Tami also discuss how contemplative practices can open the heart, agency and reclaiming your power to effect change, the empower... posted on Apr 8, 2723 reads

What Is Wanting to Find Expression Through You?
"I've learned the hard way, there's something in us that always knows what's right for us. And I can say quite literally, if I need to decide what is appropriate for me in any life situation, ranging from practical problems to large questions of life, I sort of put it inside and wait for an answer. And it always comes back to me I've imagined a bunch of little folks running around inside the solar... posted on Oct 1, 4449 reads

Davis Dimock: The Gift
"A guy came here once from some outsider art magazine. He was taking pictures and he asked, "Do you do anything else?" So, I showed him some of my drawings. He said, "These are great. We could use these." I told him I didn't want them out in the world. It seems pretentious to think of myself as an artist. I think of artists as people who are going through the angst of creating stuff, and then the ... posted on Dec 16, 1552 reads

New Year Transformation: Resources for the Journey
"The New year often brings with it a welcome sense of possibility as we bid farewell to the old and embrace the potential of what's to come. Even as global challenges continue to contribute to a sense of heightened uncertainty, opportunity awaits when we situate ourselves in gratefulness. May this collection of resources help to support you in welcoming the new year with wholehearted curiosity, hu... posted on Jan 1, 2538 reads

Marie Howe: On Matters of Life and Death
"Marie is the kind of poet whose accomplishments are too many to mention, so I'll keep it short and say that she's the author of four collections of poetry, the recipient of a Guggenheim, and a former poet laureate of New York. While in that role, she made it her mission to make poetry as ubiquitous as a Gap ad, and she succeeded in bringing poetry to the streets and the subways of New York. And s... posted on Mar 23, 1945 reads

The Art of Lying Fallow
"I suspect our ability to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately related to our capacity for dwelling in a particular state of being beyond the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell called it "fruitful monotony." Adam Phillips called it "fertile solitude." Walt Whitman called it "loafing." The Buddhist tradition describes it... posted on Apr 20, 5064 reads

The Skills Necessary to Deal with Anguish
I think many of us have a skewed idea of what "accepting" a catastrophic situation actually is. If you have the idea that coping well should look something like the proverbial "grace under fire," then you think you should summon the sheer grit to plaster a big cosmic grin on your face, no matter what horrors are being visited upon you. I don't think this is helpful. Actually, just the notion of "a... posted on Apr 26, 3367 reads

Six Ways to Help Kids Grow Their Creativity
Brene Brown, bestselling author, researcher, and University of Houston professor, was surrounded by creativity as a child. "I grew up in a pink stucco house in New Orleans where my mom was always a maker. All the curtains in our house were homemade, all the art in our house was from us kids. I had dresses that matched my mom's that matched my dolls. I never thought about creativity as an act separ... posted on May 29, 3173 reads

Lion Heart
Luzuko Madonci wanted to be a lion when he was a child. His friends laughed at him. And yet as an adult he has indeed developed the heart of a lion, exhibited by his joyous wholehearted laughter, his confidence, and his courage in the face of trials. Having overcome childhood trauma, he has learned to embrace his emotions and to see pain as a helper, a teacher, a residue of something good that is ... posted on Jun 16, 2329 reads

4 Reasons to Cultivate Patience
As virtues go, patience is a quiet one. It's often exhibited behind closed doors, not on a public stage: A father telling a third bedtime story to his son, a dancer waiting for her injury to heal. In public, it's the impatient ones who grab all our attention: drivers honking in traffic, grumbling customers in slow-moving lines. We have epic movies exalting the virtues of courage and compassion, bu... posted on Jun 28, 23859 reads

Telling is Listening
"Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the... posted on Nov 13, 3137 reads

Tsultrim Allione: Turning Towards What’s Difficult
After losing her infant daughter suddenly in 1980, the search for stories to help process grief led her to write what would go on to become a book that rippled into a burgeoning community of practice. Along the way, Lama Tsultrim found herself delving into research of the sacred feminine, deepening her own inner practices, and a whole lot more. In an intriguing podcast conversation, Tami Simon jou... posted on Feb 11, 2387 reads

Dancing with the Enemy
"I wonder if you all will find the courage to step out onto the dance floor and to dance with those who are our enemies," says Rev. Chaz Howard, as he invites us to look beyond our differences and tap into a space of being human. A soulful presence, the youngest ever chaplain of an Ivy League university narrates the heart-warming experience of his students from different religious settings coming ... posted on Apr 21, 3024 reads

Conscience and Courage: A Conversation with Lee Hoinacki
A brief note only hints at the wide horizon of this former Dominican priest, professor, author, prison dishwasher -- and perhaps Ivan Illich's closest friend. One example: "From the time of Descartes on, people in the west have had increasing difficulty in being in contact with their own bodies. How many times do we even open a window?"... posted on May 31, 1689 reads