life. You’ve run the Aspen Institute (a nonpartisan educational and policy studies think tank), had leadership roles at CNN, and were the editor at Time. You’ve also been the biographer of some of the greatest innovators in human history. Your new book is Leonardo da Vinci. How do you write a biography of someone who lived half a millennium ago? Isaacson: The good thing about Leonardo da Vinci is he left 7,200 pages of notebooks. We can look every day at this mind dancing across nature. We all keep notes digitally these days. When I tried to do Steve Jobs’ period in the 1990s — when he was in the wilderness between his stints at Apple, he worked at NeXT Compute... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,640 reads)

leadership and the learning organization—particularly its capacity to self-organize. Meg is an author of nine books including the bestselling book, Leadership and the New Science and her new book, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, where she turns to the new science of living systems to help leaders persevere in this time of great turmoil. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Meg and I spoke about the cyclical nature of life and how we are currently in a destructive end phase of the cycle of history in the United States. How we need to see this clearly and also the despair we can feel in looking at this rea... posted on May 17 2018 (16,207 reads)

possibly if I met those people in person, I would never begin to trust their judgements. But somehow they have an authority because they’re in print or they’re on screen. And so if they can inspire our trust, life certainly should! Part of the whole cycle of trust is, as you said, working one’s way through the anxiety. One has to make wrong decisions and do things the wrong way before one gradually begins to see what might be the better way. So I think it’s the nature of Act One or Two to be anxious, to make those plans. And then in time to see those plans upended and realise that it wasn’t so terrible after all. [Laughs]. Something I&rsquo... posted on May 11 2018 (12,293 reads)

two other crucial standards—that those family and community relationships embrace all the other species, plants and animals alike, and the living ecosystems on which they depend, and that they be considered, as the Irokwa nation has expressed it, with the interest of the next seven generations in mind. There is one other good way of assessing human-scale technology, as expressed in a sage axiom of the British philosopher Herbert Read: “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.” Far from serving an apprenticeship, modern industrial society works to enslave nature, for the benefit of humanity (or some small part of it), and regards m... posted on May 4 2018 (7,927 reads)

by certain kinds of talking therapies and external experiences. And I’m a great believer in those therapies, and also continue to work in those areas and arenas. There’s a lovely passage from The Winter’s Tale, which I quote toward the end of the book, beautifully phrased, and I wish I had it in front of me. I’d read it out loud. MS. TIPPETT: Here’s a sentence I think may have been from that passage, or your commentary on it: “If humanity is of nature, then so are our inventions.” MR. SOLOMON: Yes, exactly. And it ends, that passage, with then the line: “That art itself is nature.” MS. TIPPETT: You also quote the poet... posted on Jun 19 2018 (14,621 reads)

help me, but I should never talk about it. I kept it secret for a long time.  I actually wasn't diagnosed as severely hearing-impaired until I was six years old, because my family thought I was living in my own little world.  When I went through first grade, I was flunking because I wasn't able to follow what was going on. At that point, I was diagnosed.  Because I grew up in an area with extreme poverty and anti-semitism, I spent a lot of my childhood living in nature. I would enter the dream state my Aunt taught me. I lived more in the spirit world than this world. Most of my relationships were with helping spirits. And that’s what Shamanism is about.... posted on Oct 8 2018 (9,662 reads)

has been suggested that the linear theory of time is related to the experience of time in the Northern (and Southern) hemispheres, where it is marked by seasonal changes: life begins in the spring, matures in the summer, and dies in the fall, to begin a new cycle the following spring. Bali, however, lies in the region of tropical rain forests near the Equator where there are no reasons to synchronize the growth schedules of all livings things. Instead, the processes of growth and decay proceed at different rates all over the forest, all the time. A flower is on a short, rapid growth cycle; a tree, a much longer one; a rock, longer still. The cycles mesh in this world, the Middle World, to... posted on Jul 3 2018 (6,934 reads)

to fill our days with lively presence comes in Be Still, Life (public library) — a splendid illustrated poem of a picture-book by Ohara Hale, whose work I have long cherished and who has the loveliest back-flap author bio I have ever encountered: Ohara Hale is a self-taught artist who works with many different forms and materials. She sings, writes, draws, and performs sounds, words, colors, and movements that are questions and ideas about love, life, nature, and all the unseen, unknown, and dreamed in between. Hale lives on planet Earth with her rescue dog, Banana. From the slumbering snail to the purposeful gentleness of the ... posted on Jun 16 2018 (7,087 reads)

servant leadership approach is always testing your humility. Humility allows us to keep learning, growing and improving. The Japanese call it ‘Kaizen’. There is always room to improve. Who wants perfect leaders who know everything and never recognize their mistakes? - Humanity: We are dealing with people not only things or projects. Authentic leadership has to do with methodologies but more importantly it understands emotions. An authentic leader has to have insight into human nature and be able to contemplate its four facets (physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual). He/she has to be skillful in identifying and engaging other people’s talent, and also in help... posted on Sep 2 2018 (15,178 reads)

Mexico, Central and South America, and even the United States—who in no way accept the inevitability of war. But in the U.S. we do live in a highly militarized culture, and many people have accepted and internalized the myths that are used to support warfare. As a result, the idea that we could abolish war and still survive is almost unthinkable for many people in this country. So we have to revise public opinion in stages. If, for example, war is created by something called “human nature,” then let’s look for a minute at the other 96% of humans on the planet who are represented by governments that invest radically less than the United States in war. If we’re n... posted on Jan 28 2019 (6,170 reads)

definition of ‘sustainability’ and invites us to learn something from these powerful, wise and sensitive animals. Allegorical use of horses as a window into the management of our own social organizations may seem at best romantic, and at worst a cheap stretch. We are not animals, we tell ourselves, and our brains function differently, and besides, horses can’t balance a budget. But this thinking not only over estimates our superiority, it underestimates the intelligence of nature. And, in fact, as mammals, our brains are hardwired for the same need for safety and success as the horse. It is our nature-deficient culture that robs us of true insight, robbing us of wisdom ... posted on Sep 22 2018 (21,007 reads)

the Fukushima nuclear power plant of March 2011. The other notable difference is the addition of a substantial afterword, where I have discussed more directly my own journey and some ways we might apply what the people profiled in this book have to teach us to our lives in the West. *** Introduction I have always thought it was possible to live a great life. Beyond all the nightmares we hear about in the news, there is a larger world surrounding us: not just the resplendent world of nature, but also our own potential as people to live well, to connect with each other, to do meaningful work, to make powerful art, and to forge a different kind of future for ourselves and for the ne... posted on Nov 28 2018 (8,899 reads)

to pick a few zucchinis for supper, I was once again amazed at the Earth’s generosity, how one plant could give so many vegetables. I had to look carefully under the spreading leaves to discover a zucchini unexpectedly growing almost too large. This is the sacred life that sustains us, part of the creation we desperately need to “love and protect,” just as it loves and protects us. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. Pope Francis speaks of the pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis and to “feel i... posted on Dec 16 2018 (7,939 reads)

you, in your body, feeling that interaction of the nervous system and subtlety in your body. What I found, as I started to recognise and feel some of the more subtle connections to my whole body, is that who and what you are—especially what you are—changes shape. You actually start to recognise things you never knew before. And so what I like to say is we’re all made up of some combination of tangible and intangible. In broad human history we’ve called our intangible nature by a whole bunch of names. You might have called it “soul,” you might call it “spirit,” you might call it “psyche,” you might call it “the unconscious,... posted on Jan 30 2019 (9,086 reads)

a fast and effective way to open your heart and embody what you really want to communicate. Despite what your mind would have you believe, your soul loves to sing. Your authentic singing voice is the muscle and mouthpiece of your soul. As unique as your fingerprint and DNA, your soul has a melody, a rhythm, and a resonance that is yours alone. You are the only one who can embody your voice. Your true or naked voice can access your soul song, and this resonant song reveals your authentic nature, who you really are. Expressing your soul song is easy if you are willing and committed to listening, to hearing, and to acknowledging it without judgment of any kind. Once heard, your soul ... posted on Mar 18 2019 (8,009 reads)

in philosophical questions, or great works of art and literature, or the astonishing discoveries of modern science. And it is so even when they come achingly hoping to help this world or even just to make sense of the heartbreaking storms of injustice, human suffering, and corruption raging throughout our civilization. Always, in almost all of these young men and women, their entrenched standards of thought and understanding, shaped by a toxic tangle of ideas about the universe, human nature, and Great Nature itself, have locked their minds in an airless reality devoid of intrinsic meaning and purpose. And here they are in front of me, notebooks or laptops at the ready. On the s... posted on Mar 25 2019 (9,263 reads)

credit Kim Morrow             A few years ago, I was invited to visit a bison ranch in eastern Wyoming. I was dating this new guy named Mark, and as we got to know each other he kept talking about this place that had been in his family for three generations. He talked often about how much he loved visiting the ranch: going for hikes; sitting out in front of his cabin and watching the symphony of nature; looking for wildlife, and even catching a mountain lion or a bear cub on his motion-sensor camera that was tied to a tree; setting out even in the dead of winter when his snowy hikes were sheathed in silence. He told me h... posted on Mar 7 2019 (8,328 reads)

a point. Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to be measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of color and growth. Late spring is potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason – done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it. The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away. There is another paradox here, known in all the wisdom traditions: if you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it ... posted on Mar 21 2021 (14,304 reads)

followed a path that led me into one of these woods, through a tunnel of green gloom and smoky blue dusk. It was very quiet, very remote, in there. My feet sank into the pile of the pine needles. The last bright tatters of sunlight vanished. Some bird went whirring and left behind a deeper silence. I breathed a different air, ancient and aromatic." A joyful observer of the quotidian, playwright, novelist and essayist J.B. Priestley shares his heart's delight in the quiet manifestations of beauty and magic in everyday life--a quiet pine wood at dusk, a spray of plum blossoms, the light and warmth of sunbeams. Celebrate the everyday wonders of the natural world with J.B. Pries... posted on May 2 2019 (6,397 reads)

cherry blossoms have arrived, and it feels like nature has handed us a beautiful gift. At the Japanese Tea Garden, here in San Francisco, I lean into a low hanging blossom and inhale the delicate sweet scent. The wet pink petals touch my nose, and once again, I am reminded of the generosity of nature, year after year. From the air we breathe, to the body we each inhabit, we are living a profound gift, and yet, we can struggle to see and relate to life as a gift.   In his seminal book, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, Brother David Steindl-Rast poses a question worth pondering: “Why is it so difficult to acknowledge a gift as a gift?” He believes that admitti... posted on Jun 23 2019 (6,683 reads)