had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me r... posted on Nov 9 2018 (30,299 reads)

the doorway. Outside, chickens cluck and scratch. Inside, on the floor with the children, Wubetu quietly examines a laminated poster. He begins pointing to letters, urging children to show him their best efforts — a recitation of the alphabet — first in their native Amharic and then in English. He will repeat a version of this scene over a week throughout stops in his native Ethiopia. Children flock to him wherever he goes, drawn to this 23-year-old man wearing a black, signature fedora, his pockets full of candy, his smile radiating acceptance of anyone who cares to share a few moments with him, better yet a dance. “Never pass up an opportunity to change a strang... posted on Nov 13 2018 (19,643 reads)

we brand as ‘the enemy.’ I’ve been reading Lao Tse, who has a lot of wisdom applicable today. He says that the greatest misfortune is to underestimate your enemy and treat your enemy as evil, not really seeing the human being. If you do that, you lose the three treasures, which are (1) simplicity—being in accord with the ground of being, being in alignment, being mindful in that sense; (2) patience—with both friends and enemies, which is again in accord with nature; and (3) compassion—starting with self-compassion, you can help reconcile all beings. Hübl: I agree with you about staying engaged. It brings up another competence, which is the c... posted on Nov 16 2018 (8,866 reads)

fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life — and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist — while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden. Nearly a century later, botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written beautifully about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, examines the revelations of the garden in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indig... posted on Nov 18 2018 (7,906 reads)

grace and poise becoming of a New Yorker, not with the ‘thickness’ of my own tongue. I sat in the front of every class, desperate to please my teachers, raising my hand at the slightest suggestion of a question. You see, I was convinced in ways that needed little or no articulation that if I got myself educated, I could rise above the debris of my own bells-and-whistles culture and take my place in the constellation of the worthy… and that if I understood the irrefutable nature of things, I could find unmovable ground upon which I could build a real future for myself. I remember responding to our pastor’s salvation call three times on a single Sunday. It was ... posted on Dec 27 2018 (6,385 reads)

When we were done, he told me that some measure of peace had returned. It was a peace that had come from within him, not from anything I’d said. I’d simply helped clear some rubble that blocked his access to his own soul. My misgivings about advice began with my first experience of clinical depression thirty-five years ago. The people who tried to support me had good intentions. But, for the most part, what they did left me feeling more depressed. Some went for the nature cure: “Why don’t you get outside and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air? Everything is blooming and it’s such a beautiful day!” When you’re depressed, you know intel... posted on Jan 1 2019 (15,054 reads)

were working 24/7 and we wanted to work 24/7, and what we were producing was so exciting that we couldn’t stop. That’s one example of being connected to Source in a way that your body will go with you. At the same time, I do think it’s important to take care of one’s capacity to serve. That’s the other thing I feel responsible to take care of: to nourish my own capacity to serve, and that comes from Source. That comes from meditation. That comes from being in nature. That comes from being in touch with the love I have for my husband and my children and my family. My love for God. My love for the spirit world. My love for the shamans. When I’m in touc... posted on Dec 7 2018 (10,606 reads)

of each Chinese character, as a sort of Rosetta Stone to decipher the poetic grammar of the ancient text against the scholarly English translations. In her twenties, Le Guin completed several chapters, then went on adding slowly each decade. Nearly half a century later, as she was inching toward seventy, she gave this private passion public form in Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (public library) — a book Le Guin describes as “a rendition, not a translation.” Similar in nature to Proust’s far-more-than-translation of Ruskin, it is indeed the type of work which the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate WisÅ‚awa Szymborska meant when she spoke of... posted on Mar 10 2019 (7,007 reads)

of everything else.” Half a century after Bertrand Russell asserted that the key to growing old contentedly is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Lamott writes: What comforts us is that, after we make ourselves crazy enough, we can let go inch by inch into just being here; every so often, briefly. There is flow everywhere in nature — glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly — so how could there not be flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach or are detached by tragedy... posted on Jan 8 2019 (6,923 reads)

medical-economic climate, how much of the primary emphasis of mental health now is on drug treatment.   We overlook the psychological, spiritual, and lifestyle elements of mental health. It took me some years to do so, but eventually I was able to compile literature to demonstrate that lifestyle has an enormous impact on mental health. For example, exercise and a vegetarian or pesco vegetarian diet, are enormously helpful for mental health; quality relationships and community; nature; service; spirituality and contemplative practice.   All of these things are not just nice ideas. They are enormously helpful to our psychological and physical well-being. Pavi: An... posted on Jan 17 2019 (6,283 reads)

industrialized countries—around 1,800 hours per year on average, compared to around 1,400 hours for Germans. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by now productivity would be so high, the average work week would be only 15 hours. And yet our material wants have outpaced even our dramatic productivity gains. Finally, we should take time to step back from our culture of busy-ness and getting ahead to appreciate what we already have. It may be human nature to want more, but the good life also rests on gratitude and purpose. This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Magazine. ... posted on Dec 31 2018 (7,255 reads)

year, this photo went viral on social media: physics professor Bruce Johnson holding an infant while he teaches. Arkansas State University has a large adult commuter population, which means that sometimes students find themselves in a childcare bind. Rather than turns infants and toddlers away, Johnson welcomes them in and makes them a part of the class. “I hope that no parent ever feels like a classroom is an unfriendly place for their kids,” Johnson told CNN. Learn how nature equips men to nurture. The Thai cave rescue Credit: AFP At the end of June, twelve boys and their soccer coach were trapped by sudden flooding in the Tham Luang cave system in Thailand... posted on Jan 27 2019 (8,900 reads)

gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember -- grace always bats last. Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." A good name for God is: "Not me." Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lidsbecause they don't look up, so they just wal... posted on Feb 12 2019 (844,390 reads)

to turning our vision into reality? And when will we reach the level of proficiency and excellence we aspire to? Anyone engaged in creative activity of whatever form is familiar with this terrain. Yet to overcome doubt and frustration, to master any craft or art, we have to cultivate a particular quality. It is one that appears opposite to what we want, which is usually immediate gratification: Patience, a virtue extolled by spiritual traditions around the world. Given the nano-second nature of our technological society, it seems harder than ever to be patient, to wait with calm rather than agitation, to not expect big or even small changes to occur instantaneously. Our expectation... posted on Jan 11 2019 (7,747 reads)

know, Mary keeps taking me back to the womb, to the eyes of a baby. Isn’t this a little regressive in a way? I don’t want to go back there. I’m an adult. I now have all this freedom and power. I don’t really want to go backwards.” MO: Right. And it’s not that we’re going backwards, it’s that everything that we took on—remember that we’re free-flowing aliveness. That’s our natural state. All you have to do is look at nature and you see that it’s free-flowing aliveness, and that when we were very young, we were connected to that great river of free-flowing aliveness. Then we began to hold on and run away into... posted on Mar 13 2019 (10,851 reads)

that give a taste of what's inside. If you're looking for thought-provoking reads in the New Year, look no further. Do you have any recommendations for books we should check out this year? Leave a comment below or drop us a note at info@shareable.net. Happy reading! Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff  "Team Human is a manifesto — a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff's most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together — not as individuals. ... posted on Mar 1 2019 (9,837 reads)

so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma and practice. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual -- but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it. The most important thing in defining spirit is the recognition that spirit is an essential need of human nature. There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual. This yearning varies in strength from person to person but it is always there in everyone And so, healing becomes possible. Yet there ... posted on Feb 4 2019 (10,647 reads)

A human being is part of the whole we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself in the thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living beings and all of nature.[1] This is an idea that still seems fantastic to many people around the world. But it is a belief that has been held by Indigenous peoples since the beginning of time. Our songs, stories, a... posted on Feb 19 2019 (9,824 reads)

from Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar, New Society Publishers, 2019 Elegant simplicity can only be built on the firm foun­dation of right relationships. Our crises-mental, personal, social, economic, environmental, political, cultural, and re­ligious -- have their origin in disconnection and separation. The moment we see that all things are connected, that we are all related, that everything depends on everything else, we start to see solutions. Why do we have crises between Palestine and Israel, between Sunni and Shia, between America and Russia, India and Pakistan, Christians and Muslims? Because we see ourselves as being separate from others. When all our inter... posted on Apr 4 2019 (7,507 reads)

as $24,000/year for a family of four. When children come from an environment with such scarcity, there is often a residue of existential fear. Neighborhoods of poverty are harsh places to grow up, even if a child’s family is warm and loving. Neighborhoods of poverty are places where there’s a much higher incidence of gun violence; drug and alcohol addiction; homelessness; resource scarcity; and a basic lack of child-friendly, safe places for kids to play, green parks to enjoy nature, and wholesome food. Counteracting the effect of systemic, intergenerational poverty is a huge task. The mindful awareness, gratitude building, and love and kindness exercises we do as an integ... posted on Mar 11 2019 (6,086 reads)