new kinds of civic, cultural, educational, and open spaces. At the center in Garrison, New York, he and his wife, Diana, are helping people from all traditions to find new ways of being conscious together in an inner and outer sense—better able to take practical action to repair the torn fabric of the world. —Tracy Cochran Jonathan Rose: The military has a phrase called “VUCA” and it stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It describes the nature of the world that we are facing. The old systems, thinking, and political debate often do not recognize this. We see enormous volatility in extreme weather events and climate change and in extr... posted on Jul 14 2018 (9,353 reads)

was in that moment my inability to hug my beautiful child fell away from me, and I was able after that to hug him.” Clare Dubois: Toward a New Nature-Based Feminine Consciousness Claire is the founder of TreeSisters.org, a quickly-growing women’s crowd-funding and consciousness-shift campaign to inspire and direct the brilliance, creativity and generosity of women towards the reforestation of the tropics and shared leadership around ecological restoration On the cyclical nature of the feminine: “The feminine intelligence is equally cyclical because our hormones change throughout the months. We have all four of nature seasons happen every month, but nobody w... posted on Jan 21 2019 (6,965 reads)

and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm. What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since... posted on Apr 16 2020 (14,101 reads)

be kind, and find meaning in our everyday lives. The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they help normalize whatever challenges you may be experiencing and offer a note of optimism for the year ahead. Appreciating Our Everyday Experiences Can Enhance Our Sense of Meaning in Life Have you ever found yourself caught up in admiring the beauty of a painting or the tranquility of your local nature reserve? Do you get deeply engaged in conversations with other people, or find yourself savoring the little things in life? A 2022 study published in Nature Human Behavior f... posted on Feb 4 2023 (7,989 reads)

to a group of CEOs in Singapore. One of them was the head of a big multi-multinational corporation. He said that for the last eight years, I have been fighting to get my company to be sustainable and ethical in the country where we source our supplies, in our offices around the world and in how we treat our customers. He said there were three reasons why I wanted to make my company more ethical. First, he said, because I saw the writing on the wall, we were using natural resources faster than nature could replenish them in many places. Second was consumer pressure – people are beginning to understand and become more aware. They’re starting to ask questions like: Why is this pro... posted on May 10 2024 (3,422 reads)

form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift." Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic "recession" is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or "financially secure&... posted on Jun 13 2012 (27,051 reads)

human beings are seekers. We seek love, wealth, security, power, happiness, and recognition. We also seek knowledge. Aristotle said, “All people by nature desire to know.” The desire to know can be very ambitious, like that of the scientists who sought to solve the structure of the DNA molecule, or rather modest. It can be enormously satisfying to know and understand things. What does it take to have intellectual success—to come to know and understand something challenging? Well, you need some raw intelligence and memory, and you need to work hard and persevere when it doesn’t come easily. You’ll be better off if you’re surrounded by learned people ... posted on Jul 10 2013 (34,762 reads)

for Goldilocks. That's right [laugh]. Ms. Tippett: Would you say a little bit more about Kepler? Because I just think he's in that league of Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, but I'm not sure he's known quite as well by people. Ms. Batalha: Johannes Kepler, yeah. He lived in the 1600s and was a mathematician, very, very brilliant mathematician. But he was also very — I don't know if spiritual is the right word, but he also had this really deep reverence for nature. There's a story. I don't know how much of it is myth and how much is fact, but there's a story that he was in a classroom giving a lecture on mathematics and geometry talking ab... posted on Jan 29 2014 (26,585 reads)

first guiding principle of the Center for Ecoliteracy's framework for schooling for sustainability — Smart by Nature™ — is "nature is our teacher." Taking nature as our teacher requires thinking in terms of systems, one of nature's basic patterns. Systems can be incredibly complex, but the concept is quite straightforward. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for example, defines a "system" as "any collection of things that have some influence on one another." Individual things — like plants, people, schools, communities, and watersheds — are all systems of interrelated elements. At the same ti... posted on Dec 12 2013 (32,966 reads)

how to fix it. 1:58     Let's begin with a question: Do we see reality as it is? I open my eyes and I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away. I then close my eyes, and my experience changes to a gray field, but is it still the case that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away? I think so, but could I be wrong? Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions? 2:38     We have misinterpreted our perceptions before. We used to think the Earth is flat, because it looks that way. Pythagorus discovered that ... posted on Jul 11 2015 (28,572 reads)

poetry they shared. Henrikson founded Street Poets in 1996. What started out as a writing workshop in a juvenile detention camp grew into a small group of writers and performers; then infiltrated Los Angeles high school classrooms with transformational results. Today, Street Poets sponsors community open mics, operates a recording studio that produces CDs of its performers’ work, publishes compilations of their poetry, and engages young men and women through workshops, drum circles, nature retreats and indigenous ceremonies, outreach to youths on Indian reservations and, most recently, a mobile recording and performance studio called “Poetry in Motion,” created from a... posted on Jul 29 2016 (15,766 reads)

September 2 1867, a 29-year old Scottish immigrant called John Muir sat alone in an oak wood on the shore of the Ohio River, a pocket map spread in front of him, his forefinger tracing an arc through the deep South of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, and finally pausing along the Florida Gulf coast a thousand miles away. He planned to walk there. A lover of wild nature, Muir had long fantasized about visiting Florida, the “land of flowers” as he called it in his journal, and from there board a ship to South America. His immediate plan was to take the wildest and “least trodden” path he could find. “Folding my map,” he w... posted on Nov 22 2016 (20,317 reads)

don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.” “If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work,” psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in his inquiry into what motivates us to work. But human nature itself is a moody beast. “Given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all,” John Steinbeck lamented in his diary of the creative process as he labored over the novel that would soon earn him the Pulitzer Prize and become the cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later. Work, of course, h... posted on Jan 15 2017 (17,227 reads)

human beings; questions that are not answerable by science, or even by many of the religions; questions such as, "Who am I? What am I? Why do we suffer? What can we know? Why is there evil?"      I've come to the sense that we human beings have two fundamental currents or forces within us. One is to function well and honorably in this life, in this material world of spending, family, success, health, community. And another current, another part of our human nature, is our quest for what we call the inner: faith, transformation or transcendence—or openness to a higher reality within us and the universe.      These two natures de... posted on Oct 2 2017 (10,949 reads)

laws or even lead to a political revolution. But if we stop there, the relationships between the communities are still divided, and there could still be fear, mistrust and resentment. If the human relationships are not healed, the conflict will resurface again on some other issue. Any peace gained through political revolution but not a revolution of relationships is short-lived. Reconciliation is what a principled nonviolent approach demands. The need for healing The very nature of violence is unjust. As Rev. James Lawson, one of the lead trainers for the civil rights movement, has said, “Violence has a very simple dynamic. I make you suffer more than I suffer. I... posted on Jan 15 2018 (15,353 reads)

of scientist Rachel Carson was when long ago she pioneered a new cultural aesthetic of poetic prose about science, governed by her conviction that “there can be no separate literature of science” because “the aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth,” which is also the aim of literature. It is in such lyrical prose and with an almost spiritual reverence for trees that Haskell illuminates his subject — the masterful, magical way in which nature weaves the warp thread of individual organisms and the weft thread of relationships into the fabric of life. Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Broth... posted on Jan 4 2018 (16,046 reads)

as a power, a presence, a capacity, that is available. It's part of the way the world works -- a spontaneous movement toward new forms of order, new patterns of creativity. We live in a world that is self-organizing. Life is capable of creating patterns and structures and organization all the time, without conscious rational direction, planning, or control, all of the things that many of us have grown up loving. This realization is having a profound impact on our beliefs about the nature of process in interpersonal relations, in business organizations, as well as in nature itself. In this article, I will focus on some of the recent shifts in our understanding of the way things ... posted on Jun 15 2018 (9,423 reads)

needs to be remembered that it was not until relatively recently that the religion and shamanic traditions of the First Peoples—with all their diversity—were viewed to be one of the world’s religions itself. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, passed and put into law in 1978, allowed indigenous peoples to freely practice their traditional religion without fear of persecution. The timeless wisdom of the diverse cultures of the world speaks in a singular voice on the nature of the Absolute or Spirit, which is often referred to as the perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis). Joseph Epes Brown, renowned scholar of the Native American Traditions and World Religio... posted on Mar 12 2018 (10,884 reads)

to my patients for the medical system, for the ugly environment or for the oncologist who didn’t tell them the truth about their diagnosis.  So as a practitioner it’s beautiful to be part of this humanistic approach to care. Buddhism still informs the model, and so there’s this idea that you relate to people through suffering, through when things don’t go well. That means there’s no shame or sense of failure in dying. You just have this sense of nature being much larger than you and yet you’re part of it. And as a human being it’s so nice to know when I picture my own death that there are places like this and people who bring thei... posted on Oct 29 2018 (12,603 reads)

quiet, the voice of his soul became louder. This new voice urged him to connect with the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he became intimately acquainted with the Native American inhabitants. What happened next, was a deep relationship with a community silenced by injustice. This caused Kevin to evolve a new voice that changed his life and his style of leadership forever.   “Strengthen the voices of others; practice restraint; learn the ways of shared leadership through nature; take care of your employees; work should enhance the evolution of the soul.” Kevin shares these principles and more in this interview. He offers us ways to illuminate the authentic v... posted on Nov 6 2018 (5,865 reads)