Life is the Network Not the Self
What if the fundamental unit of biology is not the self, but the network? What if plants, and really, all species, are made of interacting relationships and networked connections that are intertwined? A simple backyard experiment looking at the biological make-up of a maple leaf revealed to Professor David Haskell that a maple leaf is not an individual made of plant cells, but "a community of cel... posted on Jun 2, 7957 reads

War Childhood: Finding Light in the Darkness
Jasminko Halilovic grew up as a 'war child' in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even though the war ended years ago, its effects linger in the atmosphere, the buildings, and the people. Between 2010 and 2013, Halilovic interviewed people online and in person about their experiences being children of war, and in 2013 published his book War Childhood: Sarajevo 1992-1995. From this book, Halilovi... posted on Aug 1, 7094 reads

Teri Delane: From Addiction to Academy Founder
How did a law-breaking, heroin-using, 9th-grade dropout go on to earn two Masters degrees and a Ph.D? By learning about trust and community at a critical time in her life. At the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, Teri Delane received the support she desperately needed, and the tools to succeed. It made such an impact on her that she decided to give back. "My heart and soul has always be... posted on May 15, 9564 reads

My Year Reading a Book from Every Country in the World
Several years ago, Ann Morgan, a writer from London, looked at her bookshelf and realized it held almost no books from other countries -- an oversight she called a "massive cultural blindspot." In a nod to the Olympics, she decided to read a book from every country (196 total) and blog about it. But she quickly learned that finding books in English would be a challenge. Only about 4.5 percent of l... posted on Jun 9, 2864 reads

Sister Lucy: The Mother Teresa of Pune
Sister Lucy Kurien founded Maher in 1997, one small home in a village outside of Pune. This humble beginning has blossomed into over 30 homes in over 85 rural communities around Pune, India as well as locations in Ratnagiri, Kerala and Jharkhan and has served over 4,000 women, men and children. Maher means mother's home in Marathi. Sister Lucy has created the warmth and love of a mother's home for... posted on Jul 1, 11868 reads

Spotlight on Kids Who Are Changing the World
We live in challenging and stressful times and may wonder how our children must be feeling when we are struggling ourselves.But, even as we try to shelter and protect them, we discover that children and young adults are remarkably resilient and that the things that help us to cope in difficult situations are often the very things that make challenges more bearable for them as well. Moving from a s... posted on May 26, 9946 reads

What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death?
As a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi felt he'd be prepared to face his own mortality. After all, he'd helped so many of his patients before. But after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis, he found little of it helpful in deciding what makes life worth living in the face of death. In this TED talk, Lucy Kalanithi talks about her husband's last two years and the choices they made to improve his quality o... posted on Sep 10, 50388 reads

Three Stories of Healing and Transformation
A physician's assistant and former doctor learns about the essence of serving patients not from medical school, but from a job at an arts-and-crafts store deeply listening to people and connecting with the humanity in others. A pediatric doctor in a large HMO was burned out and dejected because she was not living up to her vision of saving lives -- until motherhood and fresh eyes of seeing the va... posted on Aug 3, 11079 reads

Let Compassion Heal Us: An Intern Examines Suffering
"Being a ServiceSpace summer intern in these past months, I have been guided into a circle of genuine friends and mentors. As part of my internship I interviewed various people in the community about their relationship to pain and suffering. One of the lessons I received is that if we hold space for each other, open our hearts, listen deeply with our full presence, detach from any projections or j... posted on Aug 13, 11689 reads

Grandmother Power
Across the world, grandmothers are keepers of tradition and leaders of change. In families and communities battling discrimination, poverty, disease and death, grandmothers stand and rise as providers, healers, insurgents. They are storytellers who bridge the past and the future with wisdom and bold, creative action. This is why photojournalist Paola Gianturco has dedicated her life to documenting... posted on Oct 23, 15874 reads

The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life
In "The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life", best-selling author Mark Nepo focuses on the relationships between people who share experiences and create bonds of love. Nepo himself is a cancer survivor, and the philosophy in his book delves into some of the experiences he has shared with caregivers and doctors during his treatment and recovery, focusing on the blur in lines between th... posted on Feb 1, 14321 reads

Atul Gawande: What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery in Boston, is a professor at Harvard Medical School, a writer for the New Yorker, and author of "Being Mortal." Through his work Dr. Gawande opens a new conversation about what dying has to do with living, and his role as a medical doctor in ensuring not only health and survival, but enabling his patients' well-being. In this interview, Dr. Ga... posted on Jan 11, 29032 reads

21 Lessons on Leadership and Love from an Uncommon Master
Frederic Pignon and his wife, Magali Delgado, travel the world performing and leading horsemanship and dressage clinics. Magali dazzles audiences with her ability to perform high-level dressage moves without so much as a bridle. Together the duo invite humanity into an altogether different approach to relationship. Their philosophy towards horses is actually a way of life: love, respect and unders... posted on Feb 13, 1601 reads

Jean Vanier: The Wisdom of Tenderness
Jean Vanier's life demonstrates tenderness. A philosopher, a Catholic social innovator, and the founder of The L'Arche movement, which is centered around people with mental disabilities, he has devoted his life to the practical application of Christianity's most paradoxical teachings: that there's power in humility, strength in weakness, and light in the darkness of human existence. The 147 L'Arch... posted on Feb 23, 12599 reads

Transforming Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
"As a respected educational writer, teacher and activist, Parker J. Palmer shares some powerful thoughts on the current landscape of higher education with regard to pedagogy and practice. Through his personal and professional experiences with teaching and learning...Palmer argues that, at the present time, we no longer can ignore the 'inner drivers' that connect to the very core of humanity and th... posted on May 8, 12102 reads

Innovation Means Relying on Everyone's Creativity
"You can't hate someone whose story you know". This motto highlights the work of Meg Wheatley, a well-respected writer, teacher, and speaker. In this informative piece, she reflects on the creative potential that emerges when we begin to treat organizations as living systems, rather than machines, and remain open to the possibility of adaptation and change. Drawing from 6 paradigms, Wheatley explo... posted on Feb 26, 12184 reads

Nature, Joy and Human Becoming
"The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us," Michael McCarthy writes, "may well be the most serious business of all." He is a naturalist and journalist, and this is his delightful and galvanizing call that we can stop relying on the immobilizing language of statistics and take up our joy in the natural world as our civilizational defense of it. With a p... posted on May 28, 6654 reads

Pearl Fryer's Unusual Legacy
Located on a short and quiet side street of the main road entering Bishopville, the garden sits on the left side of the road and a bank of pine trees lends shade and depth at the back of the property. An archway leads visitors to the left side of the property. It was through this archway that I stepped onto Fryer's garden for the first time. In life-sized letters cut into the grass and planted wit... posted on Jul 6, 10321 reads

Keewaydahn: Going Home
Indigenous people can live without American society, but American society cannot live without indigenous cultural knowledge. In her lecture to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Winona LaDuke compares indigenous cultures to industrial cultures, recounts the holocaust of indigenous peoples, explains indigenous sustainability, and describes the impact indigenous and industrial cultures have ... posted on Jun 27, 6937 reads

I Will Teach You: Great Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim
At age seven, Tae Yun Kim gazed upon her uncles practicing an ancient martial art. She was awestruck. Never before had she seen something so beautiful and exciting, their movements both natural and mystical. She decided right then and there she had to learn. There was only one problem: She was a girl in 1950s South Korea, and this was a five-thousand-year-old culture and tradition. When Kim asked ... posted on Jun 12, 8277 reads

Muhammad Yunus: Revolutionized Banking
What would it take to create a world with zero poverty, unemployment, or net carbon emissions? In "A World of Three Zeros," economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus continues his work conceiving economic and social systems that enable people to break out of poverty. Well known for pioneering microloans and founding Grameen Bank, Yunus also has novel thoughts on capitalism and how it ... posted on Jul 24, 7545 reads

What Does a Compassionate Workplace Look Like?
Compassion in the workplace may sound foreign, but studies have shown that cultivating compassion at the office can have remarkable outcomes for product design, employee and customer engagement, and accountability. Compassion is at the root of delivering quality service, says Monica Worline, because "Service quality hinges on relationships, and relationships deepen when we listen and hear what's g... posted on Sep 13, 7600 reads

Opening Your Heart to Bhutan
How does a jet-setting financial analyst from London end up a Buddhist nun in Bhutan? Emma Slade (ordained as Ani Pema Deki) is a yoga and meditation teacher and author who left a successful career in finance in her thirties to find peace and meaning in the mountains of Bhutan. Unusual for a mother of a now 12-year-old boy, she was ordained a Buddhist nun in Bhutan in 2014 after rigorous training ... posted on Sep 7, 6797 reads

Jason Sowell & The Laundry Project
When DailyGood volunteer, LuAnn Cooley walked into a laundromat last week, she was greeted by a group of volunteers from The Laundry Project -- a non-profit whose generous mission is "to assist families with meeting a basic need -- washing clothes and linens, by turning laundromats into community centers of hope. Laundry fees are paid for while volunteers assist with laundry services, entertain ch... posted on Sep 12, 7599 reads

Horse Herd Dynamics & the Art of Organizational Success
"The horse herd is a 40-million-year-old system that not only succeeds, it thrives. This endurance defies the conventional 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... posted on Sep 22, 21272 reads

Why Activism Must Be More Generous
Frances Lee, activist, writer, designer and public scholar in Seattle, Washington, believes that social justice movements have a narrow framework of morality, which is counterproductive. Movements need a critical mass of people, but now activists are expected to follow specific standards to be trusted and heard by the larger group. Frances argues that social justice activists must be as committed ... posted on Oct 24, 8327 reads

BJ Miller Understands Mortality
Oncologist and Executive Director of the Zen Hospice Project, B. J. Miller is a practitioner who is part of a Buddhist-informed, humanistic approach to care. The Zen Hospice Project is a place where medical staff and volunteers practice love, compassion, and empathy. In this interview, Miller, who has experienced deep, personal loss, advocates for respecting our grieving process and allowing it to... posted on Oct 29, 12659 reads

Pablo Neruda Against the Illusion of Separateness
"There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song -- but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awarenes... posted on Nov 2, 7430 reads

Pope Francis' Encyclical: Hearing the Cry of the Earth
The Earth needs both physical and spiritual attention and awareness, our acts and prayers, our hands and hearts. Life is a self-sustaining organic whole of which we are a part, and once we reconnect with this whole we can find a different way to live -- one that is not based upon a need for continual distraction and the illusions of material fulfillment, but rather a way to live that is sustaining... posted on Dec 16, 8004 reads

8 World-Views and Practices by Mark Nepo
Since prehistoric hunters had to work together in order to survive, people have had to learn how to share both the workload and the harvest, and the problems and the joys. Through the centuries, traditions have formed and complexities have grown. But the health of all community depends on how we treat each other. This article explores eight worldviews and the practices they offer. Each can help us... posted on Dec 13, 11337 reads

The Difference Between Fixing and Healing
Encounter the mystery of life and living with Krista Tippet and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, wise physician, author and founder of the Remen Institute for the study of Health and Illness.
Through hearing these powerful stories we can sense that our losses, our illnesses have helped us to live fully and to heal not only ourselves but those whose lives we touch. Life is full of losses and disappo... posted on Jan 15, 14295 reads

The Power of Everyday Rituals
In a world often fraught with stress and disorder, the Balinese ritual of canang sari is a reminder of the sacred nature of all things and times. On Balinese street corners and in hallways, at the entry to shops and homes, these small baskets of flowers remind the giver and the passerby of how one can enter into what is essential in everyday life. Author Jay Griffith experienced the value of rit... posted on Jun 13, 3605 reads

The Magic of Moss and What it Teaches Us
In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, world-renowned botanist/bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to contemplate the mystery and meaning of life as viewed through her study of one of the world's oldest plant species. This illuminating, award-winning volume of essays weaves scientific and personal observation into a lyrical tapestry that celebrates the power of attenti... posted on Mar 29, 6990 reads

The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul
"Report after report documents how--despite more technologies aimed at connecting people, ideas, and information--people of all ages continue to experience greater and greater social and personal disconnection. Why? Well, our body, mind, and spirit can only keep up with so much. When overloaded, we may disconnect because it all is too much or feels like it is too much. Disconnecting from our self ... posted on Apr 2, 7619 reads

George Orwell: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Novelist and essayist Eric Arthur Blair, pen name George Orwell, is perhaps best known for his prescient depictions of creeping totalitarianism and social injustice as captured in 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London. Blair is also recognized as an avowed appreciator of the living world who intuitively understood nature's role in transforming the human spirit in the aftermath of war: "I think... posted on May 29, 5604 reads

Cherishing Our Connections
"We all belong to the world in concentric circles of relationship some more distant and others close, some with people different from us and others with people more similar. Living within this web of connectedness can bring us the greatest of joys and the deepest of challenges. The preferences, patterns, and habits we have learned can both build relational bridges and create great divides. Much o... posted on Aug 2, 8647 reads

Wild Mind: Reclaiming Our Original Wholeness
Our human psyches possess, as capacities, a variety of astonishing resources about which mainstream Western psychology has little to say. By uncovering and reclaiming these innate resources, shared by all of us by simple virtue of our human nature, we can more easily understand and resolve our intrapsychic and interpersonal difficulties as they arise. These resources, the four facets of the Self, ... posted on Sep 25, 8396 reads

India's Little Librarian
Poor neighborhoods in India typically have low literacy rates because residents do not have the resources necessary to educate their children. 9-year-old Muskaan Ahirwar is working to change this in her impoverished neighborhood in Bhopal. In January 2016, she opened a library outside her house to give kids free access to books and a place to read. She started with just a few books and now has sev... posted on Sep 14, 1925 reads

Lily Yeh: Fire in the Darkness of a Winter's Night
Lily Yeh was a successful painter and professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts when she returned to Beijing in 1989 to display her artwork. While there, she witnessed the tragic events of Tiananmen Square and came to realize that, "being an artist is not simply about making art...It is about delivering the vision one is given...and about doing the correct thing without sparing oneself." ... posted on Nov 22, 3237 reads

Esther Perel: The Constant Dance Between Me and You
"We all come into this world with a need for connection and protection and with a need for freedom. And from the first moment on, we will be straddling these two needs -- what is me, and what is us? The common parlance today is, I need to first work on myself; I need to first feel good about me; solve me before I can be with somebody else, and I find that also a strange thought. You know who you a... posted on Dec 18, 10797 reads

A Geometry of the Heart
At 16 she lay down in the middle of a busy two-way street. Then she heard an inner voice say, "Do you want to be a drunk, or do you want to be an artist?" She got up and never forgot the clarity of that decision. High school was a humiliation. She was deemed slow and unteachable. When she asked her dean about how to put together a portfolio for art school he asked her if she'd considered selling s... posted on May 3, 3740 reads

Diana Beresford-Kroeger: The Call of the Trees
Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a world-recognized botanist, medical biochemist and author (and now filmmaker). She is known for her extraordinary ability to translate scientific complexities of nature for the general public with both precision and poetry. "If you speak for the trees, you speak for all of nature", says Beresford-Kroeger, one of the world's leading expert on trees. She has studied the e... posted on May 9, 7470 reads

Notice the Rage. Notice the Silence.
The best laws and diversity training have not gotten us anywhere near where we want to go. Therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is working with old wisdom and very new science about our bodies and nervous systems, and all we condense into the word "race." Krista Tippett sat down with him in Minneapolis, where they both live and work, before the pandemic lockdown began. Says Menakem, "You... posted on Jun 6, 19042 reads

How Trauma & Resilience Cross Generations
"The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 att... posted on Jul 25, 6866 reads

Stories to Tend the Soul of the World
"Dr. Sharon Blackie is a renowned writer and teacher whose work weaves together psychology, mythology, and ecology to reveal how our cultural myths have led us to the individual and collective social and environmental problems we face today and how reconnection with our more ancient mythology would better serve our relationship with the Earth, our souls, and the cosmos. The central premise of her ... posted on Oct 17, 7934 reads

2021: Resources for the Journey
"One year ago, as 2020 was dawning, we joined with many around the globe in imagining a year of possibility and transformation. It was the start of a new decade and the number 2020 couldn't help but evoke a hope for new, clear ways of seeing. Most of us simply couldn't have imagined the global pandemic that would sweep the world, making our connection to one another more poignant and powerful than... posted on Jan 1, 6931 reads

To Live and Love with a Dying World
"In the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, and a celebrated advocate for localism, ecological health, and small-scale farming. DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in 2008 by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands N... posted on Jan 4, 3878 reads

Drawn Into the Garden: An Artist's Journey
Take a stroll through Helen Stewart's enchanted garden, and discover the allure of living in creative relationship with soil and soul. Gardening is in Helen's blood. Her great grandfather ran the world's largest nursery of his time. Following in his footsteps, Helen, a former sheep farmer, turned artist, author and community weaver -- has gradually transformed the grounds of her heritage home in ... posted on Feb 10, 3793 reads

Eldering in the Age of Consumption
"In modern Western society, we want to preserve everything and we want to live forever. We wage war on old age and write songs about being forever young. Because death is seen as no more, no less than the end of the line--something to be held off and resisted--we live in constant fear of it. But to the Celts, death was inextricably intertwined with life. Every month the moon died and was reborn. E... posted on Mar 9, 11429 reads

The Only Real Antidote to Fear
"That in love and in life, freedom from fear -- like all species of freedom -- is only possible within the present moment has long been a core teaching of the most ancient Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions. It is one of the most elemental truths of existence, and one of those most difficult to put into practice as we move through our daily human lives, so habitually inclined toward th... posted on Apr 4, 7529 reads