Maya Angelou On Identity & The Meaning of Life
Through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent, despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her father at the age of three, and abused in her childhood, the late Maya Angelou became a cultural phenomenon. This interview from 1977 brings us timeless wisdom from this phenomenal woman, as she explores issues of identity and the meaning of life. ... posted on Jul 22, 27669 reads

The 6 Essential Conditions of Creativity
“Surprise is not easily defined. It is the unexpected that strikes one with wonder or astonishment. What is curious about effective surprise is that it need not be rare or infrequent or bizarre and is often none of these things. Effective surprises … seem rather to have the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no l... posted on Jul 31, 21533 reads

Big Questions From Little People
Do animals like sheep and cows have accents? Why do we cry? Is new technology always good? The art of asking big questions often comes from brave little people who are innocent to the complexities of the answers. Sometimes, it takes a whole book and the world's leading experts to respond to these simple yet profound inquiries about life, nature, and the cosmos...... posted on Sep 1, 15564 reads

Teaching Kids About Living Systems
"If you cut a cow in half, do you get two cows?" That is the simple question Linda Booth Sweeney likes to ask young people in her efforts to try and teach them the concept of living systems. It is a notion that she says even four-year-olds will shout out, "No way!" as they recognize that the cow has parts that belong together to make a whole. Join Lisa Bennett, communications director for the Cent... posted on Jul 5, 19376 reads

America's Most Tenacious Gardeners
Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has about the worst of any city in America. It's been ranked at various times as both the poorest and the most dangerous. As so many flee the violence and crime, it may seem strange that others are literally putting down roots. A recent study revealed that Camden's gardens may be the fastest growing in the country. The city needs fresh food... posted on Jul 19, 14411 reads

How We Grieve: Learning To Live With Loss
John Updike wrote in his memoir, "Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?" And yet even if we were to somehow make peace with our own mortality, a primal fear rips through whenever we think about losing those we love most dearly -- a fear that metastasizes into all-consuming grief when l... posted on Aug 18, 47528 reads

Why The Capacity For Boredom Is A Good Thing
When was the last time you were bored -- truly bored -- and didn't instantly spring to fill your psychic emptiness by checking Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? The last time you stood in line at the store or the boarding gate or the theater and didn't reach for your smartphone seeking deliverance from the dreary prospect of forced idleness? But boredom might not be as not as bad as it seems; in f... posted on Jul 9, 39937 reads

Towards A Psychology of Hope
Hope is among the strongest human emotions. Research shows it's good for our physical and emotional well being. And it's often the 'thread' that pulls us through. Traditionally hope has been thought to be one of those things that you either have...or, you don't. But, what if hope can be learned? According to Anthony Scioli, a professor of psychology and author of The Power of Hope, this human emot... posted on Aug 5, 46657 reads

The Science of Play
Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play suggests that the rough-and-tumble play of children actually prevents violent behavior and that play can grow human talents and character across a lifetime. Read more of his thoughts about what he calls the science of play.... posted on Jul 18, 32343 reads

How To Make Hard Choices
The push and pull of different options can often be impulsive at best, and agonizing at worst. In this thoughtful TED Talk, Ruth Chang explains why sizing one choice against the other -- for example, a home in the country versus the city, or a major in philosophy versus in law -- presents a false dichotomy of the vast range of possible options that exist to become the person that we want to be. Ra... posted on Sep 6, 33018 reads

Because I Said I Would
Alex Sheen keeps his promises. One year after his friend Charlie Cordell killed Vincent Canzani while drinking and driving, Alex stood outside of a busy bar with a sign telling those leaving that he was ready to drive them home that night and even take them back to their cars in the morning. And he did it for free, because he had a promise to keep. When someone snuck him a tip, he donated it to "M... posted on Aug 26, 7914 reads

Look With Your Heart: Lessons From My Grandmother
Mia Tagano visits her 94 year old grandmother -- who now has dementia -- and discovers a whole new, less verbal, way of communicating her love through heart, hands and hugs. To her surprise, when she brings this approach to her grandmother's roommate who has suffered a stroke, it radically transforms their communication and opens up both women profoundly. This heart-warming story shares more...... posted on Jul 29, 0 reads

Julia Cameron On How To Get Out Of Your Own Way
"Art is a spiritual transaction. Artists are visionaries... Art is an act of faith, and we practice practicing it." For anyone interested in the ineffable grasping and spiritual practice of the artist, Maria Popova of brainpickings.org summarizes Julia Cameron's seminal text The Artist's Way, "exploring its gateways, its obstacles, and how we can get out of our own way."... posted on Sep 3, 25392 reads

From Hero To Host
For too long, too many of us have been entranced by heroes. Perhaps it's our desire to not have to do the hard work, to rely on someone else to figure things out. But perhaps it's time for us to face the truth of our situation -- that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice -- and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.... posted on Aug 28, 35370 reads

Good Night Margaret: A Love Story Against The Odds
Take a moment to enjoy this short documentary film from the New York Times entitled, "Good Night, Margaret." It is the uplifting story about Margaret "Muffi" Lavigne and Chris Plum, both of whom have muscular dystrophy. But this story focuses not on their disabilities. Instead, it focuses on something they both feel incredibly lucky to have discovered...love. As Chris so poignantly states in the f... posted on Sep 8, 19949 reads

Kids Making A Mark On The World
Riley De Graff, a resourceful student from Sun Valley Elementary School in San Rafael, CA, effected positive change for the earth by asking a parent to help her recycle used markers in her school. By creating a petition through Change.org, the school collected over 90,000 signatures and mobilized a used color markers recycling campaign which is now supported by the Crayola company and Dixon Ticond... posted on May 2, 2444 reads

Radical Kindness: The Banker Who Gave It All Away
On the surface, Philip Wollen does not look like the radical type. Named as one of the top-wanted executives in Australia, he was a vice-president of Citibank when he was 34 and a general manager at Citicorp. Around 1990, however, Philip decided to give away 90% of his capital. His aim, he says, is to die broke; to give away all he owns with "warm hands." Now, his Winsome Constance Kindness Trust ... posted on Aug 30, 9502 reads

Marina Keegan & The Opposite of Loneliness
Marina Keegan's posthumous writings are moving, sensible and funny. Her parents, with the help of her college professor, put them together to honor Keegan's loving, compassionate spirit after her tragic death. By doing so, they transformed their anger, sadness and grief into a force for positivity and forgiveness that will inspire you. ... posted on Sep 15, 0 reads

Bridging the Clothing Divide
Developmental organizations typically work on food, education, health care, and economic opportunity, but very few address the need for clothing. For materially poor people, however, clothing is shelter. Anshu Gupta shares, "In earthquakes, the shake kills people; in a tsunami, the water kills people; but in winter, the cold does not kill people. It's the lack of proper clothing. Why don't we cons... posted on Oct 23, 13814 reads

Perfect Pairing: Young People Teaching Seniors About Technology
"Seniors who feel like today's technology has left them in the dust are hitching a ride with a philanthropic gaggle of students who, in their spare time, are helping older generations return to the fast lane with their iPods, iPads, smart phones and computers. A group of teenagers who never knew a world before computers launched Wired for Connections/Mentor Up...designed to help senior citizens un... posted on Oct 2, 39457 reads

Giving Discarded Laptops New Lives & New Homes
It started with a small request made during one of Becky Morrison's many trips to Guinea. Instead of a donation of t-shirts and toys, she was asked if she might bring a laptop. In preparation for her next trip, Becky posted the request to social media. Within minutes, 10 used laptops once destined for the trash heap, were offered a brand new 'home'. It was then that Becky founded Globetops, an org... posted on Oct 14, 16994 reads

The Relationship Between Self-Compassion & Procrastination
What causes us to procrastinate, and how can we change our relationship with this tricky habit? Beyond "just getting started," consultant and life coach Linda Graham suggests that self-compassion may be the key to addressing procrastination and its cycle of negativity.... posted on Oct 9, 60400 reads

Of Webs, Boxes and Boundaries
Margaret Wheatley shares: "When my children were small, I had a slogan on my refrigerator that read: 'If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.' Perhaps that was my children's first lesson in systems thinking. We adults learn this, too. If others are struggling, we experience the consequences of their struggle. If others don't feel safe, we aren't safe. Great teachers have been trying to teach us t... posted on Aug 31, 22080 reads

Tom Carter's Epic Journey Through China
Tom Carter's wanderlust had taken him through the entire length of Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. To continue seeing the world, he decided to teach English in China. Working in this role for a few years non-stop allowed him to save up just enough to traverse the country. Equipped with a digital camera, listening ear, and no agenda, Carter unwittingly ended up creating the most comprehensive bo... posted on Sep 18, 13828 reads

An Innovation That Is Lighting India's Villages
Worldwide about 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity, a statistic hard to fathom in our current digital age. In India, more than 400 million people have no electricity. Gyanesh Pandey, who grew up in a village in Bihar, India without electricity, and three of his friends are creating a different reality for thousands of people through a company they founded known as Husk Power Systems. Re... posted on Nov 8, 14823 reads

Former Orphan Creates Safe Haven For Street Kids
Crouching in the back of a van is a young boy with a fresh injury. He'd been hit with a bottle when he got into a fight. Stanislas Lukumba, a tall, good-looking, fortyish nurse, checks for shards of glass as the driver shines his cell phone on the wound. For the past eight years, Stanislas has made nightly trips in the van, a mobile clinic that runs in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.... posted on Jan 6, 15630 reads

Slow Medicine: An Interview With Victoria Sweet
Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco was, as far as anyone knows, the last almshouse, or Hotel-Dieu, in this country -- a hospital for the sick and poor. Dr. Victoria Sweet took a position there, a place where she and other physicians could practice a different kind of medicine -- an intimate, intuitive, deeply skilled medicine focused on continuing care and observation of the patient, minus com... posted on Oct 8, 22611 reads

35 Images of Kindness Within Conflict
This collection of photos showing everyday individuals standing for love in times of terrible violence will shake your spirit and open your heart. These acts of love suggest that "during times of conflict and political or religious civil unrest, the power of the human spirit's capacity for non-violent protest and kindness still shines through."... posted on Sep 17, 99306 reads

The Forest Man of Majuli Island
It has been said that the single most powerful thing one can do to combat climate change and promote peace is to plant a tree. Jadev Payeng has been doing just that since the 1970's on the once-barren sandbar on the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. Over 40 years later, the forest he's planted is now larger than New York City's Central Park and is home to several thousand varieties o... posted on Aug 17, 4800 reads

The Extinction of Quiet
Noise pollution is linked to health problems and some argue it interferes with our natural connection to the earth. As the world's quiet places disappear, are we forgetting how to listen? In 1989, "acoustic ecologist" Gordon Hempton received a grant to document and record the natural sounds of Washington state. He identified 21 wilderness places to record -- sites unsullied by the sounds of traffi... posted on Oct 17, 19607 reads

DailyBread: A Simple Idea That's Feeding The Hungry
Simplicity can be disarming. That's what Carolyn North discovered. It started with an impulse to save the leftover Thanksgiving turkey her neighbor had discarded as trash. Thirty years later, she and a rotating team of friends-turned-volunteers have been quietly recovering surplus food and delivering it to free food shelters and pantries across the San Francisco Bay Area. ... posted on Oct 30, 16622 reads

Preserving The World's Most Delicate Sites
California-based nonprofit, Global Heritage Fund, is taking a unique approach to preserving our world's most endangered sites. They are bypassing the often tangled ties of bureaucracy, to invest directly into the community which surrounds it. By bringing together highly skilled engineers and archeologists, they are able to save some of our world's most sacred sites. And, in doing so, they're worki... posted on Dec 26, 13875 reads

Is There A Right Way To Get Angry?
Anger can cause us a great deal of hurt, but it can also be a positive force that propels us to act and can spur creativity and fuel success. It is all about how we manage our anger in those instances when we feel overwhelmed by it. Read further to learn more about 'the right way' to get angry and how you can harness your anger for good. ... posted on Nov 23, 28894 reads

A Simple Act of Kindness
As children, we're taught to be wary of strangers. To walk away, even when we know someone might need our help. Sadly, the world today seems to elicit this type of fear. And, as parents, we continuously struggle to help our children find the balance between staying safe and helping others. Read this inspiring story to learn how one mother's day of errands quickly became a teaching moment for her a... posted on Dec 17, 33573 reads

Kindness: The First Gift
"Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself... Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference." John O'Donohue takes us on an eloquent exploration of kindness and its role in the unfolding universe.... posted on Nov 28, 48626 reads

From Rwandan Garbage Dump To Harvard
After 2-year old Justus' parents vanished during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, he lived in a stripped-out car in the Kigali City Dump, surviving on food scraps thrown out by nearby restaurants and hotels. Six years later, Clare Effiong was driving through Rwandan dirt roads in a taxi cab, looking for ways to "do good." Her intuition told her to pull over when she saw a group of children, including ... posted on Jan 8, 24152 reads

The Deaf & Blind Artist Who Never Gave Up
The story of Emilie Gossiaux, a native of New Orleans who now lives and works in New York City, is nothing short of extraordinary. At the age of 5, Gossiaux began to suffer from an untreatable disorder that caused her to start losing her hearing. Years later, in yet another cruel twist of fate, Gossiaux was in an accident that left her blind. Remarkably, she continued to follow her love of art and... posted on Feb 24, 19104 reads

Priorities & The Art of Pruning:
As life gets busier and busier, many find that it is almost impossible to juggle new ideas, new challenges or perhaps even new relationships. According to James Clear, this is where the analogy of pruning a rose bush comes into play: before we exhaust ourselves with trying to perfect the big picture perfect, we need to make careful and difficult decisions about what to cut out or trim back on. Doi... posted on Dec 11, 29594 reads

The Hero At The Checkout Counter
When a musician encounters an extraordinary unsung hero at the checkout counter of his neighborhood grocery store, he is so moved that he cannot get the experience out of his mind for weeks. His thoughts and feelings eventually manifest into words on his blog: "When real heroism steps out of a movie, or off the pages of a book...it has the capacity to touch a part of you that has been sleeping. It... posted on Dec 29, 24663 reads

34 Images of Heart-Warming Humanity
Popular news and media outlets often report negative stories and rarely shed light on all the good that happens on a daily basis. Here are 34 stories of random acts of kindness that will warm your heart and bring a smile to your face.... posted on Dec 9, 214382 reads

Photographing Horses To Save Their Lives
They are the symbol of the American West -- strong, resolute, assured. And yet, nearly 150,000 wild horses are sent to slaughter each year in the U.S. Though, The Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 was intended to protect them, an increase in cattle interests has caused their allocated territory to diminish. Until recently, their plight has gone largely unnoticed. But, thanks to t... posted on Jan 31, 8165 reads

Giving People A Hand Up, Not A Hand Out
I saw Joe sweeping up New York City's detritus, dressed in the familiar blue pants and shirt of Ready, Willing & Able. Four months out of prison, he said, "I've learned my lesson, but the situation was pretty dismal." That's when he turned to the Doe Fund, as tens of thousands of homeless men and ex-cons have done since 1990. Today the Doe Fund's 400 fulltime employees (some 70% of them graduates ... posted on Jan 4, 31367 reads

What The People Of The Amazon Know That You Don't
"Many human afflictions are diseases of the heart, the mind and the spirit. Western medicine can't touch those. I cure them." Deep in the Amazon rainforest, there are a small number of indigenous tribes who maintain a healing tradition that far pre-dates the development of modern medicine. In this powerful TED talk, ethnobiologist Mark Plotkin outlines the many challenges and perils that are endan... posted on Jan 24, 34673 reads

Wendell Berry on Solitude And Creativity's Enemies
Wendell Berry's remarkable work, What Are Humans For?, is filled with philosophical insights for the would be artist in us all. Here, Maria Popova of Brainpickings extracts some of the most poignant and moving moments from his piece, interweaving them with thoughts from Thoreau and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.... posted on Feb 1, 27896 reads

Desmond Tutu: Forgiveness Is Liberating
"In many ways it has been unbelievable. It has been almost breathtaking--this willingness to forgive, this magnanimity, this nobility of spirit." Desmond Tutu shared these words in 1997, speaking to a crowd about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and their efforts to heal the deep wounds of racism. In the wake of the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, scholar Angela Davis su... posted on Apr 3, 12935 reads

Using Brain Science To Transform Schools
After Sept 11th 2001, child trauma psychiatrist Pamela Cantor was hired to assess the emotional impact of the attacks on New York school children. What she discovered surprised her. "From lower Manhattan to the Bronx, most of the children I met were traumatized less by what they had witnessed that terrifying morning than by the experience of growing up in poverty," says Pamela. She found that "one... posted on Feb 4, 38612 reads

Tiny Living: Making it Work
When it comes to owning a home, the phrase "bigger is better" has become the norm. But a new breed of home owners have decided to go with the "less is more" approach and scale down to -- gulp! -- well below 500 sq. feet. The reasons are clear right away: less expensive, less cleaning, less maintenance -- and also more energy efficient, cozy and elegantly streamlined. As Jay Shafer wrote in his boo... posted on Feb 12, 25969 reads

The Difference Between Education & Training
"The root word of education -- educare -- means to lead forth a hidden wholeness in another person." These are the words of Rachel Naomi Remen, whose course, the "Healer's Art," is now taught in half of American medical schools and seven countries around the world. Her words remind us that competence and completeness are each held within the other, and that we are already enough.... posted on Jan 28, 35742 reads

All the World's a Stage
As the old saying goes, “laughter is the best medicine.” And for Grant Snider, who practices orthodontics by day, and webcomics by night, here’s proof that he believes in that very notion. Take a moment to enjoy these fanciful, thought-provoking and sometimes whimsical comics about daily life from the mind of Mr. Snider.... posted on Sep 24, 6924 reads

Duane Elgin On Voluntary Simplicity
Duane Elgin is an unusual social visionary, one with an MBA from Wharton and a master's degree in economic history. He is a passionate advocate for shifting away from the consumer mentality which has driven history for hundreds of years. According to Elgin we are now in a time of great transition, a time that can no longer sustain the materialism of a consumerist society, and that calls for new wa... posted on Mar 28, 24639 reads