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, 3812 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, 11584 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, 7577 reads

Emergence Disturbs the Concept of Linearity
When Bayo Akomolafe was a child he prayed to God for a "faith-o-meter" -- some kind of tool that would measure his worthiness and assure him of his place in heaven. "Of course I didn't get my prayer answered," he says. "But I got something better than an answer, I got bewildered, and I am in a state of bewilderment now." An academic, poet and philosopher, Bayo Akomolafe has dedicated his life to m... posted on Jun 4, 2141 reads

Nature and the Serious Work of Joy
"'Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity," Rachel Carson wrote in reflecting on our spiritual bond with nature shortly before she awakened the modern environmental conscience. The rewards and redemptions of that elemental yet endangered response is what British naturalist and environmental writer Michael M... posted on May 4, 5091 reads

Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence Now
"Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist, science journalist, and the author of the books Emotional Intelligence (over 5 million copies in print in 40 languages), Social Intelligence, and Ecological Intelligence. Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Dan about the insights in his landmark book, Emotional Intelligence, and where weve come since its publication in 1995. They dis... posted on Jun 28, 5681 reads

Letters to a Young Poet: Communing with Rilke's Prophetic Musing
"A new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet has been released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before. In ten letters to a young person in 1903, Rilke touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives -- prophetic musings about solitude and relationship, humanity and the natural world, even gender and human wholeness. And what a joy it is ... posted on Jul 9, 4548 reads

Doffing Our Inner Masks: Lessons from Horses
"In this present time, we are being asked to don masks for everyones physical health. Yet at the same time we are being challenged to doff our internal masks for our mental health both individually and as a collective. The horses can support us to remove that inner facade and emerge into a more peaceful and positive future...Interestingly, someone asked me the other day, how do horses deal in time... posted on Jul 21, 6722 reads

The Descent to Soul: An Overview of the Terrain
"Our developmental dilemma stems primarily from our disconnection from nature, from both our outer and inner natures: the loss of our experienced belonging to and entanglement within the natural world and the loss of our communion with the very core of our own individual human nature our Soul. What we have lost, in particular, is the journey of soul initiation a psycho-spiritual undertaking that... posted on Jul 26, 7879 reads

The Art of Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes
"'How we spend our days,'' Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, 'is, of course, how we spend our lives.' And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life -- in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purpl... posted on Aug 11, 6188 reads

A Palestinian Woman Building Peace From the Bottom Up
Born in Jerusalem to respected Palestinian scholars and educators, Huda Abu Arquob's great-grandfather was one of the many Muslim Palestinians who took in and protected Jewish residents of Hebron during the 1929 massacre. "That story has not been properly documented," Huda says, "perhaps because it challenges the simplistic narrative of Palestinians and Israelis fighting for 3,000 years. I've felt... posted on Sep 22, 3567 reads

Calling Team Earth
"Paul Hawken is a world-renowned environmentalist, activist, and author. His works include Blessed Unrest, Drawdown, and Sustainable Revolution. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Paul about the call to action in his newest book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Paul and Tami discuss the accelerating effects of climate change and how global so... posted on Sep 29, 3012 reads

Ecology by A.K. Ramanujam
"We live in times of such great potency. The time of the sixth mass extinction that a vast majority of us are participating in and co-creating, just by how we live our lives, and the choices that we make. We human beings, need the tree beings, the kingdom of the plant people, for our very breath; and if we wish to steward our planetary home away from what appears to be an inevitable fate of climat... posted on Oct 8, 4282 reads

There Are Songs
"Scientists are now affirming what many indigenous peoples and mystics have known for a long time: the world is made of sound. Everything around and within us is comprised of vibrating stuff. As a songwriter, I am always listening for the songs that are already here. My job is to catch these whispered suggestions and bring them into form." Barbara McAfee is a singer/songwriter, voice coach, and cr... posted on Nov 16, 5832 reads

Let a Thousand Translations Bloom
"Translators ferry across the meaning, materiality, metaphysics and all the magic that may be unknown in the mediums and conventions of their own tongue. The pull of the strange, the foreign, and the alien are necessary for acts of translation. It is this essential element of unknowingness that animates the translator's curiosity and challenges her intellectual mettle and ethical responsibility. E... posted on Nov 23, 3553 reads

Turn New Year's Resolutions into Revelations
New Year's resolutions tend to be about wanting more of something we desire and/or less of something we do not, and while they surely have their noble side, they also often emanate from subtle and less subtle forms of perceived lack, scarcity, comparison, self-flagellation, and judgment. The 'should' and 'should not' messages we send ourselves when we make resolutions can be harsh and incriminatin... posted on Jan 1, 5197 reads

The Core of Belonging
"Rev. angel Kyodo williams is an author, activist, Zen priest, and founder of the organization Transformative Change, which centers on the link between inner work, wholeness, and social transformation at scale. She has created an audio series called Belonging: From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Rev. angel about how so... posted on Jan 18, 4125 reads

Trauma, the Body and 2021
"When Krista Tippett interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. She described him then as "an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society." She catches up with him in 2021 -- as we are living through one vast overwhelming experience after the other. A... posted on Feb 10, 7492 reads

How Newness Enters the World
"When time becomes history, different dynamics come into focus than the ones that are at any moment screaming for attention. The title of Gal Beckerman's book intrigues and compels: The Quiet Before. He's a journalist with a special interest in history and words and ideas how ideas are passed and debated and become defining in generational time; how conversation becomes culture-shifting relations... posted on Apr 18, 6741 reads

Darkness Rising
"The unprovoked invasion of Ukraine retells an old story of conquest and control bringing destruction and death. With missiles falling onto cities, thousands already dead, and over two million refugees, mainly women and children, fleeing, we are witnessing a way of life, of freedom, being lost. As these refugees join the millions worldwide displaced by conflict and persecution, this war is bringin... posted on Mar 13, 5276 reads

Giving Your Heart Over to Real Change
"In this podcast, Sharon Salzberg joins Sounds Trues founder, Tami Simon, to discuss her recent book, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World--and how you can begin to bring the core of your being into your work, your community, and your life. Sharon and Tami also discuss how contemplative practices can open the heart, agency and reclaiming your power to effect change, the empower... posted on Apr 8, 2765 reads

How to Break the Cycles of War and Violence
Anastasiia Timmer is a criminologist who was born and raised in Ukraine. Now based in California, Timmer studies why people commit acts of violence. She and her team of Ukrainian, Russian, and American researchers went to Ukraine in 2017, after the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian provinces of Crimea and Donbas. At that point, as Timmer points out, "people of Ukraine were suffering from war for m... posted on Apr 23, 3284 reads

Let the Sun Rise
We all have days when things don't go as smoothly as we'd hoped and we have to make peace with things as they are. Fortunately the sun rises again each morning for all of us and we get another chance to see what the day will bring, to try again and to meet each moment with hope and to practice the art of living. Rejection, fears, doubts and failure are simply part of the human condition. Acknowled... posted on May 2, 2372 reads

On the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening
"Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence transient and transcendent, fragile and... posted on May 23, 2133 reads

Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
"Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves --those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive: truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by. It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so rem... posted on Jul 10, 2671 reads

Jack Healey: Create Your Future
Jack Healey, a former Franciscan priest and former head of Amnesty International-USA, has pioneered the use of music activism to exponentially raise the visibility of human rights and inspire nonviolent action by youth. Called "Mr. Human Rights" by U.S. News and World Report, Jack over a 60-year career has "helped move the topic of human rights from closed-door diplomatic negotiations to widesprea... posted on Aug 24, 2340 reads

Matthew Fox: Bowing to the Heart Over Authority
"And so creativity should be at the heart of all ritual; not a frozen form, but a flexible form. Dance is at the heart of our prayer. We do circle dancing. We dance to DJ music and live music. And we also do spiral dancing. Getting the body involved is so important. You don't have a Hindu body or an atheist body or a Buddhist body. You have a body. We're all human there, so we can all dance togeth... posted on Sep 8, 3195 reads

Elderhood: The Post-Heroic Journey
In her book 'If Women Rose Rooted,' author Sharon Blackie explores what she calls an'Eco-Heroine's Journey.' She describes this as, "a path to understanding how deeply enmeshed we are in the web of life on this planet. In many ways, it is an antidote to the swashbuckling action-adventure that is the Hero's Journey, with its rather grandiose focus on saving the world....This path forces us first to... posted on Oct 3, 2321 reads

Earning It: A Conversation with John Toki
"I visualize the process of making art as going on a long walk for miles and miles and miles and miles, and you get up over the hill--maybe the hill symbolizes the artwork--then you see the beautiful ocean and this sunset. But you have to earn it...Life as an artist is hard work. Young artists often don't understand that it's not until they get out on their own, making art, and starting to dig aro... posted on Oct 20, 1299 reads

Spirituality, Art and Innocence
"Nothing can be loved at speed, and I think we might be looking at the loss of love in the world due to the increased velocity of ordinary life; the loss of care, skill and attention enough to ensure the health and happiness of each other and the planet earth. It is a baffling problem and governments seem unable to recognize it, or do much about it at present. To put it as a bleak modern metaphor,... posted on Oct 31, 2106 reads

The Gift of Lewis Hyde's
"Gifts pass from hand to hand: they endure through such transmission, as every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the receiver. And so it is with Lewis Hydes classic study of gift giving and its relationship to art. The Gift has never been out of print; it moves like an underground current among artists of all k... posted on Nov 20, 1930 reads

The Fearless Organization
A completely fearless organization is an aspiration that will always remain slightly out of reach. It will never be the case that every single person shows up at work with a fearless stance that looks outward and forward, and that everyone is more interested in contributing to shared goals than in staying personally safe. Having said that, a 'mostly fearless' organization is one in which people fe... posted on Dec 30, 1200 reads

Ikebana and the Jedi Model
"The Japanese traditional arts including ikebana have adopted the apprenticeship model [of the Jedi]. Once you enter the world of ikebana, you are trained under one certain master for at least several years and if the master thinks you are ready to be a master, which is called "shihan" in Japanese, the master recommends you to the board of masters which would approve you as shihan. If approved, yo... posted on Jan 10, 2219 reads

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement
"In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, Nobel Prize Winner, Daniel Kahneman together with co-authors Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise helps produce errors in many fields, including medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, food safety, forensic science, bail verdicts, child protection, strategy, performance reviews and personnel selection. And although noise can be found... posted on Jan 21, 2180 reads

Zach Shore: Shining A Light Amidst Deep Moral Conflicts
"After an encounter on campus with a fellow blind student who had just returned from a solo excursion with seeming ease, Zachary Shore had a moment of awakening: "My problem wasn't my blindness. It was my lack of skills and confidence." He would indeed come to find a remarkable set of skills and confidence -- eventually earning a doctorate from Oxford University, becoming a distinguished scholar o... posted on Feb 8, 2094 reads

The Company We Keep: Deborah Meier
"When all goes even remotely well, we are remarkable learners. Our capacity to be so is linked to our equally remarkable capacity to imagine being another. We are designed to learn from others, to be apprentices to adults. All we need are those adults and a setting that seems to accept us and, in turn, seems acceptable to us. This allows us to trust sufficiently to explore and imagine, predict and... posted on Feb 13, 2585 reads

Asymmetry & the Art of Generous Creation
"As an artist or writer, how do you compose a work that is generous? How do you place a group of rocks together in a garden, or branches, berries and blossoms together in an ikebana arrangement,-- or ideas and language on a page -- to invite real participation? The artist is giving a gift, I think, if she leaves some connections unfinished. Implied. The artist is giving a gift, I think, when the c... posted on Mar 6, 2628 reads

Amishi Jha: Pay Attention to Your Attention
Amishi P. Jha came to her pathbreaking work studying the neuroscience of mindfulness and attention when, as a young professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she lost feeling in her teeth. She had been grinding them as a profound stress response to burnout from her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and tenure-track professor. Knowing from her academic work that the b... posted on Mar 9, 5078 reads

Shay Beider: Resilience is Rooted in Source
Over the last two decades Shay Beider has done pioneering work in integrative medicine through her non-profit organization, Integrative Touch, that enhances well-being, minimizes suffering and facilitates healing for children with special medical needs and their families."Essentially, our entire role as a team is to listen with every little bit of our capacity. And so that's not just listening wit... posted on Mar 16, 2752 reads

Deborah Cohan: The Dancing Doctor
"Deborah Cohan is a lifelong dancer, obstetrician-gynecologist, and teacher of embodied medicine. In 2013, moments before undergoing a double-mastectomy, she and the entire operating room team broke out into dance, filmed by the anesthesiologist for Deborahs friends and family. The video found its way into the public sphere and has since been viewed 8 million times. Deborah oversees births at Zuck... posted on Apr 21, 3916 reads

Curiosity: A Sponge for Terror
"And so I moved from hoping every morning to find myself waking up from a bad dream to realizing that this room and its contents were the only life I had. And this was the body I had to live it with. I started waking up ready to fully live this specific life and get acquainted with what was in many respects a new body every day. I started the day asking, what part of my body works today? What can ... posted on Jun 15, 3598 reads

Thirsty for Wonder
"Contemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe. Maybe you're making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as the harvest moon is rising over the easterslopes. She is full and golden, like one of those pregnant women who radiate from within. Suddenly you cannot bear the beauty. Scissors suspended in your hand, tears p... posted on May 4, 3020 reads

The Thread of My Life: Following the Heart's Wisdom
"One of the great paradoxes of life is that we must go inward in order to find the road out of ourselves. That is what life asked me to do 15 years ago. After a long period of trying to run away from dark thoughts and feelings my body and mind collapsed. And that was the best thing that could ever happen to me! Before this breakdown I never wondered about what living really means. I just followed ... posted on May 9, 3082 reads

Seasons of the Monastic Table
"'Remember the earth whose skin you are,' writes Joy Harjo, and there is literal truth to this. We are grown from the body of the Earth, we are made of it, and to it we return. Plants, bacteria, animals, fungi, humans: we all exist in relationship to each other and to a rotating and orbiting planet whose journey around the sun gives us waxing and waning light, seed sprouts and withering stems. Bei... posted on Jul 5, 1679 reads

Carrie Newcomer: Asking the Right Questions in Song
Carrie Newcomer is an American performer, singer, songwriter, recording artist, author and educator. The Boston Globe described her as a "prairie mystic" and Rolling Stone wrote that she is one who "asks all the right questions." According to a 2014 PBS "Religion and Ethics" interview, Newcomer is a conversational, introspective songwriter who "celebrates and savors the ordinary sacred moments of ... posted on Jul 15, 2945 reads

Slowing Down in Urgent Times
"To slow down in times of crisis--times that in so many ways require action on all fronts--can seem counterintuitive. We are constantly met with pressures to achieve more, act faster and be better. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe disagrees. Urgent times, he urges, call for quiet; for rest and respite. Instead of ramping up, we must surrender, and wait to witness the transformative potential of stillness. Dr. A... posted on Jul 22, 2852 reads

Adrian Arleo: Metaphors for Interdependence
Writes Adrian Arleo, "For 40 years, my sculpture has combined human, animal and natural imagery to create a kind of emotional and poetic power. Often there's a suggestion of a vital interconnection between the human and non-human realms; the imagery arises from associations, concerns and obsessions that are at once intimate and universal. The work frequently references mythology and archetypes in ... posted on Jul 27, 1575 reads

Jessica Gigot: Moon
"The full moon rises over the blackberry bramble along the ditch. It has been shining so bright these past few nights, aiming light into all the dark spaces, memories, regrets. ... I am inside with our two girls. We can't afford a full-time babysitter, so in the afternoons, my husband and I alternate, fusing into one person running the farm. During this particular day I have milked the sheep and m... posted on Dec 15, 1477 reads

It Takes Brokenness to Find It
"My father was 67 when he died, and that's too young, but lately, as I stare at some hard realities of aging and mortality, I begin to appreciate the fact that he didn't have to endure a long period of frailty, pain, and dependence. My father was himself to very the end, brilliant and good and a force of nature, the most important person in my world, and I miss him terribly even now. Maybe espec... posted on Aug 6, 3861 reads

Cloudy is the Stuff of Stones
"Whenever I'm outside for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot -- my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the merits of pebbles by some fickle and mutable aesthetic and either pitch them back or pocket them and stack them among hundreds of their brethren on the counter behind our kitchen sink like fortification... posted on Aug 18, 1608 reads