Imagine a World Without Prisons
Deanna Van Buren designs restorative justice centers that, instead of taking the punitive approach used by a system focused on mass incarceration, treat crime as a breach of relationships and justice as a process where all stakeholders come together to repair that breach. "Imagine a world without prisons," Van Buren says. "And join me in creating all the things that we could build instead."... posted on Apr 30, 2029 reads

A Day with the Langs
For over twenty years artists Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have been collecting plastic trash washed up on a pristine beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Their meditative practice, and the art they make from the collected detritus, is a small song of hope in the face of the worldwide blight of single-use plastic. ... posted on May 1, 2914 reads

The Spell of the Sensuous
David Abram's book, "The Spell of the Sensuous" draws on diverse sources, ranging from Balinese shamanism, and Apache storytelling, to his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to surface the subtle and far-reaching influence of the natural environment on human cognition. Here is a selection of powerful excerpts from the book.... posted on May 13, 3730 reads

We're Gonna Carry That Weight A Long Time
"All houses have memory. Life's big occasions--the triumphs and heartbreak--drift through like smoke, leaving barely a trace. It's the small moments they remember: the hollow at the turn of the stair, the scratches around the keyhole, or wood darkened by touch. "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," wrote Annie Dillard, and the houses we spend them in record it all."... posted on May 27, 4315 reads

Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships
Change means movement. If you want change you have to disrupt something. See how one skateboarding park in a rural Indian village rippled out into changes in gender restrictions, caste restrictions and poverty restrictions through the voices of Ulrike Reinhard, the founder of the skateboarding park, and Asha Gond, a young member of the tribal community in the village of Janwaar.... posted on May 28, 2321 reads

Rumi, Grace & Human Friendship
Tami Simon speaks with Coleman Barks-- a leading scholar and translator of the 13th-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi-- about the extraordinary friendship between Rumi and his teacher Shams Tabrizi.... posted on May 29, 5514 reads

To Become a Better Leader, Question Your Assumptions
"When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new ideas, based on systematic evidence." Here he discusses why it's important for leaders to question their assumptions around ... posted on May 30, 5380 reads

The Forest of Orchids
"As Colombia continues to suffer violence and unrest, one family seeks to change the country's story from one of destruction to one of restoration and healing by planting thousands of native orchids across a mountainside."... posted on Jun 2, 4124 reads

What Critically Ill Kids Can Teach Us
"In 2013, Shay Beider accompanied an anxious little boy into the office of Dr. Fayez Ghishan, the Physician in Chief and a pediatric gastroenterologist at Diamond Childrens Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. The boy was soon to undergo an endoscopy, an invasive scope to examine the digestive tract. Such procedures could be traumatic for children because they required an IV placement; nurses often had to... posted on Jun 18, 4604 reads

Donella Meadows: Dancing with Systems
"We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we do'nt even know what to optimize. We cant keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship ... posted on Jun 22, 5025 reads

The Clearness Committee: A Communal Approach to Discernment
"I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a Clearness Committee. If that name sounds like it is from the sixties, it is--the 1660s! From their beginnings over three hundred years ago, Quakers needed a way to draw on both inner and communal resources to deal with personal p... posted on Jul 1, 8066 reads

Seven Lessons Learned from Leaves
"I've been thinking more deeply about leaves --what these simple gifts of nature can teach us, and how they can help us overcome the challenges we face in life. Over the past year, I jotted down thoughts in a vintage leather-covered notebook that I keep on my desk. And in the spirit of this deeper exploration, I used a macro lens on my camera to reveal a closer look at the wondrous structure of le... posted on Jul 12, 12111 reads

The Two Driving Forces of Creativity
"Two helpful words to keep in mind at the beginning of any writing adventure are pleasure and spaciousness. If we connect a sense of joy with our writing, we may be inclined to explore further. What's there to find out? Perhaps too much stock has been placed in big ideas or even small ones -- a myth! but regularity seems like a key. Dont start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote... posted on Jul 24, 6109 reads

Leverage Points & the Power to Transcend Paradigms
"Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in 'leverage points.' These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. This idea is not unique to systems analysis -- it's embedded in legend. The silver bullet, the trimtab, the miracle cure, the secret passage, the mag... posted on Jul 25, 6520 reads

How to Recapture Your Imagination
"If you had the spyglass, you could see anything in the world. If you had the spyglass, there was nothing from which you couldn't glean information. It had mesmeric power over the people. It had been created by a king who gave it to his daughter, to be used for the strangest of courtships. If you wished to marry her, you had to achieve only one thing. You had to disappear. You had to become a magi... posted on Aug 2, 3515 reads

Hilma af Klint: Enigmatic Mystic & Mother of Abstract Art
"In 1986, those art historians who see art as some form of linear progression 'improving' with time received a rude shock. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's exhibition The Spiritual in Art -- Abstract Paintings 1890 -- 1985 introduced a hitherto unknown woman artist. The issue was not just that this art was so exquisitely beautiful -- but that the paintings had been painted in the early 20th ... posted on Aug 17, 6771 reads

Doubts
This delightfully animated poem by Julie Flanders urges you to "construct an orchestra of belief in your head," thereby getting rid of the doubts that can eat your dreams. Do not let them in, do not let them play, because doubts will take over your mind as they linger, and never go away. Doubts serve as clouds blocking the sunshine that leads to happiness and joy.... posted on Aug 20, 3281 reads

Vandana Shiva: For Love of Mother Earth
"Vandana Shiva started out in quantum physics, something her school didnt even teach, but which she taught herself well enough to eventually study for a PhD in Canada. Somewhere in there, she met the tree huggers of the Chipko movement in the forests of Uttarakhand, the forests her father worked when she was a child, and it became clear that a life other than the one she intended lay in front of h... posted on Aug 23, 4957 reads

A Surgeon's Compassionate Pricing Model
As a surgeon based in eastern Nebraska, Demetrio Aguila, MD, has drawn patients from 34 states, 6 countries, and 4 continents, not only because of his innovative, life-changing surgeries for people suffering with chronic pain, but because of the compassionate payment option he offers: in lieu of dollars, patients can donate community service hours for their procedures. For example, if a patient ne... posted on Aug 25, 5030 reads

I Don't Seem to Be Fine
A disorder caused by a medical treatment for malaria, a too-common affliction for children in Uganda, can lead to constant pain and a debilitating handicap for the children who receive this treatment. Ugandan medical professionals have developed a successful surgical remedy that, along with physical therapy, greatly improves the children's quality of life. With support from a team of medical colle... posted on Sep 4, 2095 reads

How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life
"Greg Depow at the University of Toronto and his colleagues conducted a study on people's experience with empathy in their everyday lives, to find out how it affected their actions and well-being. Their findings shed some interesting light on how small moments of ordinary, everyday empathy work to benefit us all."... posted on Sep 8, 6806 reads

Nature is a Jazz Band, Not a Machine
"From genetic engineering to geoengineering, we treat nature as though its a machine. This view of nature has deep roots in Western thought, all the way to Descartes and Hobbs, but its a fundamental misconception with potentially disastrous consequences, argues Jeremy Lent. His work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization's existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-aff... posted on Sep 12, 4865 reads

Working to Welcome and Resettle Afghan Refugees
"We've had 5,300 people sign up to be volunteers. That's beyond a record for us. We typically work with about 350 volunteers a year. We have more people who want to volunteer than we have things for volunteers to do at this point. But we're so grateful for all these people who want to step in and help." A number of different organizations are helping resettle the over 20,000 Afghan refugees who ha... posted on Sep 14, 2108 reads

The Difference Between Healing & Curing
"In my thirty years of working with cancer patients, I've seen a profound distinction between curing and healing. Curing is what a physician seeks to offer you. Healing, however, comes from within us. It's what *we* bring to the table. Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of coming home." The founder of Commonweal, Dr. Michael Learner shares more. ... posted on Oct 2, 2899 reads

What Makes A Good Life?
What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.... posted on Sep 24, 4180 reads

A Case for the Porch
"Lately I've been trying to think like a porch. Trying to think between the natural and the human. Thinking how best to build during a climate crisis. I came across John Cage saying that progress in art "may be listening to nature." He thought this activity could best play out on a porch, where we can hear nature's symphony and then breathe our own masterpieces. Can we play our porches like instru... posted on Sep 25, 3973 reads

I Want to Raise Questions: A Conversation with Hung Liu
"The reality today is that it's a quick, changing world. So many things are going on. But still, overall you have to anchor yourself. I still believe in my paintings. I still want to do my painting stroke by stroke. I still want to find some truth through the process. It's not simple. The good thing about being an artist is that I can use my work to transform something -- to reach, so I can raise ... posted on Oct 10, 1519 reads

Touch as Nutrition
Is it any coincidence that when a friend or loved one does something nice for us, we feel "touched"? As John Tuite, founder of The Centre for Embodied Wisdom, tells us, "We mistakenly think that touch occurs on the periphery of our self, a skin thing." But as he shares, touch is a crucial piece of our health and development, and one we all too often go without as we get older. ... posted on Oct 16, 45526 reads

The Art of Engagement
Alice Fox manages a plot of land that provides her with food for her body, materials for her art, and sustenance for her spirit. Sustainability underpins all of her work. She looks closely at everything she finds on this plot of land, engaging with it, finding ways to utilize it or at the very least to appreciate it. By noticing the detail in everything she discerns the possibilities it offers. Th... posted on Oct 21, 2106 reads

Wendell Berry on Hope & Place
"It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
posted on Oct 31, 17477 reads

The Woman Beside Wendell Berry
"Here's my portrait of Tanya Berry: This white-haired 81-year-old is a fiercely independent thinker who embraces interdependence. Someone with a deep humility who gives others credit reflexively, and a self-confidence that makes her comfortable telling you what she believes she's good at. A kind person who doesn't hesitate to offer blunt advice. A woman who kept records of her prodigious canning i... posted on Nov 24, 6251 reads

Universal Human in Training
"We are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation in human consciousness. Unprecedented. Our perception is expanding beyond the limitations of the five senses. Together, they form a single system whose object of detection is physical reality. Now we are acquiring another sensory system: we are becoming multisensory. We are transiting from a five sensory species to a multisensory species, and... posted on Oct 30, 3315 reads

Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter
"As a recovering 'productivity geek,' I know how it feels to become swept up in the idea of discovering the perfect system of time management. But I was eventually forced to accept that my struggles to achieve a sense of perfect control or mastery of my time were counterproductive, leading not to a life of more meaning but one of more overwhelm and stress. I came to see that I needed to give up th... posted on Dec 12, 14113 reads

The Heritage of Afghanistan
"Robert Abdul Hayy Darr, who since 1985, as director of the Afghan Cultural Assistance Foundation, has been helping Afghan refugees adapt to life in new homelands. He is also a long-time lover of Afghani-Persian culture who has translated several works of Persian poetry into English, and a follower of the Sufi tradition with a deep knowledge of the works of Ibn Arabi. In this conversation with Jan... posted on Nov 14, 2789 reads

What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living
"The hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone," says author Suleika Jaouad. In this fierce, funny, wisdom-packed talk, she challenges us to think beyond the divide between 'sick' and 'well,' asking: How do you begin again and find meaning after life is interrupted?"... posted on Nov 5, 9758 reads

The Peacock Mosaic
When their school closed during the pandemic, the teachers and families of the East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante, CA, all scrambled to put together backyard pods for the coming school year. They took the challenging hand they were dealt and made the very best of it, creating something beautiful, including a new re-birthed school.... posted on Nov 6, 4531 reads

We're All Human
The filmmaker of this video shares a transformative moment with a person experiencing homelessness: Walking along a busy street in Edinburgh, my eye caught a sign resting at the feet of a man sitting on the pavement outside a posh hotel. It simply read, 'I am a human being.' It stopped me dead in my tracks. Kneeling down to take a closer look, I struck up a conversation with Sparky. And what start... posted on Nov 7, 2458 reads

Little Amal: Walking the Path of Hope for Refugees
"Little Amal," a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl, has big, expressive eyes and loves jumping in puddles as she travels on foot to the UK in search of a new home. But Amal isn't just any girl -- she's a giant puppet more than 11 ft. tall. She's the centerpiece of The Walk, a traveling arts festival. For the past three months, Amal and the crew have travelled from the Syrian-Turkish border to the UK ... posted on Nov 11, 2433 reads

A Better Place: Playing for Change
Musicians from around the world come together in song to speak up for equality and social justice. Whether they are performing from backyards, city street corners, by the oceanside, or in a park, they all give voice to the rights of people everywhere to live in freedom, dignity and peace. "If you feel it, through the music, we can make this world a better place."... posted on Nov 12, 2092 reads

How Does Your Worldview Affect Well-Being?
"Our worldview, our beliefs about what reality is, our views on what (if anything) has value and meaning, what Aldous Huxley called an individual's philosophy of life, contributes more significantly than we often think to our mental well-being. From pessimism to existentialism, might reading certain philosophical ideas actually lead to depression? The connection is not so simple. Philosophy can bo... posted on Nov 13, 6040 reads

Happiness Family Farm
Happiness Family Farm is a Black-owned CSA farm in Portland, Oregon. Rosata, her husband, Prosper, and son, Japhety, work year-round to harvest fresh fruits and vegetables for the local community. They feature a unique assortment of vegetables from all over the world, bringing a taste of home to many in their community.... posted on Nov 26, 1788 reads

The Golden Rule & The Transformation of Being
"The most ancient of principles that binds all religious and philosophical traditions together is what we have come to call 'The Golden Rule.' Simple in its statement, its actual practice seems at best fitful and, for many, difficult to impossible, from the level of our ordinary consciousness. To be able to practice the principle even with those we already love is not always easy. To practice it w... posted on Nov 29, 4338 reads

The Path of Reconciliation
"Opposites arise in the field -- good, bad, darkness, light, joy, sorrow. These qualities arise in concert, each a complement to the other. But the human brain struggles with opposites. We attach to one side of an equation and call it Reality. Our point of view is never the whole picture. Fortunately, the Universe is maintained by scientific/spiritual laws. We're familiar with laws of science. The... posted on Dec 20, 5746 reads

What Defines You
Danielson Okeyo of Cape Town, South Africa, saw himself as something of a Superman because of his physical abilities. A series of injuries made him question who he was when he was no longer defined by what he could do. Okeyo takes us along on his journey to connect with the healing power of nature by befriending the ocean. In the process he realizes that nature accepts us as who we are. As he open... posted on Dec 18, 2530 reads

Rediscovering Gentleness
"At the end of Craig Foster's 2020 documentary film My Octopus Teacher, he shows his son the wonders of nature along the shore and in the sea. He says the most important thing to learn is a gentleness that thousands of hours in nature can teach a child. The word 'gentleness' suddenly stood out and could well be the best description of the film. It is a word rarely used today." Karachi-based artist... posted on Dec 22, 5244 reads

A Solstice Invitation
The solstice in December marks the first day of winter. In the Northern hemisphere it is the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Ever since ancient times, this day has been celebrated across the world as a time of renewal, a kindling of hope in the depths of darkness. depended. From contemplative artist and dharma coyote Aura Glaser comes this poetic Solstice invitation. ... posted on Dec 21, 7104 reads

When There Is No Language Speak Kindness
"Perhaps, you also grew up with this notion: that to be of value, it has to be big. And what if that notion is not true? What if it is the seemingly small actions that are in fact, of great value? What if these seemingly small actions are what connect us one to another and open the gateway to deeper understanding?" Kristin Pedemonti shares more.... posted on Dec 25, 2521 reads

The Gurukul System of Training: An Indigenous Pedagogy
"It all began with a simple yet deep dissatisfaction when I was 20. On the first day of my first job, I spurned the possibility of how my time would be spent. With a clear intuition that I did not want to engage in commercial work whose end was just financial transactions; an inward journey had unknowingly begun. The discomfort, which was actually a yearning for something more than the perceivabl... posted on Feb 9, 2750 reads

The Log- Year 2
There are some things we see without seeing, but in them a whole world is held unto themselves. For the last couple of years, wildlife photographer Robert Bush Sr. has had a trail camera situated above a stream in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The "log" videos are mesmerizing and entertaining, as we observe how integral this log is to the life of the forest. What appears to be just a log is so much... posted on Jan 8, 3698 reads

Calligraphy-- A Sacred Tradition
"Ann Hechle is a major figure in contemporary western calligraphy. The breadth of her subject matter reflects a personal journey which has immersed her in the sacred literatures of the world. In this interview, she gives us privileged access to her magnum opus, her 'Journal', in which she explores the principles of form and order -- the sacred geometry -- which are the well-springs of the creative... posted on Jan 13, 5273 reads