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Soft Power: A Magnetic Approach to Practice![](images/quickread.gif) "The desire to be in control is a normal survival response, but what I love about the art of aikido is that we can move beyond survival to a vast and universal perspective in which all life is connected and interwoven. Such an orientation is not self-conscious. Since it relates to the connecting aspect -- that of the space and energy -- rather than individuals, there is no thing that needs to be o... posted on Jul 18, 9482 reads
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Bearing Witness: The Animal Dialogues![](images/quickread.gif) "It was a fortuitous flip to the essay on pronghorns that persuaded me to pick up Craig Childs' The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. In each intimately wrought tale on antelopes, hawks, and red-spotted toads, I found a writer and translator more versed in the tongues of the non-human world than I will ever be. Childs honors the weight and magnitude of his encounters with creature... posted on Aug 15, 5599 reads
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Wild Mumbai![](images/quickread.gif) "Every night for the past eleven years, Rajesh Sanap and Zeeshan Mirza have spent the post-dinner hours combing the woods behind their homes. Like restive sprites, the young men skirt ponds, bash through spiky hedgerows, upturn rocks, shake up leaf litter, and thread through dirt trails hairy with undergrowth. In the course of their nocturnal walkabouts, they've found about a dozen arachnids, incl... posted on Aug 14, 2419 reads
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Wendell Berry on Caretaking![](images/quickread.gif) "In 2018, Helena Norberg-Hodge sat down with Wendell Berry for a far-reaching discussion. The two are giants of the local economy movement. Berry is a poet and activist, an author of over forty books. Norberg-Hodge founded Local Futures, which works to renew ecological, social, and spiritual well-being by promoting a systemic shift toward economic localization.Together they touch on human nature, ... posted on Aug 31, 4885 reads
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Love and Philosophy Between Prison Walls and Ivory Towers![](images/quickread.gif) In 1987, while teaching a class at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on nonviolence, philosophy lecturer Lee Perlman had a novel idea: "Why not take the students to a prison, to talk with men who had committed extreme forms of violence?" Now, 30 years later, through the MIT Prison Initiative that he founded, Perlman teaches classes to a mixed cohort of both MIT students and prisoners... posted on Dec 28, 7025 reads
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Tinkering with Intent![](images/quickread.gif) Delightful, creative and completely engaging, Blair Somerville's work defies description, and evokes a sense of magic. He lives in the remote town of Papatowai, on the South Island of New Zealand, and uses found materials and other curious objects to re-purpose into moving artworks. Blair realized early in life that he didn't need a lot to live, and that money and material possessions were not imp... posted on Aug 23, 2970 reads
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The Religious Value of the Unknown![](images/quickread.gif) In an age when the fate of the world is unknown, George Prochnik makes a case for uncertainty as a form of faith and hope. Restoring a sense of the unknown requires unlearning, calling into question our way of life. In uncertainty, reason fails whereas love guides. This love can be exemplified by those who spend hours practicing arts and handicrafts with no concern for real-world application, but ... posted on Oct 15, 3292 reads
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What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in School?![](images/quickread.gif) Did you know that all 50 U.S. states require schools to have a policy against bullying? Despite this preventive measure, there has been a slight uptick in bullying over the past 3 years. "Bullying occurs everywhere, even in the highest-performing schools, and it is hurtful to everyone involved, from the targets of bullying to the witnesses--and even to bullies themselves." In this Greater Good art... posted on Nov 4, 6630 reads
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Love Letters from La Pineta![](images/quickread.gif) "Love Letters from la Pineta" by DailyGood volunteer Jane Jackson is more than a book -- it is a living gesture of love that wings its way between the visible and invisible world. A book that embodies hospitality in its deepest sense. For to truly welcome love and all its bright gifts we are required to keep our hearts open when grief's shadow descends. And that is exactly what Jane does in this b... posted on Feb 14, 4825 reads
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Learning to Move from Strength Instead of Strain![](images/quickread.gif) As a young man he trained for a decade in the classical dance form of bharatanatyam. As an adult he studied yoga, and ran a studio of his own. One day he announced he was going to observe his students in silence, and see what arose. It was a radical decision, and for Gert van Leeuwen, it led to the birth of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy - a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice that ... posted on Feb 20, 5148 reads
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The Soul of Care![](images/quickread.gif) Arthur Kleinman's wife, Joan, began to struggle with a rare form of early Alzheimer's disease at 59. Eight years after losing her, the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of psychiatry and of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School chronicles their journey in "The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor." The... posted on Feb 21, 5121 reads
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Humanity's Wake Up Call![](images/quickread.gif) "The rapid spread of novel coronavirus has prompted government, business, and civil society to take dramatic action--canceling events large and small, restricting travel, and shutting down major segments of the economy on which nearly all of us depend. It is a demonstration of our ability, when the imperative is clear, for deep and rapid global cooperation and change at a previously unimaginable s... posted on Mar 25, 8584 reads
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Caring For Self and Others in Troubled Times![](images/quickread.gif) "Warm greetings of peace, hope, and healing to you and yours. As we navigate these perilous waters of our common life -- with all the grace and gratefulness we can muster -- you might find support in exploring these thoughts on 'Caring for Self and Others in Times of Trouble: Some Spiritual Tools and Tips'. Please share these wherever you wish, taking what you need and leaving the rest."... posted on Mar 27, 13784 reads
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Even If You've Not Been Fed, Be Bread.![](images/quickread.gif) "In my role as director of the nonprofit Mercy Beyond Borders, I am frequently in South Sudan visiting our education projects for girls and our micro-enterprise projects with women and our leadership training of young women for advocacy. Keeping girls in school protects them from early marriages, allows them to develop their gifts, sets them on the path to pursue professional careers. The small lo... posted on Apr 4, 7645 reads
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Helping Parents When Parenting Gets Hard![](images/quickread.gif) "I love the act of listening to parents, one-on-one or in a group. Parents have so much love they want to give to their children and families, they work so hard at it, they summon unprecedented amounts of energy and persistence to love well. I love listening over time, and being privy to the creativity of parents, and to their successes in transforming difficult situations in their families into p... posted on Apr 30, 4663 reads
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Greg Tehven: Business, Local Community and Love![](images/quickread.gif) "I think we have to love our sense of place, and champion the heck out of it", says Greg Tehven, who is turning the world of economic development on its head, and inviting people to build the communities they want to live in. Confronted with the business failings of his beloved hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, he asked himself what the community could offer to the public that would help get it bac... posted on May 11, 3398 reads
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Health for All: The Journey of Dr. Abhay Bhang![](images/quickread.gif) In 1986, when Dr Abhay and Dr Rani Bang decided to adopt Gadchiroli, a tribal village in Maharashtra, India as their home and workplace, the district was infamous for Naxalism, abject poverty, poor infrastructure and abysmal health services. Today, nearly 30 years later the Bangs' model of home-based newborn and child care is now being practiced across India and even in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan... posted on May 14, 5679 reads
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John Welwood: On Spiritual Bypassing & Human Relationship![](images/quickread.gif) "When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and dev... posted on Jun 27, 4333 reads
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Ayni: Living Life in the Round![](images/quickread.gif) "Today For You, Tomorrow For Me." This is the meaning behind ayni, a living Andean philosophy and practice that awakens a balanced and harmonious relationship between nature and man. In Andean cosmology, this is expressed through complementary opposites such as male/female; sun/moon; gold/silver. Their interaction is a form of reciprocity called ayni. One of the guiding principles of the way of l... posted on Sep 4, 5278 reads
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Hot Gravy: A Story of Hope and Healing![](images/quickread.gif) ""Hot Gravy," is a story of hope and healing, redemption and forgiveness, captures one such moment. It is featured in the "Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) Course Book," developed by Jacques Verduin, founder of GRIP, a yearlong program that enables prisoners "to turn the stigma of being a violent offender into a badge of being a non-violent Peacemaker." We invite you to take a few minutes to meet Ja... posted on Sep 7, 5570 reads
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Thomas Merton and the Language of Life![](images/quickread.gif) "By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and speaking to us in a great variety of linguistic forms, such as an alphabet, grammar, syntax, cipher, book, and secret language. This is probably because language renders us conscious, envelops th... posted on Oct 26, 6058 reads
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Paul Farmer on 'Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds'![](images/quickread.gif) "In November 2014, Partners In Health Co-founder and Chief Strategist Dr. Paul Farmer was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, breaking bread with a group of Ebola survivors as the world's largest epidemic of the virus raged across the country. "It was the night I met Ibrahim," Farmer recalled, referring to one of the survivors. "We started talking and he told me he'd lost 23 members of his family to Ebola.... posted on Dec 16, 3756 reads
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The Land Has Memory![](images/quickread.gif) "The denial and fear of death makes possession, possessiveness, and overconsumption possible. If we would just pull back a bit, slow down, and ask the "why" of each of our actions, based on the utter assurance of death, we would all be better off environmentally." Playwright, poet, and essayist Cherrie Moraga sees the world as a place where the body knows and "the land has memory." "Her writings h... posted on Dec 20, 3343 reads
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The Clarinet in the Attic![](images/quickread.gif) "Pat and Peter went together to the doctor's appointment. In their eighties, theyd been married over sixty years. Pat was a poet; Peter, a retired minister. The specialist confirmed an earlier diagnosis: Peter was suffering from dementia, cause unknown. Some "accident in the brain" was robbing him of his short-term memory. Every ten or fifteen minutes, his mind would reboot, and he lost all recoll... posted on Dec 28, 5785 reads
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Choosing Earth: With Duane and Colleen Elgin![](images/quickread.gif) "Duane Elgin's book, Choosing Earth projects a half-century into the future to explore our world in a time of unprecedented transition. Duane offers a whole-systems view of the converging adversity trends facing humanity and three major scenarios for the future that are most likely to emerge from these powerful trends. By illuminating deep psychological, spiritual and scientific changes that are a... posted on Jan 6, 5515 reads
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The Sword & The Shield: The Struggle for Black Freedom ![](images/quickread.gif) "To most Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. King represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. In his latest book, Peniel Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century's most iconic African American leaders, and addresses ... posted on Jan 12, 2719 reads
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Fabiana Fondevila: The Many Flavors of Wonder![](images/quickread.gif) Fabiana Fondevila is an Argentinian writer, speaker, teacher, and all-around wonder activist. She began her career as a journalist and war correspondent, working for the main outlets in her native country. Returning to spiritual questions, she then spent years interviewing some of the world's top thinkers, mystics, scientists and philosophers in search of a map. And then, life transpired: her olde... posted on Apr 17, 6119 reads
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Love is the Last Word![](images/quickread.gif) "To understand anything -- another person's experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics -- is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge -- which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of... posted on May 21, 5757 reads
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Finding Time: Slowness is an Act of Resistance![](images/quickread.gif) "The four horseman of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our l... posted on May 25, 6383 reads
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Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul![](images/quickread.gif) "We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught. And some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our culture or religion or nation has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred, and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to... posted on Jul 14, 5161 reads
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Neil Douglas-Klotz on The Aramaic Jesus![](images/quickread.gif) "This is, what I would say, the beauty of the approach that I have used is common in looking at the Semitic language teachings of various prophets. It's common among the Sufis today, it's common among the Jewish mystics, that when you look at the words of a prophet or a mystic or a teacher in the Semitic languages, the language itself allows you to look at it in a number of different ways, from a ... posted on Jul 28, 7985 reads
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What Do Gardens Mean?![](images/quickread.gif) "This much is clear: people calling themselves artists and who are called artists by others -- are making gardens and calling it art, or are making art in which the making of gardens is part of what they are calling art. And for a very long time, people who may not call themselves anything, have been making gardens that other people call art. Further, it would be greatly surprising if all this we... posted on Aug 5, 2307 reads
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Singing: Most Companionable of Arts![](images/quickread.gif) "Singing is able to touch and join human beings in ways few other arts can. Alice Parker is a wise and joyful thinker and writer on this truth, and has been a hero in the universe of choral music as a composer, conductor, and teacher for most of her 90 years. She began as a young woman, studying conducting with Robert Shaw at Juilliard, and collaborated with him on arrangements of folk songs, spir... posted on Oct 24, 3622 reads
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The Seed Wheel Turns![](images/quickread.gif) "'Something will always rise up and fall again' is a collaboration between the poet Kathryn Hunt and Camille Seaman, a photographer. The photographs are part of Seaman's years-long project chasing and photographing stormsdynamic, alive, wedded to wind. "I always wanted my images to speak to the duality of all things--to speak to the essential truth that there can be beauty in something terrible an... posted on Nov 8, 2802 reads
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Listen: Four Love Songs![](images/quickread.gif) Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmentalist. Her many books and awards include Holdfast: A Home in the Natural World, and Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change, and, most recently, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. In the following essay, "she considers the looming loss of wild mus... posted on Nov 21, 3764 reads
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ThanksBeing with Rumi![](images/quickread.gif) "It's Thanksgiving time...the holiday of humility and togetherness. The holiday that asks us to look within toward that ever-present beacon of gratitude which is often obscured by the frenetic world we've created. It reminds us to give, to make amends, to repair ruptured friendships and family ties. It leans into sustenance and nourishment. The table becomes the altar. The family become precious g... posted on Nov 25, 7600 reads
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Transforming Trauma![](images/quickread.gif) "This is the timeless wisdom of the shamans, our planet's oldest indigenous healers, and also of our great religious and spiritual traditions: suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow; it is the school from which we graduate, committed to healing others' hurt. Recent scientific studies on post-traumatic growth yield similar conclusions.This is what I know after fifty years of clin... posted on Nov 30, 4839 reads
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Tracking Wonder![](images/quickread.gif) "In a world obsessed with work and productivity, many people feel broken by distraction, disengagement, and a default reactivity to life's surprises, but can rediscover their innate genius to lead a more creative life rooted in the present. In the new book 'Tracking Wonder', Jeffrey Davis an acclaimed teacher, consultant and speaker presents a science-based, soul-centered, counter-approach to hy... posted on Feb 1, 3014 reads
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Time to Shed Our Skins![](images/quickread.gif) Nils Kercher and Kira Kaipainen are life partners and unique world musicians who simultaneously draws listeners into the stark realities of our greater world, while also drawing them inward into the dazzling potentials of the human spirit. Theirs is a music that believes deeply in our fundamental interconnection, and the capacity we have to heal together. In the music they create together, the int... posted on Dec 8, 5047 reads
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Her Imagination is a Beautiful Garden![](images/quickread.gif) "My winter garden is quiet and lovely, with snow piled onto the shrubs and outlining the trees. For me, this is a time for resting and reflection, reading, drawing, and planning next year's garden. Gardening has always been a part of my life. As a child, I spent summers playing in my grandfather's stately and formal garden in Rochester, New York, where my great grandfather had managed the Ellwange... posted on Dec 9, 6597 reads
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Why Adults Lose the Beginner's Mind![](images/quickread.gif) "We spend so much time and effort trying to teach kids to think like adults. A message of Gopnik's work and one I take seriously is we need to spend more time and effort as adults trying to think more like kids." This wide-ranging conversation between Ezra Klein and psychology professor Alison Gopnik discusses how children think, the value of play and the pivotal difference between 'spotlight' con... posted on Dec 27, 5384 reads
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Writing a Better Story![](images/quickread.gif) "When I wrote the song Writing A Better Story I was in the process of doing some very deep inner work, which included stories of personal trauma but also legacy burdens that had been carried for generations and finally given to me. There are stories I carry and you carry that support us, sustain us, inspire us to be kinder better people and work for the better kinder world. There are stories we ... posted on Feb 17, 5100 reads
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On Meeting Loss, Finding Life![](images/quickread.gif) "If we are able to see that loss can teach us and fear can reveal our edges and priorities, we can begin to understand that grief is part of a natural process of transformation, and more so now, as we face radical uncertainty. We also can discover that healthy grieving can be relational, and in other societies grieving and mourning are shared experiences. So being transparent with others about our... posted on Feb 21, 11541 reads
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The Revolutionary Power of Diverse Thought![](images/quickread.gif) Elif Shafak is a Turkish author, columnist and speaker who writes stories of women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, and youth in both Turkish and English. In this Ted Talk, she exposes the unprecedented challenges facing the world today, the attraction to and fallacy of following demagogues, and how these same problems will show us the way forward: the indispensability of democracy, the need ... posted on Feb 28, 19400 reads
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When the Earth Started to Sing![](images/quickread.gif) "This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the... posted on Mar 2, 6387 reads
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Resisting Revenge to Embrace Humanity ![](images/quickread.gif) After a Palestinian sniper killed ten Israeli soldiers including her son, who was active in the peace movement, Robi Damelin's first words were: "Do not take revenge in the name of my son." Somewhere below the grief, she knew even in that moment that exacting vengeance would merely fuel the cycle of violence. In her pain, Robi couldn't bear "business as usual" and closed down her PR office. She so... posted on May 11, 2503 reads
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Let the Sun Rise![](images/quickread.gif) 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 Jun 3, 2245 reads
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Woodworker Anoo Kulkarni: Answering the Heart's Call![](images/quickread.gif) "For many years, I wondered what it really meant to 'follow one's heart'. I was very curious to know what it felt like. I was certain it would be extraordinary, with an air of mystery. Something lofty and noble, a higher purpose. It would be a dramatic turning point after which all the pieces of the puzzle would fall neatly in place. I would no longer feel torn, there would be no guilt or self-dou... posted on Jul 13, 4031 reads
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Tolu Ilesanmi: Cleaner and Life Artist![](images/quickread.gif) "Tolulope Ilesanmi was a cleaner. He left banking in Nigeria and came to Montreal, where he did his MBA and then started a company, Zenith Cleaning. Tolu considered everything about that company a mystery its people, its practices, its purpose. He said to himself, I will contemplate this thing with awe and curiosity and gratitude until it is done with me. Eventually he wrote down this sentence: C... posted on Jul 16, 1991 reads
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Jonathan Foust: Body-Centered Inquiry![](images/quickread.gif) "Jonathan Foust is a longtime teacher of yoga and meditation who has guided learners at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC for more than 20 years. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Jonathan discuss the practice of body-centered inquiry--specifically the surprising ways it can be applied to pain. Jonathan explains how ... posted on Aug 1, 4419 reads
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