The Fragrance of Prayer
"I was having some downtime in a high place. Having slowed, I could see how much a rushed life had whiplashed my body. When I'm caught in that frame of reference, everything seems whiplashed. Birds fly scattershot and even ants seem indecisive, irritable. The earth grows blurred because I grow blurred. The old rhythms, of course, persist. Things move fast, like larks or light. But none of it rushe... posted on Jul 26, 4934 reads

Connect & Find Joy While Social Distancing
"Social distancing recommendations will remain in place for months to come, and until there's a vaccine, limits on big gatherings will likely continue. For the elderly or those who live alone, the isolation can be particularly grueling. But, people are finding new ways to interact with each other, even under extraordinary circumstances." NPR offers some strategies to connect with others.... posted on Aug 11, 8847 reads

The Phone Call
In 1992 Auburn Sandstrom was 29, the mother of a three-year-old son, caught in an abusive marriage and an addict. One night she hit rock bottom. She was writhing in pain on the floor of her filthy apartment wrestling with withdrawal from a drug she had been addicted to for several years. In her hand, she gripped a ragged piece of paper with a phone number of a counselor her mother had mailed to he... posted on Aug 21, 6889 reads

Grounding Yourself on Mother Earth
"Shamans, Native Americans, and wisdom teachers all over the world see the earth as a giant, conscious, living being. They say pollution sickens her in the same way cancer spreads slowly through a human body. Debilitated though she may be, our Mother Earth still retains tremendous power to heal. When we physically ground ourselves on her surface we are gifted with her vital energies." In her new b... posted on Sep 9, 14702 reads

Of a Different Yarn
Kelly Lim, a crochet artist from Singapore, takes the traditional craft with hook and yarn to new heights. Having learned to crochet when she was seven years old, her art extends from her Creatures, a series of soft sculptures, to large scale installations which add unexpected visual impact to urban spaces. Landscapes, which she launched in 2019, explores textures from nature. A visit to Japan ins... posted on Sep 6, 2555 reads

Barbara Kingsolver on Knitting as Creation Story
"It starts with a craving to fill the long evening downslant. There will be whole wide days of watching winter drag her skirts across the mud-yard from east to west, going nowhere. You will want to nail down all these wadded handfuls of time, to stick-pin them to the blocking board, frame them on a twenty-four-stitch gauge. Ten to the inch, ten rows to the hour, straggling trellises of days held f... posted on Sep 14, 20208 reads

Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "Where Do We Go from Here?" sermon at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The country was at a crossroads. The "evil triplets" of the times, militarism, racism, and poverty called for what King called a "radical revolution of values." Will we move in the direction of chaos or community? The qu... posted on Sep 16, 3325 reads

Zen TV
""How many of you know how to watch television?" I asked my class one day. After a few bewildered and silent moments, slowly, one by one, everyone haltingly raised their hands. We soon acknowledged that we were all 'experts,' as Harold Garfinkle would say, in the practice of 'watching television.'"This short excerpt by Bernard McGrane provides a profound thought experiment that can help us "wake ... posted on Oct 4, 0 reads

Charlie Chaplin: Let Us Free The World
Some call it the greatest speech ever made. This remix puts Charlie Chaplin's climactic address from "The Great Dictator" (1940) into present-day context, showing how the spirit of liberty, brotherhood, and equality that defeated fascism seven decades ago must be urgently reclaimed.... posted on Oct 10, 3207 reads

Last Child in the Woods
"Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature." More from Richard Louv in this excerpt from his celebrated book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorde... posted on Oct 29, 3350 reads

The Conviction of Belonging: An Update
Recently DailyGood featured "I Am Everybody," an inspiring post by author Phyllis Cole-Dai, in which she shared the story of her 'signature' red coat, that over the years has been autographed by hundreds of strangers. This one-of-a-kind coat is an emblem of our profound interconnections, and Phyllis invited readers to write her if they wanted their names added to the mix. The flood of responses sh... posted on Nov 7, 5020 reads

Where Wonder Lives: Daily Practices for Cultivating the Sacred
Fabiana Fondevila is a storyteller, activist and teacher from Argentina. Her upcoming book, 'Where Wonder Lives' invites readers on a unique journey through inner landscapes, kindling fresh awareness of life's mysteries. In the following excerpt she delves into humanity's age old search for meaning through two seemingly contradictory, yet deeply complementary paths.... posted on Nov 18, 7251 reads

Prince Ea: Three Seconds
A presentation, in the inimitable style of spoken word artist Prince Ea, of where humanity stands today and how we must all work together to make it to the fourth second. This film won first prize in the short film category of the Film4Climate initiative in 2016. Can we come together to create a tidal wave of change?... posted on Nov 27, 2918 reads

William Segal: The Force of Attention
"Attention is an independent force which will not be manipulated by one's parts. Cleared of all internal noise, conscious attention is an instrument which vibrates like a crystal at its own frequency. It is free to receive the signals broadcast at each moment from a creative universe in communication with all creatures. However, the attention is not "mine." In a moment of its presence, one knows t... posted on Dec 9, 6131 reads

COVID: Etymologies of the Word that Changed the World
What is in a word? Writer Becca Rose Hall creatively explores that question using the word that indelibly entered the collective consciousness of humanity this year: COVID. Breaking the word down in different ways she searches for meaning in its roots, and uncovers different facets of a changed world. ... posted on Dec 7, 4237 reads

Wislawa Szymborska: Life-While-You-Wait
From Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Life-While-You-Wait" is "-- a bittersweet ode to life's string of unrepeatable moments, each the final point in a fractal decision tree of what-ifs that add up to our destiny, and a gentle invitation to soften the edges of the heart as we meet ourselves along the continuum of our becoming." BrainPickings offers Amanda Palmer's captivating reading... posted on Dec 15, 16763 reads

KindSpring: Top 10 Stories of 2020
"Every year KindSpring shares the top 10 most inspiring kindness stories it's featured over the year. These stories range from chance encounters of anonymous acts of kindness to deliberate, thoughtful ways that everyday people choose to make the world a better place for those around them. In an unprecedented year, when uncertainty and confusion covered a vast majority of the news headlines, we als... posted on Jan 2, 12958 reads

To Walk in Beauty Once Again
"Fragility sticks to everything alive like the quiet wetness of morning dew
in this global pandemic
as a doctor
I see this fragility
Threatening to swallow so much of what we love
like a large red blanket covering a small bed
and I can't unsee it."
So begins this powerful poem by Sriram Shamasunder, a physician whose work takes him to the front lin... posted on Jan 17, 7549 reads

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance
"As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?"... posted on Jan 19, 11176 reads

Amanda Gorman: The Miracle of Morning
Amanda Gorman has achieved many firsts, including being the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate in the United States at age 19. On January 20, 2021, the 22-year-old Gorman read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. What follows here is a video of her reciting "The Miracle of Morning," a poem written several years ago "when hurricanes, hate crimes, and deportations were some of the many ... posted on Jan 21, 8923 reads

John Lewis: Love in Action
"Here is an extraordinary conversation with the late congressman John Lewis, taped in Montgomery, Alabama, during a pilgrimage 50 years after the March on Washington. It offers a special look inside his wisdom, the civil rights leaders spiritual confrontation within themselves, and the intricate art of nonviolence as 'love in action.'" More from On Being.... posted on Feb 1, 6096 reads

Francis Weller: Initiation, Trauma and Ritual
"For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings worked through trauma communally through ritual practices. Ritual was the re-regulating practice after trauma or a death. What happens when we abandon those forms? Again, another thread of what the soul yearns for is dropped. I've spent the last 20-plus years developing ritual practices for community around grief, around gratitude, around initiatio... posted on Feb 3, 12537 reads

The Song of Grandmother Cricket
This beautiful animated short film, inspired by a myth from the Bolivian lowlands, was created by a group of Bolivian animators in collaboration with The Animation Workshop of Denmark. When Abuela Grillo (Grandmother Cricket) sings, it rains, and in a country marked by water shortages, the film is a response to the privatization of Bolivias water resources by foreign corporations. The Cochabamba w... posted on Feb 5, 2941 reads

Painting A Protest #standwithfarmers
Since September of last year, hundreds of thousands of farmers across India have been protesting against the introduction of a series of agricultural laws. "Close to where Praveen Kumar is sitting with his crutches on a scooter, a brush in one hand, talking to people around him, is a large canvas -- 18 feet in length -- on which he has painted images from the farmers' protest at Singhu. Praveen ha... posted on Feb 13, 1749 reads

A Meditation on Grief
"Grief is one of the hearts natural responses to loss. When we grieve we allow ourselves to feel the truth of our pain, the measure of betrayal or tragedy in our life. By our willingness to mourn, we slowly acknowledge, integrate, and accept the truth of our losses. Sometimes the best way to let go is to grieve." Jack Kornfield shares more here.... posted on Feb 20, 14667 reads

A Few Words on the Soul
"We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps."
In an article in the New York Times, Edward Hirsch called Wislawa Szymborska "a philosophically inflected poet who investigates large unanswerable questions with terrific delicacy. She pits her dizzying sense of the world's transient splendor against unbearable historical knowledge." Here the Polish Nobel laureate... posted on Mar 6, 7021 reads

Phone of the Wind
"'Hello. If you're out there, please listen to me.' On a hill overlooking the ocean in Otsuchi Town in northeastern Japan is a phone booth known as the 'Telephone of the Wind.' It is connected to nowhere, but people come to 'call' family members lost during the tsunami of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Many visit the phone booth including a mother and 3 children who have lost their father. ... posted on Jun 3, 3273 reads

Her Art Informed Science: Maria Sibylla Merian
"I am an insect ecologist and a field biologist; Maria Sibylla Merian's work forms the very foundations of my discipline. Yet I am ashamed to confess that until relatively recently I was unaware of the magnitude of Merian's contribution to biology. It has only been in the last few decades that recognition for her scientific contributions has had a resurgence." Learn more about this remarkable woma... posted on Jun 13, 6847 reads

Grace in Uncertainty
"Jerry Takigawa sent me a copy of a little book he designed and published: 'Grace In Uncertainty.' At the beginning, he quotes Andre Gide, "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." Then he lays out the book's structure. Part one, Premise: Recognize that consciousness is the foundation of everything. Part two, Practice: ... posted on Mar 18, 3350 reads

Once I Took a Week Long Walk in the Sahara
"Tracing an ancient route across the Sahara Desert once caravanned by pilgrims on their journey to Mecca, Anna Badkhen contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence of memory, and what remains eternal in the face of erasure."... posted on Mar 23, 3158 reads

Before You Know Kindness: A Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
"Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth." Thus begins Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Kindness, animated poignantly by Ana Perez Lopez for the On Being Project. The poem, first published in 1980 and read softly here by the poet, contrasts strikingly with the typographical approach to the animation done during the pan... posted on Apr 9, 3353 reads

On This Our World Turns
"Imagine that you are born into poverty.Imagine that, during your grade school years, a teacher recognizes your artistic talent. Imagine that the teacher enrolls you in a government-funded art class, held weekly at a local museum.
Imagine that, every Saturday, your mother puts you onto public transportation. She trusts that you'll be safely delivered to the museum, where an art instructor w... posted on Apr 18, 5540 reads

Friend of the Water
"Above a clear, rocky stream, a tiny green tree frog perches on the belly of a leaf. Turning its minute snout toward the water, the frog lets out three chirps in the dark, struggling to make itself known. The act of naming is never a discovery, but a description of what always was there, a sound connected to a thought in time. The heart within the translucent chest of the tiny frog by the stream b... posted on Apr 23, 2699 reads

An Illustrated Poster for People Who Love Their Work
'Arbejdsglaede' is a wonderful Scandinavian word that literally means 'work-love' or 'work-glad'. There is no direct translation for this word in the English language, so Maptia decided to use crowdsourcing to explore its meaning. More than 200 people who love their jobs shared three words that described how they felt on a Monday morning. A beautiful poster summarizes the results, with the size of... posted on Apr 28, 40803 reads

The Shambhala Warrior's Weapon
"There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen.
Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste our world. In this era, when the future of sentient life hangs by the frailest of threads, the Shambhala warriors a... posted on May 8, 3129 reads

Probable Impossibilities
"In Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings, the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sieves four centuries of scientific breakthroughs, from Kepler's revolutionary laws of planetary motion to the thousands of habitable exoplanets discovered by NASAs Kepler mission, to estimate that even with habitable planets orbiting one tenth of all stars, the faction of living matter in the unive... posted on Jun 14, 4786 reads

The Third Harmony
In this short film made by the Metta Center for Nonviolence, veteran activists make clear the need for nonviolence on a worldwide scale at this critical stage in human evolution--not just to solve problems in an isolated crisis but as a way of life that can change the world for all of us. According to Dr. Bernard LaFayette, founder of the Center for Nonviolence & Peace studies, the challenge for e... posted on Jun 17, 2216 reads

The Biology of Wonder: Finding the Human in Nature
"In this book, I describe a biology of the feeling self--a biology that has discovered subjective feeling as the fundamental moving force in all life, from the cellular level up to the complexity of the human organism. I also describe how this discovery turns our image of ourselves upside down. We have also understood human beings as biological machines that somehow and rather inexplicably entail ... posted on Jun 29, 3936 reads

A Story Waiting to Pierce You
"A true encanto, an incantation, this book is pure music. It sings to the reader. This is the real thing. In each paragraph of the book, the Spirit is there. This is what the native people of the Americas have been trying to say, but were never permitted to. This song is the song of wisdom that we native people have not been allowed to sing." These words by Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) a... posted on Jul 6, 2495 reads

The Book of Delights: Ross Gay's Year of Willful Gladness
"On the day he turned 42, the writer Ross Gay set himself a challenge. Every day for a year, he would write an essay about something delightful. He wrote about nicknames, fireflies, reckless air quotes. And about a hundred of those essays are now collected in his new book appropriately enough titled "The Book Of Delights." When he came into our studios, Ross Gay told me that finding those delights... posted on Jul 17, 3846 reads

A Counterculture of Commitment
"I have come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of our generation: Keeping our options open. There's this philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman -- he called it "liquid modernity" -- we never want to commit to any one identity or place or community... so we remain, like liquid, in a state that can adapt to fit any future shape. Liquid modernity is Infinite Browsing Mode...but for everything ... posted on Jul 20, 4646 reads

Rise Up Again
As we all know but often hesitate to share with others, life can be hard at times. Without community and support, it is even harder. This film highlights the lessons of living with resilience by relying on inner strength held up by the support of community. Mpumelelo Ncwadi from South Africa lives from this wisdom which was passed on by his father who taught him that "You should never live your in... posted on Jul 23, 1837 reads

The Quest to Understand Consciousness
"Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness -- that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self."... posted on Aug 15, 8389 reads

Finding the Mother Tree
"In this in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard--the renowned scientist who discovered the "wood-wide web"-- speaks about mother trees, kin recognition, and how to heal our separation from the living world."... posted on Aug 16, 7323 reads

In the Ground of Our Unknowing
While facing the paradoxes and ambiguities of the pandemic, writer David Abram stumbled upon "beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we're isolated in this uncertain time," he writes, "we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other."... posted on Sep 5, 1603 reads

Response is Different From an Answer
"The current moment calls for moral ferocity. We should not sleep well at night when we know others are suffering. Ferocity itself, though, holds danger. Lets not forget that some of the worst perpetrators of evil have often claimed to act in the name of the good, or God, or the national interest, or a future utopia. By claiming the moral high ground, and labeling our opponents misguided, we run t... posted on Aug 30, 2068 reads

Prayer for Atheists
"Legend has it that the physicist Niels Bohr had a horseshoe hanging above his door. A colleague asked him why, to which he responded, "It's for luck." The colleague then asked him if he believed in luck. Bohr reassured him that as a scientist he did not believe in luck. Puzzled, the colleague asked again why Bohr had the horseshoe hanging above his door. Bohr responded, "I'm told that you don't h... posted on Sep 21, 6829 reads

The Muse Who Made Storefronts Bloom
"Joan Vorderbruggen's job title is cultural district artist coordinator, but she really is Joan the connector, Joan the problem-solver, Joan the nurturer, Joan the perfect balance of right-brain nonlinear creativity and left-brain organizational prowess. Most people with her nonstop manic energy would get annoying in a hurry, but her authenticity charms, whether she's trying to pitch corporate spo... posted on Sep 7, 2438 reads

The Wisdom of Salmon
What can salmon teach us about sustainability in a complex environment? Marine biologist Alexandra Morton shares startling new research that lets us decode the information stored in a salmon's immune system. The data reveals where we're harming the fish, the ocean, and ourselves -- ultimately revealing lessons for how humans can thrive on this planet without destroying it.... posted on Sep 30, 2090 reads

The Man in the Red Bandana
"On Sept. 11, 2001, one young man led several people down the stairs to safety after a plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. The people he helped only knew him as "the man in the red bandana." They now know his name was Welles Crowther. He died when the tower collapsed." More about his powerful story and legacy here.... posted on Sep 11, 5348 reads