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, 40802 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, 3935 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, 8384 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, 6828 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

What You Get Into Will Change You
"Sometimes in life you just dont know what youre getting into. Youre reminded of this, the day you kayak through an otherworldly stretch of sea caves in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The Lakeshore is a preserve of almost 70,000 acres at the northernmost tip of Wisconsin. It includes a 12-mile ribbon of cave-studded shoreline along Lake Superior, or Gichigami, "the great sea," as the Ojib... posted on Sep 13, 4374 reads

Wholeness, Timelessness & Unfolding Meaning
In this interview, conducted two years before his passing, influential physicist-philosopher David Bohm discusses his insight into "the essential unbroken wholeness of the universe: the timeless order which lies behind physical phenomena, and the importance of the imagination for giving a meaningful understanding of reality."... posted on Sep 20, 4172 reads

Change Happens at the Edge of Our Comfort Zone
"When we isolate our tension and explore the feeling of space, or energy, then at some point, we reach the edge of our comfort zone. At the edge of our comfort zone, we have the possibility to change... In the process of change, the whole body starts to open up -- it starts to express itself as a whole. When we make a decision to step into the wholeness of the body, then conflict will dissolve in ... posted on Oct 12, 3234 reads

I Want to Play
"I work hard. Sometimes too hard. I even work hard at play. Perhaps you suffer the same affliction. Call it 'passion' or 'devotion' or 'loving what you do,' but it is possible to have too much of a good thing." Writer Phyllis Cole-Dai describes a writing workshop that she gave to herself as a gift. It resulted in a lovely poem, beginning with this delightful assertion: "I want to play..." Read mor... posted on Nov 3, 4371 reads

A River Reawakened
"In September 2011, I stood on a river overlook with children from my daughters elementary school, all of us transfixed by a giant jackhammer pounding cement to rubble. Below us, a waterfall raged through the first notch carved in the Lower Elwha Dam, as dust rose in the September sunshine, drifting over Douglas fir and cedar crowns. Trees were the only spectators old enough to remember when the E... posted on Oct 18, 3578 reads

How Nature Helps Us Heal
"One morning last spring, I was reflecting on how good the ride outside made me feel when I walked in to see a 68-year-old patient with several significant behavioral and medical problems. Before I could say a thing, he jumped in as if in mid-conversation. "Dr. Hass, I can't thank you enough. I swear that prescription you gave me mid-COVID lockdown saved my life!"" A doctor shares more about why ... posted on Oct 25, 6773 reads

A Little More Than Kin
Richard Powers reaches beyond the cold calculus of kin selection to look at how human beings find kinship with nonhuman relatives and how stories can reveal our shared fate.... posted on Feb 25, 1919 reads

The Dying Sea: A Conversation with Radek Skrivanek
The Aral Sea was once the world's 4th largest inland body of water. The story of its loss, one of our greatest environmental disasters, remains unknown to many people even today. In this interview, Radek Skrivanek talks about his many journeys to document the demise of that great freshwater lake and the life it supported. It's a painful read, knowing the picture he paints is not fiction. ... posted on Dec 15, 1639 reads

Love Letters to Presence: Three Poems
"My name is Micheal 'Moley' O Suilleabhain. I am a poet from Ireland. These three poems are love letters to presence. That presence we feel when we are close to the source of this life. Gratitude, Wisdom, Determination, and Belief. The first poem, Turas d'Anam, means 'journey of your soul'..."... posted on Dec 16, 7335 reads

The Wide-Angle Legacy & Vision of bell hooks
"The news that bell hooks had died at 69 spread quickly across social media on Wednesday, prompting a flood of posts featuring favorite quotes about love, justice, men, women, community and healing, as well as testimonials about how this pioneering Black feminist writer had changed, or saved, lives. If the outpouring felt more intense than the usual tributes to departed scholars, admirers say that... posted on Dec 17, 3562 reads

14 Fabulous & Contemporary Women Nature Writers
"Each of these women's words can make us reconsider or better appreciate our relationship to the natural world. So, go find an alfresco reading spot (or at least a place with a view of the great outdoors), and dig into literary fare from the following ladies." The following piece highlights the work of 14 wonderfully diverse women who are outstanding contemporary nature writers.... posted on Dec 23, 4089 reads

'New Day's Lyric': Amanda Gorman
As 2021 draws to a close, poet Amanda Gorman has released a new poem. In her words, this poem was created to, "celebrate the new year and honor the hurt & the humanity of the last one." The poem begins with these words: "This hope is our door, our portal..." You can read the whole poem here.... posted on Dec 31, 50079 reads

10 Insights from 2021 That Give Us Hope
As 2022 sets sail, the editors of the inspiring news portal KarunaVirus, share ten insights gleaned over the past year, as they witnessed everyday people all over the world choosing love over fear in a multitude of different ways. Read on for a dazzling constellation of stories of compassion, resilience, ingenuity, sportsmanship and more!... posted on Jan 4, 14947 reads

An Early Morning Revelation: Chuck St. John
At seventy years old, St. John recounts a remarkable experience that happened in the most ordinary of circumstances when he was 28 years old. "There was this taste of knowing [my family] like characters in some story I'd read about recently, or from a movie watched last night, as if I myself had not lived the story. It had all just happened to me as if I had been in a long dream. How did I get her... posted on Jan 9, 2677 reads

The Gentle Road Home
"Back before Christmas, I led a weekend retreat in California. At its close, one of the retreatants presented me with The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. I happen to be an admirer of the book's author, Gregory Boyle. Hes the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, "the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world." Extravagant. Tenderness. ... posted on Jan 15, 7906 reads

You Are the Kind of (S)hero We Need
This inspirational video of the song "Hero" by the Makepeace Brothers shines a light on the qualities of (s)heroes, both those who are famous and those lesser known, who live their lives inspiring those around them. The affirming anthem gives us hope that we can each be that kind of (s)hero: "You are the noble, you are the wise, you are the human, you are the kind of hero we need."... posted on Feb 4, 2285 reads

The Really Terrible Orchestra
"Some years ago, a group of frustrated people in Scotland decided that the pleasure of playing in an orchestra should not be limited to those who are good enough to do so, but should be available to the rankest of amateurs. So we founded the Really Terrible Orchestra, an inclusive orchestra for those who really want to play, but who cannot do so very well. Or cannot do so at all, in some cases. My... posted on Feb 13, 7968 reads

An Abolitionist's Handbook
"In her new book, An Abolitionist's Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World, Patrisse Cullors starts with courageous conversations. She says, "We have courageous conversations because our goal is to live inside of a healthy community that values the dignity of every single human being." These conversations typically arise out of our lived experiences. They are conversations we have b... posted on Mar 6, 2381 reads

The Island of Missing Trees
"Author Elif Shafak struggled at first with how to write her new book, The Island of Missing Trees. The story she wanted to tell is about a family from Cyprus, a Mediterranean island that was the center of a conflict in the 1970s, but she didn't want the story to be about tribalism or nationalism. Which is why, Shafak told NPR's Steve Inskeep, much of the story is told from the perspective of a fi... posted on Mar 10, 2428 reads

17 Things I Would Do Differently
On the fifth anniversary of his father's passing, Eric Jones found himself penning a series of reflections in his journal that would eventually turn into a post titled,"17 Things I would do differently if I were fully convinced I'm going to die." Brimming with honesty, eloquence, insight and humanness, Eric's words are an ode to life, inspired by the presence of death. ... posted on Mar 21, 20776 reads

Shop Class As Soul Craft
"Matthew Crawford was on what most people would think was the "right track." Then he left his job as executive director at a think tank in Washington to open a motorcycle repair shop. In his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he makes the case that our society has placed too great a value on white-collar work and not enough value on the trades. Crawford tells host Guy Raz that the mechanical arts have... posted on Mar 28, 3062 reads

Fighting Fire with Fire
"Victor Steffensen talks to Rosemary Rule about his pioneering work reintroducing indigenous cultural burning practices in Australia. 'Climate change means the land is telling us something. It is not all doom and gloom. If we look at it the right way, it is an opportunity for change.'"... posted on Apr 2, 2795 reads

The Missing Piece
"Unlike most beginning meditation practices, which provide a simple object of focus for the attention (like following the breath or reciting a mantra), Centering Prayer provides no such focal point; it merely teaches the practitioner how to release the attention promptly when it gets tangled up in a thought. Echoing the teaching of The Cloud of Unknowing (which turned out to be Centering Prayer's ... posted on Apr 3, 3471 reads

What Can We Do When a Loved One is Suffering?
"What can we do when a loved one is suffering? This question has come up a lot so I wanted to share some thoughts in case it may be helpful to you or a loved one. First, I acknowledge how challenging it is to witness any kind of suffering, whether it is physical, emotional or existential pain. But let me throw in a specific curveball...What if they are suffering yet there is not much that you can ... posted on Apr 15, 11659 reads

Ancient Green: Moss, Climate and Deep Time
"Taking a long view of life on Earth, Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of 'Braiding Sweetgrass,')explores how mosses--ancient beings who transformed the world--teach us strategies for persisting amid a changing climate.


... posted on May 5, 2228 reads

Iyore (I Return)
"My name is Imuetinyan Ugiagbe and I am a visual storyteller who happens to be visually impaired. The title of the piece I am sharing with you is Iyore (pronounced E YO RAY), which means I return in the Edo language. When I take a trip, I rarely think of whether I would make it home safely. But, all of that changed on the 13th of June, 2020." Imuetinyan Ugiagbe shares more in this moving piece.... posted on May 12, 3499 reads

The Age of Invisible Stones
"We were old. We were weathered. We lost our youthful looks. We dotted Japans coastline. We stood at human height, sometimes taller. They called us tsunami stones. Our faces were carved with messages: build on higher ground. remember the last calamity. A few of us, near Kesennuma, had been around for six hundred years and our faces said: CHOOSE LIFE OVER YOUR POSSESSIONS." When did the Anthropocen... posted on May 14, 1916 reads

Talking with Kids About What's Going On in the World
""Mom, I'm feeling nervous, my 12-year-old daughter shared one night as I tucked her into bed. "Are you just having nervous feelings or are you thinking about something?" I asked. "Ukraine," she replied. I asked if she wanted to talk about it. She didn't."I just want you to tell me a story--a happy story--to help me fall asleep." In that moment, I found myself going through the eternal parenting s... posted on May 25, 4371 reads

Spoken Without Words: ASL Poetry Slam
"It's spoken word without spoken words. ASL SLAM is an open space for poets to perform their work in American Sign Language (ASL). As ASL SLAM's executive director Douglas Ridloff explains, ASL poetry doesn't rely on rhyming patterns or meter within auditory or written wordplay; rather, the art is "more about the movement, a visual rhyme versus an audio rhyme." Its performance is a stunning and em... posted on Jun 9, 2653 reads

The Age of Stolen Salt
Salt is an ancestor. Older than ocean, old as stars. Salt flows through your saltwater body even now like blood, as blood. Salt is nonnegotiable, necessary for the working of every single cell.
Salt is time. Evidence of how long since evaporation. Resident time of water in basins. Measured future for the preserved dead. Salt is first and lasting." More in this beautiful piece from Orion. posted on Jun 15, 2087 reads