The Way Knows the Way
"When I was growing up, my mama made up songs for everything. Potty training? Sing about it. Your hearts deepest longing? In song. I learned: like birds, we sing. Simple plain, because were alive. For me Song is a protection mantle, a wise friend, a presence meditation, a comic relief. Song anchors us in our breathing bodies, resonant chambers. Song lives in the crosshairs of Right Here + ... posted on Sep 28, 5832 reads

My Wild-Like Refuge
"My current refuge isn't designated as wilderness or wild or special by anyone but me. It is not tucked away in some far-flung corner of the world where access is granted only to those wearing high-end technical gear or with enough disposable time to wander without any cause other than "wanting to." No, it is a journey of steps measured in feet and minutes, determined by the willingness of the loc... posted on Oct 26, 1828 reads

Dancing in A-Yard
DANCING IN A-YARD is a documentary that takes viewers into California State Prison where maximum-security inmates serve life sentences. The film follows the story of four men who were convicted as teenagers and sentenced as adults.
All four sign up for a powerfully transformational dance class in prison with French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas. You can watch the trailer of the film here.... posted on Nov 11, 2124 reads

The Inward Migration
"As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story. From here, she considers how her ancient culture has responded to ongoing destructionand how to bear witness to the creation of a post-apocalyptic world."... posted on Nov 14, 1787 reads

Just Be Nice
In this brief and moving glimpse into his life, Morne Pretorius shares how the experience of a car accident ten years ago which left him in a coma for a month, has impacted his perspective on life, leading him to living gratefully every day. He reminds us to make peace with what happens in our lives, realizing that our experiences do not define our future. Speaking from the knowledge gained from h... posted on Nov 18, 2279 reads

The Man Who Planted Trees
"Who says a single person can't make a difference? This Academy Award-winning short film, based on a story by Jean Giono, was created in 1987 by renowned animator Frederick Back. It beautifully showcases one shepherd's long and successful effort to re-forest a desolate valley in the foothills of the Alps near Provence in the first half of the 20th century."... posted on Nov 21, 2431 reads

I Practice Philosophy as Art
"If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence its impossible to linger on information. That's how it differs from... posted on Dec 6, 2172 reads

Carl Safina: Mother Culture
"Only humans inhabit a wider swath of Earth than sperm whales, but humans seldom glimpse them. The whales range from 60 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude, usually in waters whose depth exceeds 3,000 feet, far from most coasts. Not only that, they can move 40-plus miles a day, around 15,000 miles annually. This makes studying their wandering lives almost impossible. Here though, water of p... posted on Dec 12, 1392 reads

The Most Beautiful Science of the Year
"When we look back at the stories we've told this year, we're thrilled at the range of their insights. The stories venture from the bottom of the sea to as far as a telescope can see, shifting perspectives on the mundane and magnificent. Below is the Nautilus journey of 2022, told through some of our favorite passages." Travel the byways of scientific stories through this exciting compilation of l... posted on Jan 4, 2110 reads

Katy Milkman: How to Change
"In her new book, How to Change, Katy Milkman offers simple yet profound insights about why better understanding our own internal obstacles--such as laziness, procrastination, forgetfulness, or our tendency to favor instant gratification over long-term rewards--is key to changing ourselves for good. Too often, books deliver one-size-fits-all approaches to common goals, like getting in shape or eat... posted on Jan 19, 2167 reads

The Unchosen One
Devon Michael was a child actor living in poverty when he auditioned for the part of Anakin Skywalker for the a Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace. He saw this opportunity as his way out of poverty and he felt this might well be the most important thing he would ever do. In the aftermath he learned that he can tell his own story, as he does so rivetingly in this film. "It depends on how you tell ... posted on Jan 27, 2160 reads

#heartivism: Gently Shaking the World
Today's activism is often built around an either-or logic -- my way or your way, where one way necessarily loses; in our attempts to build a bridge here, we often burn a bridge elsewhere. Heartivism, however, invites us to act from that deeper channel within us, where we are first united by our universality before we are differentiated by our particularities. A heartivist is someone who responds t... posted on Feb 2, 9341 reads

What I Regret Most Are Failures of Kindness
For many people, the things we regret in life might be the big ones: either moral failings, career opportunities missed on the way to success, or all those things that fall into the category of "adventures we should have taken." For American writer George Saunders, his list of regrets is quite simple: failures of kindness. What grabs at his heart the most is missing those seemingly insignificant c... posted on Feb 11, 50857 reads

Why Beauty Matters
"The content of these writings flow from a paradigm shift in the cosmology of our culture that is happening at this time. The timeless recognition of Consciousness and its productions (the apparent world around us) is also experienced as Beauty. The old "materialist" culture is giving way to a deeper Truth; the unity of everything. Beauty is one way into this new understanding." Scott Guyon shares... posted on Feb 23, 2206 reads

Translation Lessons from Superlichen
"Until the late nineteenth century, lichens were understood as individual organisms. It was then suggested, controversially, that a lichen was, in fact, a partnership. The division between the partners might have been invisible at first, but underneath a microscope, it was plain as day: a lichen was a pact between a fungus and an alga. Scientists began to speak of symbiosis: not survival of the fi... posted on Mar 8, 1537 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 up... posted on Mar 12, 24297 reads

Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene
"Is it naive to say that the world as we know it wont end if we keep telling stories? Maybe not, if we reconsider the kinds of stories we tell. Ancient stories, myths, old talesthese kinds of stories hold something powerful. Call it bone memory, call it the deep, primordial part of ourselves, call it the voice that gossips with the wild, across species and across time. If we listen, we hear it cal... posted on Mar 20, 1980 reads

How Much Silence is Too Much?
"As much as anyone else, I fantasize about checking out. I would love to remove the pinging notifications from my days, for my mind to wander without being thrown askew by each incoming tweet. But visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque. Even if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment? How much... posted on Mar 29, 1765 reads

How Long Has It Been Since You Smelled a Flower?
"For forty years I have worked at the nexus where language intersects with the lives of prison inmates, and it has proven to be one of the most exciting intersections imaginable...Since 1974 I have directed a number of prison writing workshops, all for male prisoners, in the Arizona State Prison. The writing that is collected in this issue of Orion was selected from that of the hundreds of writers... posted on Apr 16, 1404 reads

The Skills Necessary to Deal with Anguish
I think many of us have a skewed idea of what "accepting" a catastrophic situation actually is. If you have the idea that coping well should look something like the proverbial "grace under fire," then you think you should summon the sheer grit to plaster a big cosmic grin on your face, no matter what horrors are being visited upon you. I don't think this is helpful. Actually, just the notion of "a... posted on Apr 26, 3367 reads

Son of a Sweeper
In India where caste discrimination is still rampant in many parts of the country, Vimal Kumar, the self-described "son of a sweeper," and member of the Dalit community, is committed to creating new futures for those from backgrounds like his, who are often seen as invisible or less than. A documentary profiling his life's work, tells the inspiring story of how Kumar formed the Movement for Scaven... posted on May 5, 1294 reads

Mother
"One day her teacher lost her voice and asked mother to help teach the class. Standing in front of the class, she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up to be a teacher. Later when her father asked her, his eldest daughter, to quit school to carry some family responsibilities at age 11, she begged, but he wouldn't change his mind. Her pillow was wet with her tears. She never returned to schoo... posted on May 14, 2162 reads

The Secret of Blooming
"The sun's setting fast. You hurry, wanting to get home before dark. But as you stroll past a humble house fringed by lush flowerbeds, you glimpse a line of people in the backyard, facing a privacy fence. With their backs to you, they're ranked like a row of tin soldiers, socially distanced; seven or eight of them, standing at attention. What are they up to? you wonder, slowing your steps. A maske... posted on May 20, 4513 reads

Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
"Conjuring the movements of migrating salmon, cranes, and butterflies, cultural ecologist David Abram intuits the sensory exchange that guides them across the wider body of the Earth. In a series of drawings woven throughout the story, artist Katie Holten illuminates the deep intelligence that enables collective movement at all scales of life, even in the microscopic cells of our bodies."... posted on Jun 25, 1538 reads

A Prickly Pear History Lesson
"Summer monsoons in the Southwestern Sonoran Desert produce a wild bounty of crimson fruit. Rising from Engelmann's prickly pear cacti (Opuntia engelmannii), these fruits, or tuna in Spanish, perch atop Mickey Mouse-shaped pads like ruby crowns. Against muted browns and greens of the desert, the tuna are eye-popping. When I landed in Tucson for graduate school more than thirty years ago, I was ama... posted on Jul 11, 1678 reads

The River of Silence
"Death, whether our own or others, can be a powerful gateway to complete tenderness. The confrontation with the impermanence of all things is perhaps the widest gate to liberation from suffering. Facing death or dealing with death, our sight becomes clear. "Priorities and omissions are etched in a merciless light," as Audre Lorde wrote. Given the sheer quantity of death around us, why not use this... posted on Sep 3, 2167 reads

Your Gift to Nature
"Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists." Eckhart Tolle shares more in this brief passage.... posted on Aug 24, 1812 reads

The Magic of Chess
Why play chess? There are as many reason as there are players. Listen to these young people from the 2019 Elementary Chess Championships in the United States and see the magic come alive.
... posted on Aug 25, 1238 reads

Albert Camus on Writing, Creativity and Stubborness
"Three years after he became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that "with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience," Albert Camus (November 7, 1913January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. The writings he left behind -- about the key to strength of character, ab... posted on Sep 1, 3438 reads

Zen & the Art of Poetry
"It's my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this. Great literature does not take sides with the small-minded. It's not partisan or narrow. It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow. A uni-dimensional poem would be boring. Sometimes the other side is so deeply buried, you really have t... posted on Sep 9, 1663 reads

Why We Can & Should Listen to Other Species
Listening closely for what her nonhuman neighbors are communicating, Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them.... posted on Sep 11, 1876 reads

Life After Death
Laura Crafton Gilpin was a nurse, poet, and advocate for hospital reform. In 1976, she was given the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for her poetry book, "The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe." She was a founding member of Planetree, an organization dedicated to advancing patient-centered care. What follows is an excerpt from her powerful poem, "Life After Death." ... posted on Sep 30, 9443 reads

I Want to Be Unproductive & Other Poems
Danielle, Coffyn's poem titled, "I Want to Be Unproductive," opens with these evocative lines:
"to ponder the meaning of yellow. to listen as summer cicadas sing their final symphony of the season. to dine with friends. to savor course after course. to inhale the scent of San Marzano tomatoes bathed in balsamic brine. to taste vanilla bean gelato and espresso marry on my tongue. to study th... posted on Oct 2, 5536 reads

The Art of Conducting
"The mantra of my old teacher Jorma Panula the great Finnish conductor was always: help, but dont get in the way. I think a really good conductor works on a level that the musicians are not even consciously aware of. Its the Taoist principle of leading without leaving a trace. Under great conductors, the musicians will feel totally free." British conductor James Lowe talks about the nature of mu... posted on Oct 18, 1362 reads

Look Closely or You'll Miss It
"With the help of a historian, ornithologist, and birds themselves, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to embody a new quality of attention. Traveling from Chicago to South Carolina, she follows a migration path that brings birdwatching together with her own layered history."... posted on Oct 19, 1488 reads

3 Reasons Why You Need Anger
Feeling hot under the collar? This fresh take might cool you down: It turns out anger, often written off as a destructive emotion, could be an unlikely source of motivation. "Anger leads you towards responses that help you overcome obstacles," points out Heather Lench of Texas A&M University. Three surprising ways anger can actually be beneficial: it can help us reach challenging goals, may boost ... posted on Feb 12, 2364 reads

Strangers 'Scarf-Bomb' City to Give Warmth in Winter
Scarf-bombing (verb) -- the act of bombarding a public space with scarves for those in need during the cold winter months. Suzanne Volpe, a crochet enthusiast who is warming up her city of Pittsburgh, Penn., U.S., one scarf at a time. Since first learning about this trend in 2014, Volpe is using her passion for crocheting to create scarves for those in need in the winter. Along with a team of volu... posted on Feb 9, 1282 reads

Zero Problem Philanthropy
Christian Seelos reframes our concept of philanthropy with the idea of Zero-Problem Philanthropy, a shift from focusing on finding solutions for problems to creating healthy social contexts that inherently reduce the creation of problems to begin with. Our current "solution-focused" philanthropic methods often result in a never-ending cycle of problems and solutions. "What would it take to shift f... posted on Feb 18, 1453 reads

Why this Retired Professor Gives Driving Lessons for Free
Retired professor Gil Howard, 82, stumbled into a second career as a driving instructor. But he's no ordinary instructor. "He is the go-to teacher for women from Afghanistan, where driving is off limits for virtually all of them. In recent years, Mr. Howard has taught some 400 women in the 5,000-strong Afghan community based in Modesto, Calif., part of the Central Valley. ... For many Americans, l... posted on Mar 18, 1328 reads

Author Drops Everything To Visit Bronx Students
Tommy Orange, author of There There, dropped everything amidst an active book tour to visit a Bronx high school class. Their teacher, Rick Ouimet, had written an impassioned email invitation, sharing how deeply transformative the book had been for his students. "It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, who talk about characters born in hi... posted on Mar 27, 1930 reads

Rethinking Identity, Embracing Destiny
Have you ever felt exhausted by your own identity? Is it even necessary? In a compelling dialogue with Zhenevere Sophia Dao, Alnoor Ladha from Culture Hack Labs discusses how identity can be overrated, and often distracts from truly belonging to life. According to Dao, identity can even be a replacement for genuine belonging. She offers a compelling argument against giving too much power to identi... posted on Apr 14, 1572 reads

Mountain Vapors
While hiking among the seemingly solid majestic peaks of the Canadian Rockies, photo essayist Keith Kozloff found himself more attracted to clouds than the steep, uphill trails of the landscape. Upon returning home, his images inspired him to reflect on impermanence and interdependence – the “cloudiness of everything.” He wondered if he could “perhaps treat challenges more ... posted on May 9, 413 reads

When the Lights Went Out
Never underestimate the power of caring, creativity and collaboration. During a presentation in India, one woman finds herself in total power shutdown. Complete darkness! But then, a spark of light from an audience member's phone glimmers. That spark ignited a chain reaction of lights from the crowd, illuminating the whole venue -- a reminder that even in the darkest moment, we're not alone.... posted on May 14, 1779 reads

What If Money Expired?
We are surrounded by useful myths: money is one of them. Yet many times, the myths we interact with on a daily basis go unchallenged: we experience the impact of the collective shared belief in the myth – the benefits and the costs – yet take it for granted that we can question whether the myth is serving its intended purpose, or has been hijacked.  Silvio Gesell questioned the my... posted on May 17, 1174 reads