mind being woken up, your conventions jostled, and your ribs being tickled multiple times along the way. Arguably no other writer in the world waltzes so delightfully between scientific fact, poetic digression, philosophical conjecture, and a flair for the comedic. Her debut essay collection, Things That Are, shines a spotlight on everything from the passionate yearning of pea tendrils, and the particularity of panda bear palates, to the perturbability of caterpillars, the oracular nature of mushrooms, and the dynamic between planets and their moons. Described as "a descendent of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson," Amy defines her genre simply: Words. And what she conj... posted on Jun 21 2023 (2,091 reads)

a narrative for people who want to judge but not be judged, who want peace without the rigor of practice, who want heaven without having to change how they live in any significant way. That feels like the opposite of accountability, to me. I know a lot of people for whom this, or some other story of God, or gods and goddesses, makes sense and provides meaning. I feel the holiness in these people, in their rituals and practices. Many of the rituals—lighting candles, letting aspects of nature represent divine material, asking for divine support and shaping of our lives—align with my own witchy practices of the present. But I always notice the contradictions between what peo... posted on Jul 12 2023 (5,379 reads)

me the same sense of grace and the presence of God. My case is no exception. Many who meet Father Ed experience this touch of the eternal. When Bill described the evening in the recording he made for Thomsen, he said that at the end of his and Dowling’s conversation, which went on long into the night, he “felt for the first time completely cleansed and freed.” As the author of the Fifth Step—“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”—Bill recognized this as a Fifth Step experience. Although Bill had composed the Twelve Steps, he himself had not made all of them; they were an adaptation and expansi... posted on Aug 2 2023 (6,927 reads)

you ever asked yourself “How did I end up here?” Wondered why you achieved some level of success while others you know have not? Or, conversely, struggled to understand why something bad happened to you, like losing your job or not getting the one you wanted, while your friends’ careers continued to flourish? Perhaps you have walked by a person experiencing homelessness and unconsciously judged them for their current plight. Or questioned the reasons that led to another person’s success or failure? How we explain what happens to people in life impacts our motivation, behavior, and attitudes toward others—and ourselves. It may also be at the root of ma... posted on Aug 5 2023 (2,918 reads)

29, 2013 Today is my father's birthday. If  he were living today, he'd be 102. I cannot even imagine that. He was 67 when he died, and that's too young, but lately, as I stare at some hard realities of aging and mortality, I begin to appreciate the fact that  he didn't have to endure a long period of frailty, pain, and dependence. My father was himself to very the end, brilliant and good and a force of nature, the most important person in my world, and I miss him terribly even now.  Maybe especially now. I find solace in these words from a poem my friend Naomi Shihab Nye wrote after the death of her own beloved father:  There's a wa... posted on Aug 6 2023 (3,959 reads)

in this house, but it means I have clearer expectations and therefore no resentment about what my work looks like. If I were to live in a house with another human being again, another adult, it would have to look really different from what I did before and in some ways, I think the idea of negotiating that– it’s not a place where I am right now. It’s not a place that I’m really ready to figure out how to negotiate that. Because I know I’m a caregiver by nature and so part of listening to myself– and this is one of the uncomfortable truths– is if I had another partner living in my house now, I think it would be really hard for me not to re... posted on Aug 10 2023 (3,361 reads)

security and certainty for the future — and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our present experience — something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes: There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secu... posted on Sep 19 2023 (4,308 reads)

how the dead go on living with them So that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk falls to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside and have their young and their young will live safely inside the dead tree So that nothing is wasted in nature or in love. ... posted on Sep 30 2023 (10,362 reads)

become part of the action. […] When you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you’re talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community. Illustration from ‘Donald and the…’ by Edward Gorey. Click image for more. In a complement to Susan Sontag’s terrific treatise on the the aesthetics of silence, Le Guin considers the singular nature of sound: Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let’s say there’s a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in wi... posted on Nov 13 2023 (3,396 reads)

this deeply moving episode, Fill to Capacity podcast host Pat Benincasa speaks with writer and life coach Jennifer Bichanich. Jennifer opens a window on her experiences with profound loss, including losing her beloved husband when the church they were remodeling went up in flames. Despite immense grief and despair, Jennifer found ways to rebuild her life and discover her own creative resilience. Working with a shamanic energy healer, delving into art therapy, and joining the Modern Widows Club, she found community, healing and the possibility of creating something beautiful from the ashes of her life. This podcast explores themes of grief, healing, and the power of creativity in navigatin... posted on Nov 20 2023 (3,028 reads)

people, bikes, cars, and trucks. "It's just one little part of the world but things take place there too just like everywhere else," Auggie explains. And sure enough, when Paul looks carefully at the by now remarkably unique photographs, he notices a detail in one of them that makes all the difference in the world to him. We see Auggie as a model of a spiritually literate person. He reads the world – in his case, one corner of Brooklyn – for meaning. By its very nature, his project is rooted in the everyday. He knows how closely we may need to see the significance of seemingly ordinary and insignificant events. He understands that some of the most rewarding s... posted on Mar 12 2024 (3,570 reads)

O’Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, spoke these words to me last year, during an interview for The reMAKERs podcast about climate change and what gives her hope. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued their latest report, a Code Red for Humanity warning on the nature of things to come. I asked her how she’s able to get up and do this work every day, during a pandemic, knowing that the future for life on Earth is looking so grim.“The future is not a linear extension of the past,” she replied. I felt myself exhale.So who shapes the future?I’ve spent the better part of two decades working in activism an... posted on Apr 10 2024 (2,137 reads)

go backwards and tell everybody your story. But maybe this is a good moment to just talk about the arc of your life and why these questions are being asked of you. Well it’s been now 40 years in the United States. My family immigrated to United States. My parents in the late 1970s and siblings in the early 1980s. I came in 1982 to Brooklyn, in the middle of my teen years, went to high school there. I came from Guyana, the tropics, being 70 per cent Amazon rainforest. I felt like I had nature in its abundance in my 15 years of life there. In school, I took interest in science but then my exposure to philosophy, my exposure to history, at least the deeper history of African history i... posted on Apr 30 2024 (2,722 reads)

"How many shades of green?" That's a question you get to ask when you're moving really slowly, as cancer forced me to do for the first time in my life.[a photo of design detail] Spiral learning of the B Corp movement, and of all of social change. That is a banister at this little gem of a park that I  found because I could only walk at a  snail's pace. So I was discovering things I hadn't discovered before because I  had always been moving too fast.[photos of other details in nature] Beauty in the small things.Then, 2020: the murder of George Floyd, racial reckoning, COVID, etc.. SMore trauma to the system and at every level of the fractal and more slowing down and time fo... posted on Apr 16 2024 (2,337 reads)

I was bedridden. Many, many, many things that I won't go into. And each of you will have your own suffering. People who have passed, hearts broken rejections, the ways that life brings us to our knees. And there's something magical that happens in the alchemy of suffering. When we open our hearts and say yes from a really earnest place, God enters through the wound. That is in our control. The places where we push against and say no to suffering, that's when we hurt. But our comfort is not nature's priority. Emergence is. Our deepening is. And we always have the opportunity to say, let this open me. Let this deepen me. Let this burn me into being, not in an insincere way. This is betwee... posted on Apr 26 2024 (4,077 reads)

an ongoing learning process for both identifying the problem and coming up with a solution. Addressing the climate crisis, sexism or racism, or transforming education systems are adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges, intricately intertwined with the human psyche and societal dynamics, prove resistant to technical solutions. They demand a shift in our awareness. A common leadership mistake, as Heifetz points out, is to apply a technical fix to a challenge that is fundamentally adaptive in nature. For example, we generate reports, make committees, or hire consultants to work a broken organizational culture, many times avoiding addressing the underlying issues of trust that are at the he... posted on May 15 2024 (3,393 reads)

carried out, while also finding a part of myself wholly enthralled. Like holding the aesthetic appreciation of detrimental plants alongside knowledge of their impact. I wanted to investigate what it might mean to hold both those stories at once, to ask if I could come to a place of… not acceptance of how it was done, but perhaps coming to grips with my own inner, earlier longing for adventure, for what that looked like in the past. Really, it’s about that co-shaping of culture and nature. You actually offer a provocative line, arguing that every thought we’ve ever had was made possible by plants. Can you unpack the ways plants shape us?  ZS: Oh yes. I meant that ver... posted on May 22 2024 (1,868 reads)

day grateful to be alive. Or we see misfortune fall upon another and are thankful that it’s not us. The lack of control that comes with random acts can be frightening, knowing that the “bell may toll for us” next. But it can also expand our gratitude for what we have and the good fortune that comes with just being alive and healthy. The recognition of randomness ensures that we do not take the good things in life for granted, and it allows us to understand the precarious nature of good fortune. Even for those currently less fortunate, it can be cause for appreciating the small things in life and hoping that the winds of chance may yet blow your way. Randomness is the... posted on May 30 2024 (2,661 reads)

wet from a new moon ceremony with horses and other animals on a farm not far from town. It was led by some beautiful humans. We started with a circle ceremony and sharing, followed by some meditations and grounding and then we went out with the horses. Just as we were out in the field, this crazy storm came in. To be out in the field with the animals and to see how they all work together and what they did when the storm rolled in was just so amazing. To see animals so in tune with mother nature. All the horses got together and they all faced the same way. They just stopped what they were doing and waited for the storm to pass. It was really beautiful to see. Us humans have definitely ... posted on Jun 4 2024 (4,813 reads)

present moment, if I can trust enough in my aloneness to dissolve fully into this great emptiness.There are an infinite number of ways I could recount this single experience from last fall. Telling new stories, as I understand it has to do with new perspectives, new observations, new dimensions of ourselves, really allowing ourselves to be recreated. As someone who writes, I feel like my primary role is to listen. As someone mentioned earlier, to deeply listen to others, to myself, to nature, to life events, but mostly to silence, to this great emptiness itself.When I do that, something surprising often pops up like this story. This was not the story that I probably would've picked... posted on Jul 1 2024 (3,163 reads)