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 (2,719 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 (2,659 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)

school lunch line, for example. To get students to eat more vegetables and less pizza, you could either tell them all about the health benefits of broccoli and carrots — or you could move the vegetables to the front of the buffet, so they’re the first things hungry kids see. Many behavioral scientists prefer this type of strategy because it can change lots of people’s behavior all at once — rather than one by one. Plus, it’s better attuned to the unconscious nature of most decision-making.  Smicval’s two biggest strategies revolve around the way waste is collected and how people pay for it. This October, Smicval began a yearslong process of tr... posted on Jun 29 2024 (2,337 reads)

in quantity, but in the organizing principle of the field in which they operate. The sparrow’s intention to serve without condition sustains the very platform of consciousness that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. She doesn’t just add a drop to the ocean; she sees the ocean in that drop. Her act, because it is given freely, without expectation, becomes the yeast of the heart, drawing a delicate line from the fleeting to the eternal, carried forward by the unseen currents of nature. And in that way, even the smallest act becomes a seed of transformation, a spark that ignites the unimaginable. Thank you, all, for being that critical yeast of heart. When our heads and hand... posted on Sep 17 2024 (3,773 reads)

friends was losing a lot of his martial art competitions, his sensei took him in a field one day and handed him a rock. "Use all your might and throw it as far as you can." After he did that, his teacher hands him a leaf. "Now, do the same with the leaf." Naturally, the leaf went nowhere. "If you are in a rock place in yourself, you will see a world full of dense rocks. But when you hold a leaf consciousness, you will see that your greatest strength lies in aligning with the winds of nature." As we harmonize with those larger winds, "the inescapable network of mutuality”, we soar through the skies like the murmurations of starlings, in elegant formations divined by a collec... posted on Feb 2 2023 (10,591 reads)