in the Hindu tradition is the idea of "non-possessiveness," or taking only what we need and finding satisfaction in balanced living. Perhaps the most developed expression of a middle way between material excess and deprivation comes from the Buddhist tradition. While Buddhism recognizes that basic material needs must be met in order to realize our potentials, it does not consider our material welfare as an end in itself; rather, it is a means to the end of awakening to our deeper nature as spiritual beings. The middle way of Buddhism moves between mindless materialism on the one hand and needless poverty on the other. The result is a balanced approach to living that harmonizes... posted on Oct 7 2011 (24,679 reads)

day; a fish can release one to ten million eggs in one breeding season; one rice grain can produce a thousand grains within a planting season. (Even pets with five to seven litters a year are more than most of us can handle!) In seas, lakes, swamps, grasslands, forests, and other ecosystems – abundant life blooms. Where they do not anymore do so, something must have upset the natural abundance. Even such damaged ecosystems, if left alone, soon teem with life again. While abundance in nature can last indefinitely, it does not grow without limit. As species multiply, they soon settle into balance with other species and the natural environment. The food chain of plants, herbivores, c... posted on Jun 15 2013 (21,627 reads)

is a simple yet profound metaphor that a childhood mentor of my mom's shared with her decades ago: "When one foot walks, the other rests." It's the way all of nature works, a beautiful reminder that everything is in ebb and flow, engaged in cycles and rhythms. Our own bodies follow natural patterns, recuperating every night and preparing for the next day's activity. With music as well, the structure imposed by notes inherently depends on the unstructured space supporting it. The notes and the space between them come together to create music. As a culture, though, we give more importance to creating notes and relatively little to the space between them. Bet... posted on Feb 28 2012 (30,260 reads)

of essence. If this is so, the real task of the medical system is to heal soul loss, to aid in the retrieval of the soul. The entire culture is ill with soul loss. What is needed is not to bring spirit into our work, to develop more of a spiritual practice or to go to church more. Our task is to recognize that we are always on sacred ground, that there is no split between the sacred and secular. That the living god is dancing on our back. That there is no task that is not sacred in nature and no relationship that is not sacred in nature. Life is a spiritual practice. Health care, which serves life, is a spiritual practice. Disease is a spiritual path, too. Much illness is ca... posted on Mar 23 2012 (52,109 reads)

today. I call them cyclical tools. The iPhone empowers the developer ecosystem that helps drive its adoption. A bike strengthens the person who pedals it. Open-source software educates its potential contributors. A hallmark of cyclical tools is that they create open loops: the bike strengthens its rider to do things other than just pedal the bike. Cyclical tools are like trees, whose falling leaves fertilize the soil in which they grow. At the top of the stack, all tools depend on nature and human nature. They depend on the sun, trees, minerals, and fossil fuels to provide their raw materials and energy. They depend on the creativity of builders to give them form. And they depe... posted on Jun 12 2012 (13,885 reads)

secret of success is concentrating interest in life… interest in the small things of nature… In other words to be fully awake to everything.” With Father’s Day around the corner, let’s take a moment to pay heed to some of the wisest, most heart-warming advice from history’s famous dads. Gathered here are five timeless favorites, further perpetuating my well-documented love of the art of letter-writing. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgeraldproduced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about, found in the altogether excellent F. ... posted on Jun 17 2012 (20,140 reads)

and plants. In the Abrahamic version (based on earlier Sumerian tales), the Tower of Babel saga, the "something" that "happened" in the opening story is further elaborated. The first common tongue was abolished by a (slightly insecure?) god. He feared that people would use it to cooperate in building a tower that would eventually challenge his heavenly reign. Language has always been connected to the primal question of what it means to be human and our relationship with nature, the invisible and unknown, the "Great Mystery." Long ago, people and animals and spirits and plants all communicated in the same way. Then something happened. The word in its... posted on Oct 28 2012 (15,750 reads)

novel prison program in New York City uses nature to teach inmates about life's larger lessons. Breezes carried wafts of lemon balm and mint from the herb garden, hedged by apricot and nectarine trees. Monarchs flitted around butterfly bushes, and a pair of resident ducks shuttled between a marshy puddle and a carefully tended pond. Just six miles from lower Manhattan, this small island oasis in the East River seemed almost bucolic—except, of course, for the coils of razor wire running along the high fence surrounding it and the gardeners wearing bright orange jumpsuits with DOC (Department of Corrections) stenciled across the backs. This was Rikers Island, the infamou... posted on Jan 23 2013 (11,968 reads)

Indian poet, philosopher, and celebrated creative spirit, Rabindranth Tagore, debating such subjects as truth, freedom, democracy, courage, education, and the future of humanity as India struggled for its independence. The correspondence, collected in The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941 (public library) is more than a mere addition to history’s notable epistolary exchanges. These letters are unique in that they were private in nature but public in manifestation — Tagore wrote in the Indian Nationalist intelligentsia forum Modern Review and Gandhi in his own political journal, Young India — an... posted on Feb 7 2013 (14,825 reads)

science we cover here on Greater Good—aka, “the science of a meaningful life”—has exploded over the past 10 years, with many more studies published each year on gratitude, mindfulness, and our other core themes than we saw a decade ago. 2012 was no exception. In fact, in the year just past, new findings added nuance, depth, and even some caveats to our understanding of the science of a meaningful life. Here are 10 of the scientific insights that made the biggest impression on us in 2012—the findings most likely to resonate in scientific journals and the public consciousness in the years to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were publ... posted on Mar 13 2013 (19,681 reads)

long hours to protect a place or species, sometimes turn their backs if they lose the fight, stifling a sense of failure by shifting their energy quickly to another worthy project. Yet, as with any shadowy aspect of our consciousness, what we avoid continues to plague us, whereas what we agree to face offers us the possibility of transformation and wholeness. And as Stephen Aizenstat, the founding president of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has written, “Avoiding our relationship with nature only hastens the inevitable: the death of the natural world.” One way to acknowledge our love for nature, grieve for its destruction, and kindle compassion is through ritual. Ritual ca... posted on Aug 26 2013 (16,955 reads)

them how to cook it and eat it, together, around the table? When you start to open up a child's senses — when you invite children to engage, physically, with gardening and food — there is a set of values that is instilled effortlessly, that just washes over them, as part of the process of offering good food to one another. Children become so rapt — so enraptured, even — by being engaged in learning in a sensual, kinesthetic way. And food seduces you by its very nature — the smell of baking, for example: It makes you hungry! Who could resist the aroma of fresh bread, or the smell of warm tortillas coming off the comal? There is nothing else as univer... posted on Sep 23 2013 (26,141 reads)

Pavi Mehta, Chris Johnnidis and I have been visiting a wildlife sanctuary in Half Moon Bay to listen to and record the remarkable animal stories and personal journey of founder, Steve Karlin. Sitting on his back porch one day last spring, Steve casually alerted us to the piercing cries of a young red-tailed hawk above and motioned us, mid-sentence, to look beyond the fence at a bobcat moving stealthily in the tall grass. To be in Steve’s company is to be reminded that the vast play of nature is all around us, and visible if only we cultivate our ears to hear and our eyes to see it. Together over many months we experienced an expanded space of listening and learning what it means to... posted on Jan 6 2014 (53,638 reads)

drawing. I was an only child, single mom, chubby red-haired kid that went to a different school every two years. So you know no self-esteem at all. I had a really good third grade teacher. She had a big roll of butcher paper. She was like, “Now who should I give this to?” I was just kind of like “…ehh.” You know?  She’s like, “Yes, you.” It was just one of those things. I felt like I could do this. I could paint. I could draw. It was mostly nature. When I was very young I worked in acrylics, mostly nature. And when I was a teenager, it was cars for a while, pen and ink. All kinds of exotic cars, and I just kind of went back into oil pain... posted on Feb 16 2014 (22,517 reads)

until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her the week before she died of cancer at the age of 54, bequeathing three shelves of colorful, clothbound volumes. Williams waited a full month after the death to open them, only to discover that each one was blank, containing page upon page of emptiness. The way she speaks mirrors her writing—fragmented, aligning pieces of ideas like a mosaic. Williams uses this enigmatic gift to explore the nature of voice and silence in her most recent work, When Women Were Birds. "What was my mother trying to say to me?" she asks in the interview that follows. "Why did my mother cho... posted on Mar 22 2014 (12,658 reads)

a slave laborer during the day for the Nazis. And then stay up all night doing their underground work. I mean, it was just a struggle, a struggle to, you know, to overcome the — what was there, and to change really bad things. Ms. Tippett: You know, it's very striking. You, again referring to Feynman, but I think this comes through in all your writing, you know, you talk about, you know, you said this about him near the end of his days, that you found answers you sought about the nature of science and a scientist, but also you discovered a new approach to life. And I just wondered if you'd say a little bit more about the contours of that, the substance of that, that approa... posted on Jul 15 2014 (26,548 reads)

and consumption are clearly me-oriented. Consumption subtly becomes stronger, and all of a sudden, "Sharing Economy' feels a lot more like Economy and a lot less like Sharing. It's a pattern we've seen before. Sometime last year, I ran into a woman who had just quit her job, after ten years of leading a pioneering sustainability organization. Just plain burned out. When I probed further, she said: "I started with the hope that we could elevate economic forces to value nature. Instead, what we've done is commoditized and devalued nature." Same thing happened with social entrepreneurship. Bill Drayton's vision behind it was to leverage entrepreneurship t... posted on Jan 22 2015 (21,908 reads)

in the way. Do not allow semantics to become one more block for you. When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. . . . There seems to be no need to name it unless that name is a useful shorthand for what you experience. Art by Vladimir Radunsky from Mark Twain's 'Advice to Little Girls.' That creative energy, Cameron argues, is part of our core nature. Rather than learning it, we simply need to unlearn all the techniques we’ve acquired for blocking it in the course of living our Serious Adult Lives. She writes: No matter... posted on Sep 3 2014 (25,435 reads)

we divide our world up into pieces because we are afraid to explore its web-like nature? Margaret Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, examines our ways of viewing the world and how to thrive in a world of interconnectedness. The dense and tangled web of life—the interconnected nature of reality—reveals itself daily. Since September 11, think of how much you’ve learned of people, cultures and nations that previously you knew little about. We’ve been learning how the lives of those far away affect our own. We’re beginning to realize that in order to live peacefully together on this planet, we ne... posted on Aug 31 2014 (22,143 reads)

in silence for a year? Even if it were possible to live in silence, why would anyone want to do it? Being silent was not difficult for me. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that once I went into the silence, I was not interested, most of the time, in speaking. Also, when no one is speaking, it is much easier to be quiet than if some people are speaking and others are not. In our monastery, everyone lived under the rule of silence. As for why we wanted to be silent, that relates to the nature of monastic life itself, which is to be apart from the world and to have an opportunity for reflection and meditation, activities that are “inner” and require quiet. It would be abs... posted on Nov 18 2014 (38,618 reads)