and full-color photos that reveal what feels like an alternate reality of a life often harsh, sometimes poetic, devoid of many of our modern luxuries and basic givens, from shiny digital gadgets to a permanent roof over one’s head. Since the beginning of time, nomadic people have roamed the earth. Looking for food, feeding their cattle. Looking for an existence, freedom. Living in the wild, mountains, deserts, on tundra and ice. With only a thin layer of tent between them and nature. Earth in the 21st century is a crowded place, roads and cities are everywhere. Yet somehow, these people hold on to traditions that go back to the very beginning of human civilization.” ... posted on Mar 28 2021 (5,520 reads)

— that even worrying — and I think that’s a personality type, too, and I fall into that sometimes. Somehow, that feels like you’re controlling it, like I am gonna bear down and think this through, and if I worry about it, the worst thing won’t happen. You say that that’s one of these inclinations we have that is counterproductive but feels so natural. Runyan:[laughs] Yes. We want to have control. That’s why the uncertainty, the unpredictable nature of this is so hard for us, physiologically. And as a mindfulness teacher and practitioner, I really work at this intersection, too, of metabolizing the reality that there is no control. [laughs... posted on Mar 30 2021 (14,188 reads)

the mistake. To behold a broken bird, fascinate on a free thing flightless. To squeeze a small fish, and quench a big appetite.  No one wants to think about the feeding, except the little girl in line who demands to know what crime deserves this, this dying, this dying, this dying slowly for a show.  The adults ignore her, but fish hears. fish prays she stops searching for reasons, fish prays she finds cruelty reason-less, fish prays she, big handed daughter of nature, mends this distortion. but the little girl decides she wants to stay in line. She rips fish flesh and prayer to feed the eagle, & the stranger asks why I went to prison, & bo... posted on Apr 2 2021 (6,000 reads)

become an instant cliche as the pandemic reveals the threadbare fabric of our culture: the truly essential people that make day-to-day life possible are often the ones in the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. As grateful as I am to have professional people in my life, I am utterly dependent on the people who grow, harvest, and distribute food. The people who stack grocery shelves and check us out. The people willing to shop for the elderly and immunocompromised. The people picking up our garbage, manning the water and sewer systems. And, of course, the health care workers. It doesn’t take a pandemic to tell us that our culture has its values and rewards upside down. B... posted on Apr 3 2021 (5,403 reads)

many agonising moments of truth to realise that no matter how hard we try, we may never know with certainty why our loved ones died the way they did. Healing begins with confronting and accepting this inconvenient truth. ‘Suicide can shatter many of the things you take for granted about yourself, your relationships and your world,’ writes John Jordan in After Suicide Loss: Coping with Your Grief. Among the many things that shatters is our perception of our loved one and the nature of our relationship with them. We are confronted with a harsh reality check: Did we really know our loved one at all? Or were we living with a stranger? Survivors of suicide loss are confron... posted on Apr 13 2021 (7,090 reads)

grace and poise becoming of a New Yorker, not with the ‘thickness’ of my own tongue. I sat in the front of every class, desperate to please my teachers, raising my hand at the slightest suggestion of a question. You see, I was convinced in ways that needed little or no articulation that if I got myself educated, I could rise above the debris of my own bells-and-whistles culture and take my place in the constellation of the worthy… and that if I understood the irrefutable nature of things, I could find unmovable ground upon which I could build a real future for myself. I remember responding to our pastor’s salvation call three times on a single Sunday. It was ... posted on Apr 25 2021 (6,913 reads)

the ramifications of climate change, combined with other ecological challenges, increase, finding and making beauty, and opening up to gratitude and compassion in the process, will become more and more important, more and more imperative. What are some of the barriers and obstacles faced by Radical Joy as it works toward its vision? Offering and image by Janet Keating. Dolly Sods Wilderness Area—a place once deeply wounded, but now transformed by loving intentions and nature’s resilience. Things have changed a lot during the past year in the way the world at large has responded to our work, our vision. In the past, some environmentalists would dismiss the ... posted on Apr 26 2021 (5,188 reads)

sense blinds us to the reality of the universe and Vladimir Nabokov’s admonition that it blunts our sense of wonder, Huxley writes: Common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, or organized memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest. Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest, and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. ... posted on May 21 2021 (5,847 reads)

it is through poetry and with music. So let’s listen to another one. TS: OK. We’ll listen to a piece, this is called “Raggedness.” And this is also from Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship. Maybe you can introduce it for us, Coleman. CB: Well, this is [about] lots of changes that happen in a student-teacher relationship. You’ll see, “I was dead, and then alive.” So it’s all about the continuous changing nature of a relationship, where maybe a teacher’s involved, but nobody knows who’s the student and who’s the teacher. It keeps changing back and forth. OK, let’s hear it. [M... posted on May 29 2021 (5,511 reads)

pay attention to and act quickly on something that the brains radar for threat thinks is extremely important. Or the brains circuitry for motivation thinks is extremely important. So, our worst emotions, the ones that make us do things we might regret later, like anger or panic are signs that the brain’s radar for threat, which is called the amygdala has detected something that it thinks is going to harm us in some way. This design worked very well when the brain was being designed by nature, in human prehistory when we lived on the savanna, the jungle, and really sucks now that we live in a complex social reality. So, we have this biological reaction, the fight or flight response,... posted on Jun 28 2021 (5,794 reads)

recalcitrant testicles but at thirteen as my relatively androgynous child body inched toward femaleness, the only thing I knew about being female was that meant being sexual with boys. Those were the only stories I knew so the wound widened around the lack of better ones and abscessed over unexpressed grief. I betrayed myself with boys nothing like my inner one. No tenderness in them as they pressed themselves into places so tender in me. Redemption happens when we acknowledge the true nature of the hurt we experience. When we name the harm, tell the story, notice the nuances, lean deep into the interstitial silence, listening for what gets revealed in what remains unsaid. Healing b... posted on Jul 4 2021 (5,371 reads)

a long term contract between our farm and the customers, and provide seasonal produce. Each year I would like to take two months of winter vacation. I am inspired by the lifestyle of “minimizing needs and knowing what is enough” and trying to practice it. This means to desire less for myself and to be grateful for everything in this life. I am happier everyday, I feel loved and I love more. I will keep on gardening to become a better person who knows how to live in harmony with nature. ---------------------------------- 3 YOUNG LADIES: SEN TRAN, NHUNG HOANG, HANH PHAM (Dong Nai province) The most frequent question people asked me for the last two years since I started g... posted on Jul 8 2021 (3,709 reads)

we will be changed by this awareness, and we will want to change the way the earth and its life-forms are being treated. Sacred is the right word to convey this Celtic way of seeing, because it is a word that is not bound by religion. Inside the walls of religious practice, we speak of sacred scripture or sacred music, for instance, but way beyond those walls we also speak of the sacred universe or sacred moments. The word points with reverence to the divine essence of life and the true nature of relationship. When we speak of something as sacred, we are offering it ultimate respect. We are honoring it. We also invoke something of the power and authority of this word when we used the... posted on Jul 14 2021 (5,242 reads)

only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s peripheral vision at rates better than chance. And despite that spotlight, we seem to miss huge elements of the thing we are ostensibly attending to. A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, sme... posted on Aug 11 2021 (6,271 reads)

infectious diseases at San Francisco General Hospital. She also served as a member of the Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents. For Cohan, medicine and movement are deeply interwoven. She has studied with Anna Halprin of Life/Art Process, Tina Stromsted of Authentic Movement, and Valerie Chafograck of Dance Sanctuary and Movement Liberation. With an embodied approach that honors the inherent wisdom of our bodies and nature, she has served as a doula for those who are giving birth and those who are dying.  The flash mob video landed Cohan interviews on multiple mainstream media outlets, including Good... posted on Sep 1 2021 (9,209 reads)

rock and drips from the walls. Craning your neck, you glimpse a sliver of blue sky overhead, at least 50 feet up. Down from that slit filters your only light. It’s enough. You’re not afraid. You creep forward until a boulder obstructs your way … or no, not a boulder, after all, but a huge log that looks petrified, wedged between the walls. How long has it been there? you wonder. You sit in The Crack, bobbing on the water, contemplating the forces of nature and vast expanse of time that have created this place, and brought you into it. Even now, this fissure in the Earth is changing, massaged by the elements. Eons smack up against the moment. H... posted on Sep 13 2021 (4,462 reads)

is all the expression they need. Prayer, though, has a performative dimension that makes it effective and appropriate for expressing thoughts and feelings. So, prayer for the atheist can be like singing in the car or in the shower. No one is listening, and that is just fine.   Prayer does not need to be addressed to anyone. If this troubles you, though, there are some atheist options. The words can be addressed to “God” in scare quotes, or to the universe, or to nature. St. Paul describes a Greek altar dedicated to the “unknown god.” The Greeks were apparently covering their bases with whatever god or gods they had missed or dismissed. For the ath... posted on Sep 21 2021 (7,733 reads)

a so-called ‘wanted’ Palestinian. We had the potential to hate but our parents saved us from fear and despair by bringing the wider world to us through books and music. Mother used to sing songs by Fairuz to us in the long dark cold nights of military curfew when, if we opened the door, a tank could be sitting in front of our house.[i] I refuse to be either an enemy or a victim. The helplessness that comes from feeling yourself to be a victim is paralysing but it was not in the nature of the women I grew up with; they were always fighting, adapting and progressing. I’ve always tried not to think that there are people out there who want to kill me. After the 1982 massac... posted on Sep 22 2021 (3,699 reads)

van Leeuwen is the founder of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy-- a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice aimed to free body and mind from conditioned preferences in order to move from higher consciousness rather than willpower. "We can start to move from profound strength instead of strain," says Gert. In these excerpts from an Awakin Call interview last year he shares more about his journey and work. Early Influences & Explorations in Movement:  I grew up in a Protestant family. We were very sober. Movement was not very familiar to us. My first yoga teacher came from Surinam, from an Indian family. It was flower power time, when everyo... posted on Oct 12 2021 (3,316 reads)

TIPPETT:That sounds wonderful. And then you’ve had 30 years to live that way. MS. PARKER:I see — it’s just such a gift. It is such a gift, and I’ve just — I don’t want to go back and change anything else that happened because that’s all part of what brought me here. MS. TIPPETT:I want to actually read — you have wonderful quotes all the way through. This quote of Martin Luther — where was it? About — something about all of nature has its sound. “There is nothing on earth that hath not its tone. Even the air invisible sings when smitten with a staff.” MS. PARKER:Yes. Isn’t that lovely? MS. TIPPETT... posted on Oct 24 2021 (3,678 reads)