with Robin Wall Kimerrer MS. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: “Why is the world so beautiful?” This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate. DR. ROBIN WALL KIMMERER: I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last... posted on Apr 22 2016 (15,108 reads)

psychologist Paul Ekman explains how to extend compassion beyond our circle of family and friends. Paul Ekman is Professor Emeritus in Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert on emotion recognition. His work in identifying the muscular underpinnings of facial expressions has been instrumental in helping us understand the universality of emotion and its place in our social lives. In 2009, he was named by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world, and his work even entered popular consciousness when it led to a popular TV show—Lie to Me. In recent years, Ekman has had a growing interest in applying his knowledge of e... posted on Apr 24 2016 (11,750 reads)

Gross: Can you talk more about the value of solitude, and why you argue that if we don’t learn to be alone, then we’re guaranteed to be lonely? Sherry Turkle: The capacity to be alone is the capacity to know enough about yourself and who you are, and be comfortable enough with that. That way, when you are with another person, you’re not trying to make that person into somebody you need them to be in order to buttress a fragile sense of your own self. You can actually turn to a person and see them as another person, and have a real relationship with them. Now, the person who can’t do that is going to be one of these people who nobody wants to be with,... posted on Apr 25 2016 (24,772 reads)

and Ciliana during one of many reconciliation events For more than 50 years, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (in Spanish, FARC) have been fighting a guerrilla war for social justice. In response, the rich and powerful created paramilitary forces to defend the existing social order. On both sides, those doing the fighting are mostly poor campesinos (villagers) and workers. Ciliana, a graphic designer, is serving a 29-year prison sentence for a killing as a member of the Paramilitary forces. Claudia joined the FARC to offer her first aid and psychology skills. So far, she has served eight years of her 40-year sentence for killing and terrorism. They are serving their t... posted on Apr 26 2016 (8,320 reads)

journey as a parent of a specially-abled son has been one of extreme emotions – from disappointment to hope; from pain to joy; from love to anguish – it’s been a journey like never before. When Vivaan was born, one of my close friends sent me Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem On Children. The first verse in the poem is often quoted, but I would still like to share it here. Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. My journey as a parent of a differently abled son has been one of extreme emotions &ndash... posted on May 2 2016 (15,372 reads)

you've made the first relinquishment, you have found inner peace because it's the relinquishment of self-will. You can work on this by refraining from doing any not-good thing you may be motivated toward, but you never suppress it! If you are motivated to do or say a mean thing, you can always think of a good thing. You deliberately turn around and use that same energy to do or say a good thing instead. It works! The second relinquishment is the relinquishment of the feeling of separateness. We begin feeling very separate and judging everything as it relates to us, as though we were the center of the universe. Even after we know better intellectually, we still judge things th... posted on May 4 2016 (20,426 reads)

think that the best way to discover what pronouncing blessings is all about is to pronounce a few. The practice itself will teach you what you need to know. Start with anything you like. Even a stick lying on the ground will do. The first thing to do is to pay attention to it. [...] The more aware you become, the more blessings you will find. If you look at the stick long enough, you are bound to begin making it a character in your own story. It will begin to remind you of someone you know, or a piece of furniture you once saw in a craft co-op. There is nothing wrong with these associations, except that they take you away from the stick and back to yourself. To pronounce a blessing on some... posted on May 8 2016 (17,288 reads)

GRACE PAINTING There’s nothing quite like the unspoken bond between the best of friends. And that bond in particular means even more to Iris Grace Halmshaw, a 5-year-old British girl who was diagnosed with autism in 2011, reported ABC News. Her disorder prevents her from speaking like so many kids her age, so through the encouragement of her parents, she learned how to express her emotions through painting instead. Her works of art are nothing short of incredible, and her family sells them for hundreds of dollars each, using the money to pay for her therapy treatments and art supplies, and to raise awareness about autism, according to their Facebook page. While Iri... posted on May 14 2016 (20,378 reads)

could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling. We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts. (Applause) But I want to talk about the need for us to dream in more than one dimension, because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8, and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over. Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven marriages survived. Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, asked during the time of Apollo, "What can we gai... posted on Sep 7 2016 (15,894 reads)

an adaptation from his new book, Dacher Keltner explains the secret to gaining and keeping power: focus on the good of others. For the past twenty years, I have been carrying out experiments to find out how power is distributed in groups. I have infiltrated college dorms and children's summer camps to document who rises in power. I have brought entire sororities and fraternities into the lab, capturing the substance and spread of individual's reputations within their social networks. I have surreptitiously identified which members of groups are gossiped about, and who receive gossip. To chart the experience of power, I have studied what it fee... posted on May 17 2016 (15,255 reads)

by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability By Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow Adapted from Michael K. Stone and Center for Ecoliteracy, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2009), pp. 3–15, 122–127. Copyright © 2009 Center for Ecoliteracy. What can educators do to foster real intelligence?...We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the Earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation, and wildness. —David W. Orr There is a bold new movement underway in school systems across North America and around the world. E... posted on May 21 2016 (15,658 reads)

Ahmad is solving what she calls the "most unnecessary problem of our time." Photo: Facebook Komal Ahmad was a student at UC Berkeley when she experienced a life-changing moment. She had just returned from summer training for the U.S. Navy when she met a homeless veteran on the sidewalk. He hadn’t eaten in three days. Yet, across the street, thousands of pounds of uneaten food was being thrown away by her school. This was unacceptable to Ahmad, so she did something about it. “Those who have and are wasting and those who need and are starving — and they’re both living quite literally right across the street from each other,” she ... posted on May 22 2016 (20,544 reads)

I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write”. ~ Joan Didion I was at my parent’s dinner table. Before me was a worn journal of thin and discolored pages and a neat script that was gently fading away. It was my grand fathers journal and now belonged to my father. I never knew my grandfather. He had died in the months leading up to my birth, and had named me in his final days even though there was no proof that the baby to come would be a girl. In the expat life I grew up in, I never got to visit the home he had lived in, the places he had frequented and the people who had been a part of his life’s... posted on May 23 2016 (15,084 reads)

and Howard* had always gotten along well. They’d worked on several projects together and considered each other friends. So when Robert discovered that Howard held a strategy meeting and hadn’t included him, he felt betrayed. He immediately shot off a text to Howard: “I can’t believe you didn’t include me in that meeting!” Howard was in the middle of a client meeting when his phone pinged with a new text. Stealing a look at his phone, he felt a jumble of things: concern, anger, embarrassment, frustration, defensiveness. The text distracted Howard, and his meeting didn’t go as well as he had hoped. His anger grew as he thought about the fact ... posted on May 26 2016 (28,127 reads)

a time of great drought, a Taoist master was asked by members of a village if he could help bring rain to their dry fields. They confessed trying many other approaches before reaching out to him, but with no success. The master agreed to come and asked for a small hut with a garden that he could tend. For three days, he tended the garden, performing no special rituals or asking anything further from the villagers. On the fourth day, rain began to fall on the parched earth. When asked how he had achieved such a miracle, the master answered that he was not responsible for the rain. However, he explained, when he came to the village, he had sensed disharmony within himself. Each day, ... posted on Dec 29 2020 (44,728 reads)

those great scenes in Westerns where the good guys race after the bad guys at a roaring gallop across the plains with their pistols drawn? Well, they are big fakes. Any self-respecting cowboy knows that the ground is pocked with gopher holes, and pushing a horse any faster than a trot is sure to catch a hoof and break a leg. That’s what went through my mind this week as I landed in one of those infernal ankle-twisting gopher holes, breaking my ankle – a tiny break, but you’d think I’d know better by this time. So here I sit in exile, yet again, this time with the other foot elevated. Fortunately, I’m rather bemused by my situation and wonde... posted on Jun 6 2016 (12,122 reads)

is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose . . . or not. The real question for me, though, is whether my hope is effective, whether it produces results or is just where I hide to ease my own pain. What I strive for I call honest hope. And it takes work, but it is good work. It is work I love. I began this book suggesting that it starts with getting our thinking straight. Since we create the world according to ideas we hold, we have to ask ourselves whether the ideas we inherit and absorb through our cultures serve us. We can only have honest, effective hope if the frame through which we see is an accurate rep... posted on Jun 3 2016 (12,960 reads)

have always had an interest in living a good life – perhaps a natural attraction towards positive psychology. An experience early on in life eventually taught me the value of seeing the self as far deeper than the finely curated fragments of body and mind that we spend a lifetime trying to conquer. It showed me, albeit exclusively, the faint and subtle yearnings of the soul that often went unheard in the noise and clamour of daily life. The Journey to Finding Meaning On an annual trip to my parent’s home in Pakistan, I decided to honor its call and spend my 2 weeks identifying a needy cause to which to contribute a portion of my time and finances. I did not have to look f... posted on Jun 5 2016 (14,183 reads)

August of 2015, Yusra Mardini and her sister, Sarah, fled Syria after their home was destroyed in the country’s civil war. The sisters traveled on land through Lebanon and Turkey, eventually boarding a boat with 18 other refugees. When that boat’s motor failed in the Aegean Sea,Mardini, her sister, and another woman jumped out and pushed the boat for three hours to the island of Lesbos. Mardini would later tell a press conference in Berlin that “it would be a real shame if I drowned in the sea.” Many refugees do drown attempting to reach safety in Europe—2,500 died this year alone—but that is not what Mardini meant. Mardini is a competit... posted on Jun 10 2016 (12,545 reads)

calls “the agents of the soul,” withdrawing the attention from what the senses bring you, from what thought brings you, thereby bringing yourself back into yourself. I felt a taste of that inner work with Descartes. It was very exciting to realize that I could doubt all this. It wasn’t disillusioning at all. It was fantastically interesting! I could separate myself—in a very healthy way, I thought—from being taken, from being swallowed by thoughts, emotional images and the external world. That had a great influence on me. There was no sense of alienation from nature or the life around me—there was only a new sense of a mental, personal capacity I di... posted on Jun 11 2016 (17,789 reads)