How Vulnerability Can Be a Strength
The word vulnerable itself comes from the Latin 'vulnerare' which means 'to wound', and so at the root of vulnerability is our own sense of wounded-ness. To be authentic in a moment in which we feel wounded, we have to honestly acknowledge the places where we feel hurt and then muster up the strength to just be with the pain. If we can embrace this vulnerability, we can fully accept the discomfort... posted on Jan 13, 30299 reads

The Visionary Architecture of Paolo Soleri
Architect Paolo Soleri is regarded as a visionary, much to his dismay. His thought and vision combines the ethical and the metaphysical in terms of how to structure and build our cities. He says, for example, "We have reached the point where we understand the appearance of self-awareness is one of the most incredible things that's happened in the universe. So, slowly we are developing some kind of... posted on Jan 30, 5211 reads

4 iPhones and a Subway Serendipity
In October 2010, little-known New York City band, Atomic Tom, had their instruments stolen. But a little bit of bad luck wasn't going to stop these musicians from doing what they love. Riding over the Manhattan Bridge on the B train, the band gave an impromptu performance of "Take Me Out" ... using four iPhones to simulate the drums, guitars, and piano they had recently lost. And they caught it on... posted on Feb 12, 5588 reads

A Love Warrior's Incredible Generosity
Raghu Makwana lost his legs to polio as a child. But his heart was intact and growing bigger by the day. When a few students found him arranging people's footwear outside a local temple, they were struck by his sparkling intelligence and genuine warmth. They arranged to have him join a non-profit at the Gandhi Ashram in India. The move would bring Raghu's latent capacity for servant-leadership to ... posted on Feb 13, 5823 reads

Valentine's Day Wisdom
"We've heard it said that this day -- which once belonged to a legendary saint in whose wake loving deeds flowed like a river -- was hijacked so many years ago by corporations looking to cash in on a beautiful state-of-the-heart technology. They who strode in preaching a catchy new religion: I love therefore I buy. And maybe we bought it. At any rate we've been blaming them ever since. Why give th... posted on Feb 14, 6295 reads

3 Little Monks and a Moment of Truth
"This is Ankur," our host Sachi had said, with the catching enthusiasm she's known and loved for, "He's an amazing photographer and has recently gone totally 'gift economy'." Meaning that he offers his photography unconditionally as a gift, inviting recipients to 'pay it forward.' I look over at the young man seated in front of me. An unguarded face lit now by a smile both shy and warm. "What's yo... posted on Mar 13, 40257 reads

An Ordinary Magical Life
"I met Shelagh Gordon at her funeral. My sharpest impression of her that day, as mourners in black pressed around me, was of her breathtaking kindness. Shelagh was freshly-in-love thoughtful. If she noticed your boots had holes, she'd press her new ones into your arms. When you casually admired her coffeemaker, you'd wake up to one of your own. A bag of chocolates hanging from your doorknob would ... posted on Mar 22, 0 reads

Infinite Family
Amy Stokes uses the internet to connect South African teens affected by HIV/AIDS and poverty with volunteer mentors from around the world. She is the founder of Infinite Family an effort in South Africa -- where nearly two million children have been orphaned by AIDS. A diverse and growing team of Infinite Family's mentors have stepped forward "to fill the void of adults -- to teach, discuss, encou... posted on Jun 15, 2581 reads

What's the Greatest Gift Your Mother Gave You?
"The way her face absolutely beams when she sees me and her voice lightens with happiness when I call her on the phone. Every time. Even after 38 years," says Kristen Harnisch. "My mother always had a sense of wonderment. The color of a leaf, a sprinkling of snow, the smell of hot soup--she found the greatest pleasure in everyday things," Nancy Bradford reflects. "When I was two days old, I was ab... posted on Apr 21, 6320 reads

Can Death Become Your Ally?
"Death is an important ally for appreciating life. I am not referring to a morbid preoccupation with death. Rather, I mean the felt awareness of our finitude as physical beings -- an honest recognition of the short time we have to love and to learn on this earth. The knowledge that our bodies will inevitably die burns through our attachments to the dignified madness of our socially constructed exi... posted on Jun 7, 37707 reads

Mr. Happy Man
For six hours each day, Bermuda's Johnny Barnes stands at a busy traffic intersection telling all who pass that he loves them. His delight and sincerity are infectious, and the people of the island love him back. His service is a simple reminder of the power of happiness and loving-kindness to change any day for the better.... posted on Apr 19, 5073 reads

Love and Play: a Conversation w/ Chaz
"When he speaks, you can sense a depth of earnest care in his voice. When you hear his stories, you know you're in the presence of a sacred soul. And it sort of sneaks up on you that he's served in hospices and with the homeless, that he spends his days mentoring college students as UPenn's University Chaplain. From gentle stories about his daughters to lessons from his "knucklehead punk" youth da... posted on Apr 29, 5074 reads

The Present of Being Present
"In the summer of 2005, things weren't looking very good for me. A broken relationship, a deadlock at work, a growing dependence on alcohol and tobacco all made for a downward spiral that I experienced every moment but couldn't snap out of. I was almost at breaking point when my mother decided to pay me a visit... On the first evening of her visit she tried to get me talking about where I was at i... posted on Sep 23, 23955 reads

10 Ways to Love Where You Live
Community is not just for extroverts. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in barrios, hamlets, neighborhoods, and villages. Yet in the time since our parents and grandparents were young, privacy has become so valued that many neighborhoods are not much more than houses in proximity...And when the links among neighbors are weak, security relies on locks, gates, and guns, rather than a close... posted on Jun 21, 35135 reads

Five Letters of Fatherly Advice
In honor of Father's Day, celebrated blogger Maria Popova takes, "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."... posted on Jun 17, 20115 reads

The Way of the Peaceful Parent
"While I have learned a lot about being a dad, and finding joy in parenthood, I also know that stress-free parenting is a myth. Parents will always have stress: we not only have to deal with tantrums and scraped knees and refusing to eat anything you cook, but we worry about potential accidents, whether we are ruining our kids, whether our children will find happiness as adults and be able to prov... posted on Jul 24, 83127 reads

Love is the Answer
Filmmaker Ian Watt had an epiphany: today's creatively-oriented young generation could make great things happen by linking artistic talent with change-making movements. This film tells the story of the organization he started to help youth serve the world with art. But it also shows Ian's first experiment in change-making, as he used his filmmaking skills to help bring attention to K.I. Nepal, an ... posted on Aug 19, 5299 reads

How To Trick Your Brain for Happiness
"In recent years, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states -- which, in turn, means we can strengthen them." In this article, Rick Hanson describes how to skillfully use the mind to amplify positive conne... posted on Sep 15, 148819 reads

Wings of Love: Nancy Rivard's Story
On Christmas Eve of 1983, a personal loss changed the course of Nancy Rivard's life. In its wake she purposely got herself demoted from the management track at American Airlines and began traveling the world as a flight attendant. While her travels took her to many interesting places and brought her into contact with inspiring individuals, she was continually looking for a way to use her job to se... posted on Oct 9, 18996 reads

Love Leads Into Mystery: Raising A Child With Asperger's
"Daniel teaches me that all rules are arbitrary, answers are illusory, future visions are incomplete. He teaches me about the psychic wounds I carry into my parenting, and my only choice is to heal myself. He teaches me to be more patient, more accepting, more tolerant not just of him but of other kids. I see a nine year old hyper boy out in public these days, and I don't get irritated with him; i... posted on Oct 10, 10106 reads

Families Held Together By Love ... & Skype
We live in a world in which some of the people we are closest to are often not near us at all. When we document our day-to-day existence in photographs and Instagrams, these people are absent. Their presence in our lives is missing from our digital memories. Photographer John Clang's series Being Together seeks to correct this. Using Skype and projectors, he captures families visually as they are... posted on Sep 20, 4626 reads

A Schoolbag Full of Love
"My daughter, Emma (in 7th grade), started back to school last week. There is a young boy in her class (call him Jake) who is quite overweight. He is treated very badly by other kids and even by the teachers. For several nights this week Emma came home from school upset about the fact that Jake gets picked on so much. She also mentioned that he had no school supplies as his family could not afford... posted on Oct 4, 6583 reads

The Beauty of Questions
"I don't think we always give questions the time and attention they deserve, often mistaking them as being mere stepping stones to an answer (...) When used properly, questions have the potential to connect us to the world of another. A heartfelt "How are you?" or "How was your day?" can become the bridge that keeps us in relationship to the lives of those we love. Sometimes, too, questions create... posted on Oct 26, 13794 reads

For Love of Sheeba the Cheetah
"Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of watching their children grow and leave the nest, but what happens when your baby is not yet two years old and can already run as fast as a car? No one knows exactly how a one-month-old cheetah cub made her way under the fence of the Ol Pejeta chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya in October of 2010. It's no small miracle that sanctuary workers spotted her before... posted on Nov 12, 0 reads

10 Amazing Stories for World Kindness Day
November 13th is World Kindness Day! In honor of this, we've compiled 10 diverse and heart-warming pieces honoring extraordinary acts of kindness, love and compassion by ordinary people. These stories include bus-drivers, bakers, basketball players, canine heroes and much more...reminding us of just how universal and essential the spirit of kindness is in our world.... posted on Nov 13, 228294 reads

For Love of Sheeba the Cheetah
"Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of watching their children grow and leave the nest, but what happens when your baby is not yet two years old and can already run as fast as a car? No one knows exactly how a one-month-old cheetah cub made her way under the fence of the Ol Pejeta chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya in October of 2010. It's no small miracle that sanctuary workers spotted her before... posted on Nov 18, 31954 reads

Knitting Behind Bars
"The first warden Lynn Zwerling approached with her idea recoiled as if she might bite. The second wouldn't meet with her. The third claimed to love the idea, then fell out of touch. Outrageous, said the fourth. The fifth, Margaret Chippendale, at a minimum-security men's prison outside Baltimore, didn't have much hope for Ms. Zwerling's plan either. "She brought the program to me and told me: 'Yo... posted on Nov 24, 10218 reads

Have You Seen the Wizard?
"I saw it when I stopped at a red light at the intersection of Lake City Way and 95th Street: an old, bearded man -- was he a wizard? -- staring down at the street from a sign on a telephone pole. I smiled. How weird. Before the light turned green, I took a picture. "Fun things out in the world for no apparent reason," I posted on Instagram. "Love those." An Instagramer named Ericka clued me in wi... posted on Nov 29, 8729 reads

Top 10 Kindness Stories of 2012!
Ever year we are amazed by everyday stories of compassion, warmth, and love that fill our world with with inspiration and hope. Collected here are 10 uplifting stories from 2012 about the kindness of ordinary people of all ages and from all walks of life.... posted on Jan 3, 6984 reads

A Manifesto for Living
"Here's to the ones who were told to stop. To give up. To quit trying. To shove themselves into a little box because the world never needed their arms stretched out wide. Here's to the ones who refused to listen. To the negatives. To the naysayers. To pessimists and the procrastinators. Here's to the ones who believe in Away. And Going. And Newness within Newness. And a world made to wash us and m... posted on Feb 6, 24829 reads

The Gift That Matters
"From a very young age, my oldest daughter has been a gift giver. Like most children, her offerings consisted of items that adults wouldn't ordinarily classify as gifts. Broken seashells, traumatized frogs, dying weeds, and misshapen rocks were often presented in small, dirt-laden hands beneath a wide smile. In the past two years my child's gift giving practices have moved up a notch. Gifts are no... posted on Feb 8, 0 reads

The Gift That Matters
"From a very young age, my oldest daughter has been a gift giver. Like most children, her offerings consisted of items that adults wouldn't ordinarily classify as gifts. Broken seashells, traumatized frogs, dying weeds, and misshapen rocks were often presented in small, dirt-laden hands beneath a wide smile. In the past two years my child's gift giving practices have moved up a notch. Gifts are no... posted on Feb 9, 26275 reads

A Family Living (And Thriving) Without Money
"A Berlin family of three has been living on practically nothing but love and the goodwill of others for more than two years and counting --not as a victims of the rough economy, but as activists who are on a money strike to protest what they call our "excess-consumption society.""... posted on Feb 23, 18040 reads

What Signs Are You Not Seeing?
"I want you to think about some of the big signs with big messages that I bet you wish you could wear around your neck sometimes so that people would be more gentle ... or even that you could put around the neck of someone you love ... my husband had an accident in 2004 that injured the frontal lobe of his brain. It has taken 6 years to get him back but in the middle there, between 2004 and now lo... posted on Mar 19, 75036 reads

Our Planet Through the Eyes of Children
"A competition launched by a National Geographic photographer titled Children's Eyes On Earth has drawn an astonishing number of striking images from children in 90 countries around the world. Over 4,000 photographs, on the themes I Love Nature and I Fear Pollution, were submitted by young people under the age of 17, from regions as diverse as the USA, Romania, Australia and Iran. The winning entr... posted on Mar 21, 12102 reads

The Stubborn Gladness of Elizabeth Gilbert
The bestselling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," about losing and finding herself, was the book that shot Elizabeth Gilbert to fame. It is now both a movie and travel tour. Yet there is much more to Gilbert than this runaway success. "Her collection of short stories, 'Pilgrims,' was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her debut novel, 'Stern Men,' was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2009 TED T... posted on Apr 7, 32726 reads

My Friend, My Companion: Lessons From Mia
In June 2010, Snigdha Manickavel and her husband Bapoorau brought home a little black puppy from an animal shelter in South India. Mia had been brought in with her mother and three of her siblings, and was the only one of the pups to survive. The young couple who took her home had no idea how deeply this bright-eyed newcomer would touch their hearts and transform their lives. In this short piece S... posted on Mar 31, 15015 reads

Roger Ebert Goes Gently Into That Good Night
Celebrated film critic Roger Ebert passed away yesterday from cancer. In 2009, he'd shared a beautiful reflection on his own mortality, called 'Go Gently Into That Good Night:' "I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born... posted on Apr 5, 40336 reads

5 Delightful Ways to Live What You Already Know
"In your heart of hearts, in the deepest place within yourself, you know the truth. The truth of living from love, of being free of whatever holds you back, of fullness, well-being, and contentment. Why pretend you don't know any longer? You might be afraid to acknowledge and live this knowing. You might be diverted by thinking your life doesn't measure up or you've been dealt a bad hand or you're... posted on Apr 14, 24537 reads

How to Change the World with Hot Cocoa & Neruda
"Wake up. Don't press snooze. Sling your legs over the side of the bed. Right. Left. Turn on music. Good, good music...You need a life soundtrack. Has anyone told you that yet? Pick out something spectacular from your closet. Feel good in your skin. Put on an item that tells some kind of story. Always have a story to tell, just a wrist or coat sleeve away. And if that yellow sweater ain't got a st... posted on May 28, 36506 reads

Stay A Lover of Little Things
"No matter what big cities you go off to and big opportunities you are graced with, always take time to acknowledge the little things. Never give up on the things that make you smile, because smiling is one of the most important things we can do in this world. Find time to just wander. With No Direction. No Plan. No Time Restrictions. Look for beauty everywhere you go. The ladybugs on the windowsi... posted on May 1, 58064 reads

Why Do We Not Ask For Help?
"My husband and I have just spent two weeks on a skiing vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with our three adult kids. We were greeted by other family members and their adult kids, so to say the least, there were Feltons everywhere. Unfortunately, one of the family members ("Nan") was out skiing on the first day and broke her shoulder in four places. She had never had a traumatic injury before. For... posted on Jul 18, 9414 reads

What My Mother Gave Me
"Mother's Day is this Sunday. While some people are racking their brains to think of the perfect way to show their love and appreciation for Mom, a group of distinguished women recently flipped that script and wrote about the most profound gift their own moms gave to them. Their essays are collected in the new book What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most." This art... posted on May 11, 10224 reads

A Moving Letter from Fiona Apple
Opening up her heart to her fans or "a few thousand friends I have not met yet" in her own words, Fiona Apple lays her vulnerabilities bare in this touching and most-humane note to cancel an upcoming concert tour so she can be with her dying dog. Her words share the deep joy and dedication she feels for her most cherished companion of 14 years, Janet - a rescued pitbull who seems the embodiment o... posted on Jun 16, 22152 reads

David Foster Wallace's Speech for the Ages
O, the maddening tedium of the everyday responsibilities of adult life! It plagues us because the "default setting" of our mentality is to feel victimized by circumstance. We place ourselves in the center of the universal narrative, making the plot-line all about ourselves. In his 2005 commencement address, novelist David Foster Wallace speaks refreshingly about personal empowerment. The freedom c... posted on May 16, 6045 reads

The Nature of Ambition
If you are lucky you will find something you love doing. Maybe you'll bake cream puffs or take alligators for walks. And maybe you'll find a way to make lots of money doing it. But what happens when your exotic animal walking business grows too fast and dog walkers band against you and you're faced with inner turmoil, fierce competition and self doubt? Find out in Grant Snider's insightful comic a... posted on Jul 16, 58644 reads

Mama Hill: A Gang's Worst Nightmare
This is an inspiring story of a 73-year-old former school teacher who has transformed her home into a refuge and resource center for local youth in Watts, CA. From her days of marching with MLK Jr., to raising kids as a single mom, and a long career serving in some of LA's toughest schools, Mama Hill (as she is endearingly called by her community) has a deep understanding of what urban youth need... posted on Jul 5, 8711 reads

An Abiding Ocean of Love: Artist Chris Jordan
The internationally acclaimed artist and cultural activist Chris Jordan explores contemporary mass culture and asks us to consider our roles in becoming more conscious stewards of the world. His work reflects the practices of making the invisible visible and developing empathy for all living things. In his series titled "Running the Numbers," for instance, he creates "beautiful works of art that ... posted on Jul 29, 83519 reads

Eckhart Tolle: The Easier Path
To the uninitiated, his persona -- a soft German-accented voice, his boyish visage, his love of vests -- doesn't exactly scream 'guru!' Yet Tolle is one of the world's most popular spiritual teachers and a literary powerhouse whose best-selling books 'The Power of Now' and 'A New Earth' have influenced millions. Born in Germany, educated at the universities of London and Cambridge, Tolle writes ... posted on Jun 23, 84531 reads

At 18, He Taught Us How To Live Before He Died
"Every teenager believes they are invincible," said Zach Sobiech. "It's not the kind of invincible like Superman; it's the kind of invincible like, 'I'll see you in five months.'" Zach didn't have five months. He died of cancer on 20 May 2013, shortly after his 18th birthday. This film gives us glimpses of Zack's enormous capacity for love, his gentle humor, haunting music, and the quiet courage w... posted on May 25, 10023 reads