Eight Verses for Training the Mind
The Prison Mindfulness Institute's mission is to provide prisoners, prison staff and prison volunteers, with the most effective, evidence-based tools for rehabilitation, self-transformation, and personal & professional development. In particular, they provide and promote the use of proven effective mindfulness-based interventions (MBI's). Their dual focus is on transforming individual lives as wel... posted on May 31, 19663 reads

Educate the Heart
Poet and author Shane Koyczan narrates this poignant short video on the importance of educating children's hearts as well as their minds. While children need knowledge to prepare them for life, those who love and care for them must also educate their hearts. Teaching compassion, acceptance, tolerance and respect are needed along with knowledge to adequately prepare children for the world.... posted on May 19, 3734 reads

Grieving My Way Into Loving the Planet
"In this excerpt from the new anthology 'A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Times,' journalist Dahr Jamail describes how Macy and her work helped him survive profound war trauma and climate grief. Macy, a scholar and teacher of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology, is the author of 13 books and a respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology. She orig... posted on May 22, 5420 reads

Manifesto for a Moral Revolution
"Moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: What are politics for? What is an economy for? Jacqueline Novogratz says the simplistic ways we take up such questions -- if we take them up at all -- is inadequate. Novogratz is an innovator in creative, human-centered capitalism. She has described her recent book, 'Manifesto for a Moral Revolution', as a love letter to the n... posted on May 26, 6878 reads

Deep Water-- A Conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee of the Global Oneness Project is a surfer, a filmmaker and an environmentalist inner and outer. His love of water led to his film, Elemental. The destruction of our water systems is a prime example of how separated we've become from whats fundamental to our survival. Rajendra Singh is one of the three people in Vaughan-Lees film. He brought seven rivers back to life in an ari... posted on Jun 3, 2473 reads

Educate the Heart
Poet and author Shane Koyczan narrates this poignant short video on the importance of educating children's hearts as well as their minds. While children need knowledge to prepare them for life, those who love and care for them must also educate their hearts. Teaching compassion, acceptance, tolerance and respect are needed along with knowledge to adequately prepare children for the world.... posted on Jun 11, 3471 reads

Totto Chan: The Little Girl at the Window
"This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an ideal school in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom, and love. This unusual school had old railroad cars for classrooms, and it was run by an extraordinary man--its founder and headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi--who was a firm believer in freedom of expression and activity. In real life, the Totto-chan of the... posted on Jun 23, 4032 reads

Hidden Stories: Paintings by Diane Ding
Painter Diane Ding reflects, "Painting this series was a healing practice. I do my art and hope it can spark my imagination in new ways, and only then do I hope the work can spark reactions in others to inspire a love of life and of life's mysteries. Humans are imperfect in many ways, but we are, deep down, one and the same; we share blood from genes from long ago, and we have no true reason to di... posted on Jul 3, 2256 reads

Freedom in Prison: The Story of My Great-Grandfather
Aryae Coopersmith recounts the moving story of his great-grandfather Shmuel, a Talmud scholar who was forced war front in Bosnia-Herzegovinae. When it was discovered he didn't have the makings of a soldier in him, he was given prison guard duty instead. "How was Shmuel, a naive young kid who knew nothing about prisons, going to run a prison full of battle-scarred soldiers? He offered the prisoners... posted on Jul 13, 6643 reads

DH Lawrence on Trees, Solitudes and What Roots Us
"A supreme challenge of human life is reconciling the longing to fulfill ourselves in union, in partnership, in love, with the urgency of fulfilling ourselves according to our own solitary and sovereign laws. Writing at the same time as Hesse, living in exile in the mountains, having barely survived an attack of the deadly Spanish Flu that claimed tens of millions of lives, the polymathic creative... posted on Jul 27, 6137 reads

Breaking Reins
'Breaking Reins' is a 13-minute gem of a film-- cut with precision, and sparkling with the truth of human experience. Epic themes fold into it compactly: Love and loss, grief's stranglehold, Nature's alchemy, and the resurrection of unbridled hope. Directed by a 14-year-old, shot over less than 2 days, and starring a first-time actor who in his day job has worked 1:1 with over 2,000 horses, 'Break... posted on Aug 7, 3876 reads

Dial Up the Magic of This Moment
"Few people have stood at the gates of hope through world wars and environmental crises and personal loss with more dignity, wisdom, and optimism than Joanna Macy during her six decades as a Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, and pioneering philosopher of ecology. Macy is also the world's greatest translator-enchantress of Rainer Maria Rilke, in whose poetry she found refuge upon the sudd... posted on Sep 1, 6552 reads

Unconditional Presence: Letting Yourself Have Your Experience
"The journey from self-hatred to self-love involves learning to meet, accept, and open to the being that you are. This begins with letting yourself have your experience. Genuine self-acceptance is not possible as long as you are resisting, avoiding, judging, or trying to manipulate and control what you experience. Whenever you judge the experience you're having, you're not letting yourself be as y... posted on Sep 17, 4633 reads

Voting as an Expression of Love and Gratefulness
"Though we typically think of voting in purely political terms, we can think about every choice we make as a vote and every moment in our lives as an election. We vote with our bodies, energy, money, time, attention, and more. How do our choices reflect our values and our vision for the world? When we explore voting and democracy as ongoing opportunities to choose our values and participate in col... posted on Oct 31, 4732 reads

The Soul of the Rose
"A bower of roses creates a special kind of sacred space, filled with a scent that can connect us to the past. Whether freshly cut and placed in a crystal vase with winter greens, or tumbling out of an old watering can, dried for a Victorian potpourri or the center of an herb filled tussie mussie, the rose connects us to our inner selves, to memories of another time, another place, as past and pr... posted on Nov 15, 8008 reads

Let's Be Well: A Video Game Born From a Child's Grief
Paula Toledo was the mother of a two-year old, and a two-week-old baby when she lost her husband to mental illness and suicide. In the wake of that devastating loss, "I felt the most important thing I could do was to care for myself and my children. And so I did -- albeit, while I laid in the dirt. Instead of clawing my way out, I decided to surrender and play there with my young children. Insulat... posted on Nov 23, 3894 reads

Lydia Fairhall Amplifies Love
"Lydia Fairhall has lived many lives in this one life. She is a Worimi woman, born on Bundjalung country, now living between the Kulin nations and Gubbi Gubbi country. From experiencing trauma in early life to an art-filled, soulful adult life as a mother, producer, executive, singer/songwriter and custodian of ancient wisdom, Lydia is the embodiment of compassionate resilience." More in this inte... posted on Dec 19, 4366 reads

When Love Rescued Christmas
At the tail-end of a year full of disasters, Laura Grace Weldon experienced a breakdown moment as she considered her children's empty Christmas stockings. Read on to hear how her 11-year-old daughter's heartfelt and hilarious response restored her perspective, and inspired a beautiful, anonymous act of generosity towards another family in crisis.... posted on Dec 25, 6429 reads

KindSpring: Top 10 Stories of 2020
"Every year KindSpring shares the top 10 most inspiring kindness stories it's featured over the year. These stories range from chance encounters of anonymous acts of kindness to deliberate, thoughtful ways that everyday people choose to make the world a better place for those around them. In an unprecedented year, when uncertainty and confusion covered a vast majority of the news headlines, we als... posted on Jan 2, 13738 reads

To Live and Love with a Dying World
"In the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, and a celebrated advocate for localism, ecological health, and small-scale farming. DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in 2008 by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands N... posted on Jan 4, 3941 reads

Tara Brach: True Refuge
"Tara Brach is an author, clinical psychologist, and the founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Tara about "the Trance of Unworthiness" --a state in which we believe that we are too inadequate, incomplete, and broken to love ourselves. Tara explains why we are so tough on ourselves and the steps ... posted on Jan 5, 6132 reads

We Must Deepen Our Capacity for Healing
"Today I want to feature some friends of mine who represent the face of love, truth, and justice. Each of them has an upcoming online event that you may want to participate in. People of good will need opportunities like this as we absorb the insurrection and the pandemic rages on." In the wake of disturbing recent events in America's capital, community leaders, activists, authors, artists and tea... posted on Jan 9, 8956 reads

The Sword & The Shield: The Struggle for Black Freedom
"To most Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. King represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. In his latest book, Peniel Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century's most iconic African American leaders, and addresses ... posted on Jan 12, 2744 reads

To Walk in Beauty Once Again
"Fragility sticks to everything alive like the quiet wetness of morning dew
in this global pandemic
as a doctor
I see this fragility
Threatening to swallow so much of what we love
like a large red blanket covering a small bed
and I can't unsee it."
So begins this powerful poem by Sriram Shamasunder, a physician whose work takes him to the front lin... posted on Jan 17, 7640 reads

Don Berwick: Health Care as a Loving Relationship
For the past 30 years, Donald Berwick has been one of the nation's leading authorities and innovators of quality and improvement in the U.S. healthcare system. A pediatrician by training, a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health, and a top health care administrator during the Obama Administration, Berwick challenges administrators, policy makers, and doctors to go... posted on Jan 26, 5318 reads

Burned Pages Don't Lie: A Genealogy Search
"A genealogy search can yield many things and go down many paths, but at its core, it is a story waiting to be told and a person to tell it." Ten years ago, artist Pat Benincasa, received a unique mission, one that arrived in the form of a charred book of Italian love poems. It had belonged to her grandfather. "What was he doing with this book and why was it burned?" What follows is the story of P... posted on May 16, 4679 reads

The World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane
In July of 2020, beloved ServiceSpace friends Kozo Hattori, and Sue Cochrane, came together for a virtual conversation in the presence of community. Both were navigating stark realities with cancer. Their luminous exchange was threaded with laughter, insight, tender truths, poignant moments and profound life-wisdom. Kozo peacefully "changed address," on March 1st, 2021. His transition came just we... posted on Mar 2, 8690 reads

All You Need Is Love?
"'Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?' That's the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book 'Humankind', and it's one that anyone involved in youth and community work like me wrestles with on a daily basis. But is Bregman's optimistic analysis grounded in reality?" More in this piece from OpenDemocracy.... posted on Mar 8, 4746 reads

A Conversation with Americ Azavedo: The Truth Demands to Be Live
For ten semesters, Americ Azevedo's seminar, 'Time, Money, and Love in the Age of Technology,' cultivated in students an awareness of the larger issues that form a context for their lives. He was well qualified. Earlier in his life he was reading a passage from Krishnamurti, "Live the Truth." That same day he stood in front of a room full of trainees, uneasy with his job and its values. He turned ... posted on Mar 11, 2231 reads

She Convinced a Community to Love a 'Bad Omen'
Leptoptilos dubius is the name of a gangly stork, "Once close to extinction, the bird has rebounded in biologist Purnima Devi Barman's home state of Assam in northeastern India. And that success, according to widespread consensus, is primarily because of Barman, who has single-handedly transformed the species from a reviled nuisance to a beloved cohabitant among a surprisingly broad cross-section ... posted on Mar 19, 5769 reads

Parker Palmer Muses on the Season
"I will wax romantic about spring and its splendors in a moment, but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being create... posted on Mar 21, 14513 reads

Picture a Face
"Your phone rings in the middle of the night. As you reach blindly to answer, do you fear that someone you love has been in an accident? Has suddenly died? For a time, early in my marriage to Jihong, such calls would often wake us. The phone was on Jihong's side of the bed. He'd lift the receiver to his ear and mumble a dazed hello. "Go back to Japan!" a loud male voice would yell, or something wo... posted on Mar 31, 4604 reads

Four Winged Poems
"This time of year, the birds catch my attention and hold it. The robins are back, or maybe they're just bolder. I see them most in this early spring season, when the worms are warming up out of the soil. The goldfinches are muted still, their diets not yet offering the delights that turn their plumage bright. And the mourning doves are crying all day long...I love the way that watching them helps... posted on Apr 14, 4092 reads

Crisis Kitchen
Crisis Kitchen is a mutual aid group that has emerged during the coronavirus pandemic in Portland, Oregon, as a means to help people thrive. It was begun by laid off restaurant workers as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened and caused more and more people to become food insecure. High quality, delicious meals are prepared and delivered by volunteers, utilizing donated space and are available for free. ... posted on Apr 16, 1784 reads

The Voice of the River
In 1973, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prepared to open a new dam project, flooding miles of the Stanislaus River Canyon, a beautiful, pristine river valley flowing from the western Sierra Nevada mountains into California's Central Valley. In 1979, Mark Dubois chained himself to a boulder behind the New Melones Dam and threw away the key. "If you guys are going to flood 9 million years of evolu... posted on Apr 22, 2467 reads

Karma Quilts: One Woman's Labor of Love Offering
"In her heartwarming book, My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Remen says, "You do not need money to be a philanthropist. We all have assets. You can befriend life with your bare hands." I am grateful for being able to befriend life with my bare hands through the making of quilts and prayer shawls." Jane Jackson is a mother, grandmother, former mid-wife, writer and much more. Over the decades she h... posted on Apr 29, 7261 reads

Love is the Last Word
"To understand anything -- another person's experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics -- is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge -- which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of... posted on May 21, 5805 reads

How to Write Love
"Stranger Care is Sarah Sentilless heartbreaking, heart-expanding account of her relationship with her foster daughter, Coco--although saying that is a bit like saying Walden is a book about a pond. It is, but ponds are just the beginning. It is, and yet, well never look at ponds the same way again. After Stranger Care, Ill never look at mothers the same way again. Or daughters. Or parenting. Or c... posted on Jun 12, 3472 reads

Lament for Syria: A Young Poet Looks Back
"I wrote about all my memories: how I woke up in the morning to my grandmother drinking coffee next to the jasmine tree listening to the music of the Lebanese singer Fairuz. I wrote about how my siblings and I walked to school with our neighbors and how we saw a boy smoking and then hiding the cigarette from his older brother.
I didn't want Syria to be known just for its war. I wanted to co... posted on Jun 24, 3617 reads

The Extra Mile
At 85 years old, Oom Hollie embodies the spirit of Ubuntu, "I am who I am because of who we are." Known as The Iron Man because of the strength and resilience of his body, mind and spirit, he and his family suffered great loss many years ago. With the support of their community they were able to move forward and thrive. He is in love with the land and with growing food, not for profit but to share... posted on Jun 26, 2225 reads

Leaf Seligman: On Redemption and Beautiful Scars
"As humans, we inevitably experience harm: we feel hurt, we get hurt, and we hurt others. We free ourselves from this experience not by imagining we can escape harm but knowing we can heal it--moving from wound to scar--and then learning to love the scars. This can, of course, be the work of a lifetime. Luckily, I have long loved scars. When I was four, I accidentally cut my left eye. As a result,... posted on Jul 4, 5327 reads

For Love of Wild Horses
Wildife biologist, Craig Downer's, childhood experience with his trusted horse, Poco, and their many adventures in the wild lands of Nevada, led to a lifetime of passionate advocacy for the protection of wild horses and burros in the Western United States. His is often a lonely struggle between raising consciousness about the long term ecological benefits these animals bring and the forces more co... posted on Jul 29, 1817 reads

Vandana Shiva: For Love of Mother Earth
"Vandana Shiva started out in quantum physics, something her school didnt even teach, but which she taught herself well enough to eventually study for a PhD in Canada. Somewhere in there, she met the tree huggers of the Chipko movement in the forests of Uttarakhand, the forests her father worked when she was a child, and it became clear that a life other than the one she intended lay in front of h... posted on Aug 23, 4897 reads

Where I'm From...
Appalachian poet George Ella Lyon's poem, "Where I'm From," evokes the particular world of a particular childhood through a poem quilted from scraps and patches of memory... Memories of specific sights and sounds, objects, instructions, tragedies, and delights. It has been used in classrooms around the world as a prompt for people to write their own versions of, "Where I'm From." More recently in ... posted on Sep 23, 6836 reads

Place, Personhood & the Hippocampus
"'Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,' the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her lyrical love letter to her native Highlands, echoing an ancient intuition about how our formative physical landscapes shape our landscapes of thought and feeling. The word 'genius' in the modern sense, after all, originates in the Latin phrase genius loci -- 'the s... posted on Sep 26, 4295 reads

For Love of Nectar: The Dazzling Sunbirds of India
When the sun is out in India, and if one is lucky to have access to a dense patch of native trees in flagrant, fragrant bloom, one is quite likely to see darting sunbirds. Sunbirds are to India what hummingbirds are to the Americas. Small birds with curved beaks that guzzle flower nectar. Dressed in an astounding colour palette that include hues as vivid as metallic green, lime yellow, deep hibisc... posted on Oct 22, 5867 reads

Inhabiting the Ground of Being
"The Realization Process is a way of uncovering an experience of this very subtle consciousness that we actually can experience pervading our whole body. We experience that and we transcend that individuality at the same time. We experience oneness, this ground of being, pervading our own body, and everything around us. So, in other words, our consciousness becomes subtle enough to pervade all of ... posted on Oct 19, 3159 reads

Ecosystems & the Practice of Love
"One of the things that I have tried to do in my work is to understand our reality as a 'commons' -- to see the whole of reality as a shared process of mutual transformation and productivity. This term '"commons" has been coined to express the idea of shared culture and resources being accessible to all members of a community. I use the term because being alive means that we are always participati... posted on Nov 1, 2441 reads

Listen: Four Love Songs
Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmentalist. Her many books and awards include Holdfast: A Home in the Natural World, and Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change, and, most recently, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. In the following essay, "she considers the looming loss of wild mus... posted on Nov 21, 3783 reads

ThanksBeing with Rumi
"It's Thanksgiving time...the holiday of humility and togetherness. The holiday that asks us to look within toward that ever-present beacon of gratitude which is often obscured by the frenetic world we've created. It reminds us to give, to make amends, to repair ruptured friendships and family ties. It leans into sustenance and nourishment. The table becomes the altar. The family become precious g... posted on Nov 25, 7613 reads