is glór, voice of the river, say, voice of the wind that shakes the barley in gort, a cornfield. And gort is the Irish name for the letter: field full of guh-grain, granary of G-ness. H by David Hockney “H is for Homosexual” for Martin Amis, who relays a heartbreaking childhood memory of awakening to his difference, then writes: I wish I understood homosexuality. I wish I could intuit more about it — the attraction to like, not to other. Is it nature or nurture, a predisposition, is it written in the DNA? When I think about it in relation to myself … its isolation and disquiet become something lifelong. In my mind I call homosexualit... posted on Dec 16 2017 (7,155 reads)

question is not what to do but how to see. Seeing is the most important thing—the act of seeing. I need to realize that it is truly an act, an action that brings something entirely new, a new possibility of vision, certainty and knowledge. This possibility appears during the act itself and disappears as soon as the seeing stops. It is only in this act of seeing that I will find a certain freedom. So long as I have not seen the nature and movement of the mind, there is little sense in believing that I could be free of it. I am a slave to my mechanical thoughts. This is a fact. It is not the thoughts ­themselves that enslave me but my ­attachment to them. In order to under... posted on Dec 20 2017 (8,061 reads)

to heart and work on. Then it happens, of course, that you are busy meditating at work and then go home and discover that you haven't really walked your talk, as completely as you ought to have. Aren't there some things that you could do better in your relationships with other people? And the answer is, yes absolutely, and I continue to work on that, even today. Mish: First, it seems like some thrive on confrontation and some shun it -- wondering where does one’s basic nature determine how you handle conflict? Second, do you feel that there is a direct correlation between one's aversion to conflict and the number of wounded places within? Ken: Beautiful! In... posted on Nov 27 2017 (14,990 reads)

shows that dreaming is not just a byproduct of sleep, but serves its own important functions in our well-being. We often hear stories of people who’ve learned from their dreams or been inspired by them. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream or of Mendeleev’s dream-inspired construction of the periodic table of elements. But, while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more skeptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming... posted on Apr 22 2018 (17,756 reads)

to everyone in the circle. We want everyone’s best interest to rise and for us to come up with a plan to attend to those interests. SR: Restorative Justice is posited as an alternative to our criminal justice system. Can you talk about our current model and why it needs remedying? SB: Our current criminal legal system—and I call it our criminal legal system, and not the criminal justice system because I don’t think it produces justice—is adversarial in nature. Any other government-operated process that produces a 75% failure rate would never be tolerated. But the fact is that over 75% of people who have been incarcerated return to our prisons. It&rs... posted on Mar 5 2018 (19,053 reads)

and frame of mind, we can manage our time effectively and make room for everything that’s important, we mentally free ourselves of the burden of having to make difficult decisions: to work out, or to have coffee with a friend; to read our children a bedtime story, or to catch up on the day’s emails; to walk the dog an extra block, or to turn home. The order and time-tables we impose upon everything from our inboxes to our leisure time disguise dilemmas of a far more pressing nature: which paths will we pursue, what relationships will we prioritize, what causes will we abandon over the course of our undeniably short lives? Ironically, the highly sought-after peace o... posted on Dec 26 2017 (21,296 reads)

truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,”Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceiv... posted on Mar 18 2018 (19,860 reads)

that acknowledges them as valuable, they are best able to interact, negotiate, compromise and simply feel good about themselves and others. This graciousness can be a cornerstone to thoughtful effective parenting. An Antidote to Oblivion Gratitude involves letting yourself accept the gifts that come to you, both material and immaterial. Most of us feel it would be rude to refuse a material gift offered by a friend. Yet we often fail to notice the countless gifts offered to us by nature or good health or delightful experiences. It seems to me, that failing to notice is rather like refusing a gift. In both cases, we distance ourselves and miss out on full enjoyment. Grateful li... posted on Jul 1 2018 (17,514 reads)

I used to sleep outdoors on the ground. As daylight faded, the entire edge of the galaxy appeared, a great arc of stars burning from horizon to horizon across the night. Looking up, I would feel my everyday human smallness begin to dissolve into that immensity. Under the depths of the cosmos, questions rose in my mind: Who are my mother and my father, my sister and my brother? Who are my ancestors? The presence of the stars felt like an imperative demand: consider, now, the true nature of your belonging. Reflect deeply upon your source and origin, and know that each one is the child of more than humankind. Certain animals have shared with me this sense of expanded belongin... posted on Mar 25 2018 (16,919 reads)

added something to that. I got this line into the movie, actually. He added to that. He said, "Dan, the difference between is you practice gymnastics." He said, "I practice everything." What did that mean? That sounds strange. What did he mean he practices everything? Normally, we do the laundry, we do our homework, we do the dishes. We do things all the time but how many of us practice the dishes? Practice the laundry—folding it for example? Practice doing our signature? Practice walking, practice breathing? The moment we're practicing something with the idea of improving it, we become more absorbed in that. What if I had practiced taking off my sweatsh... posted on Jul 13 2018 (14,043 reads)

surprise, fear, and disgust. But a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that there are at least 27 different but interlocking emotions. For the study, the researchers—including GGSC faculty director Dacher Keltner—asked more than 850 participants to watch over 2,000 video clips. The five-second clips included births and proposals, deaths and natural disasters, silly slips and risky stunts, spiders and wondrous nature, sexual acts and awkward handshakes. In response to the clips, participants either wrote freely about the emotions they felt, rated how much they felt 34 different feelings, or rated their f... posted on Jun 21 2018 (19,207 reads)

are their lives like outside of work? How complex is the private life they deal with daily? Or look at human history. Over and over it testifies to the indomitable human spirit rising up against all forms of oppression. No matter how terrible the oppression, humans find ways to assert themselves. No system of laws or rules can hold us in constraint; no set of directions can tell us exactly how to proceed. We will always bring ourselves into the picture, we will always add our unique signature to the situation. Whether leaders call us innovative or rebellious depends on their comprehension of what's going on. The inalienable freedom to create one's life shows up in othe... posted on Apr 11 2018 (14,274 reads)

there a secret to happiness? Is happiness spending time with loved ones, or spending time alone in nature? Is it losing yourself as you dance to music, or finding yourself while quietly meditating? The secret to happiness is actually all of these things and more, and it varies from country to country and culture to culture. According to the annual World Happiness Report, Norway is the happiest country, scoring highly in its approach to caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance. Meanwhile, the Happy Planet Index ranks Costa Rica as the happiest country on Earth. While opposites when it comes to climate, the two ... posted on Feb 21 2018 (21,442 reads)

a small town in the Italian Alps said “Yes!” to a pesticide-free future. The following excerpt is adapted from A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved Its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals — a tiny village in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy — had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. Yet the town is located high up in the Alps, and the conventional apple producers, heavily dependent on pesticides, were steadily overtaking the valley below. Aid... posted on Mar 2 2018 (13,878 reads)

   “We can’t use these. They look like heirlooms!” Gina, a guest at my holiday gathering, holds up one of the elaborately embroidered napkins from the buffet table. “Where’d you get them?”     “Out of a dumpster. The tablecloth and those candleholders were in there, too.”     “You can’t be serious! Why would they be in a dumpster?” The shock in her voice carried across the room, and others looked up.     It’s common that women ask where something came from, especially if it’s an attractive article of clothing or new addition to the house. Bu... posted on Apr 1 2018 (1,243 reads)

We don’t have the capacity to kill just that part of a person who committed a terrible crime who then deserves punishment. We kill all these other things. We kill this person who’s capable of care-giving, this person who’s capable of generosity and compassion, who might be a father, a brother, a son or a daughter, a friend, who might be all of these things that every human being strives to be. And that’s why it becomes a sentence that is disproportionate by its very nature. That made me see how unacceptable the death penalty is. It made me more burdened when people couldn’t get stays of execution ‘cause I realised what a tragedy that was. But in ma... posted on Mar 27 2018 (7,870 reads)

is we all know that “the boat is leaking and the captain lied” as Leonard Cohen once sang; we know the statistics about climate change and acidified oceans and decapitated mountains. The news that the numbers of kittiwakes on St Kilda have plummeted or that the ancient trees of Sheffield have been felled pains us. We don’t numb out that pain, nor do we indulge it in the see-saw of hope and despair. We know the Earth is not an abstract concept of environment or ‘nature’ and requires a very different relationship, one that wrests the material of life out of the hands of the ‘quants’ and economists and gives it due respect. The question we fac... posted on May 22 2018 (5,557 reads)

of a Jeannette Winterson or a Tolkien. But myth itself is connected to time and space. It has to pass through many mouths and many communities, until it takes on the kind of weight that means it’s authentically a myth. So my challenge for anybody is to regard themselves as a kind of a mythological scholar in training. And to go out and to look through the old anthologies, get a library card, and try and collect these stories that are waiting to say something vital about the nature of our times. And the second part of that challenge, the most crucial part of the research, will be your individual expression of that story. It doesn’t have to be an oral storytelli... posted on May 13 2018 (7,712 reads)

these two together synergistically. We connect more with the heart, extending the circles of compassion more widely to include responsibility to others. Eight Ways of Cultivating Heartfulness This book is organized around a way of being and living that is called heartfulness. In my grandmother’s teachings and in my life stories I identify eight principles for cultivating heartful living. These are learned from observing life circumstances, practicing self-reflection, studying human nature, practicing mindfulness, counseling, teaching, parenting, and partnering. There is considerable overlap in the principles, which form the core of the chapters in this book, and there is nothing... posted on Mar 8 2018 (14,129 reads)

coherence with the rest of life. My letters, phone calls, and modest support of particular environmental organizations will continue, but the most intimate, meaning-saturated action I take on behalf the wild Earth is to engage as if stone, lizard, yucca, lichen, and cloud are intelligent, ensouled beings, with their own longings, and as if the land and creatures are sacred presences and as if acknowledgement of their subjectivity and nobility encourages them to reveal more of their animate nature. I know for sure that I come more alive with such enactments, shiver with a sense of participating with sentient presences, and with life’s great intelligence. In our time of disturban... posted on Mar 15 2018 (19,458 reads)