be deported for committing misdemeanors as minor as running a red light. Other laws like Senate Bill 4, passed by the Texas Legislature, allow police to ask people about their immigration status after they are detained. These policies make immigrants and people of color feel like they’re always under surveillance and that, at any moment, they may be pulled over to be questioned and detained. During Hurricane Harvey, the immigrant community was hesitant to go to the shelters because images of immigration authorities patrolling the area began to surface online. It made them feel like their own city was against them at a time when they needed them most. Constitution-free zones crea... posted on Jul 22 2021 (29,673 reads)

FILM BECOMES THE FIRE In 2017, we released our labor of love film, TeachMeToBeWILD: A Story of Hurt Children and their Animal Healers. This film is a universal healing story that brings together many interconnected elements: children, animals, nature, silence and the power of safe, non-judgemental listening spaces. One of our greatest inspirations to make the film was witnessing how Steve Karlin and John Malloy do not teach the children—rather, they create a “safe space” where the children  learn experientially. As we began screening the film in schools, juvenile detention centers, community groups and spiritual institutions, we experienced ... posted on Mar 20 2019 (8,631 reads)

because I can talk up a storm, I love, even crave, silence. I feel safe in it. I know I won't blurt out something foolish or harmful, something I'll be sorry for. That's probably why if you ask spiritual teachers for advice on how to practice wise speech, they're likely to answer with one word: silence. Like the rain necessary for flowers to bloom, silence is essential for speaking with clarity. A Hindu adage, echoed in other cultures, reflects this relationship: If what you have to say is truthful, kind, and useful, then say it; if not, silence is best. My earliest lesson in the value of silence and the painful consequences of unkind words occurred when I was... posted on Apr 14 2019 (12,483 reads)

master’s degree in theology from Harvard University and a master’s in social work from the University of Toronto, Stephen Jenkinson was the director of counselling services in the palliative care department at a major Canadian hospital  in  Toronto for several years, where he encountered the deep “death phobia” and “grief illiteracy” that most of his patients and their loved ones brought to their deathbeds. This work motivated Jenkinson to encourage people to prepare for their death well before its arrival so that they might be free to “participate emotionally in their deaths as they participate in other major life even... posted on Apr 26 2019 (22,318 reads)

midwife in Oslo, Norway. | Karen Beate Nøsterud/norden.org via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5 DK. "Who is there in this world but Mother? I am Mother, you are Mother, Mother is mine, Mother is yours, Everything is Mother." Traditional Baul Song from Bengal. Since 2012 I have walked thousands of miles throughout the United Kingdom and spoken with people around the world, asking them to share their experiences of love and connection. What are the loving narratives of their lives? What does love mean to them? As the journey has grown so the experiences have deepened, and the sharings with others have deepened too. What started as a personal jour... posted on May 14 2019 (5,902 reads)

of Norwich. Credit: Flickr/Matt Brown. CC BY 2.0. Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart by the Great Papal Schism. She also lived through the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, during which thousands of disenfranchised tenant farmers and laborers marched all over England looting monasteries, burning records of their serfdom and debt, and killing their hated overlords. Most tragic of all, from the time Julian was six years old, she endured repeated outbreaks of the Great Pestilence - later termed t... posted on Apr 21 2019 (14,751 reads)

by Kevin Laminto on Unsplash My mother was an early tree whisperer. On sweltering summer days she’d dragoon her three young children into schlepping buckets of water across the road to a spare suburban park so that we might quench newly planted striplings and coax them into leaf. More than sixty years later these trees are muscular giants offering shade and beauty and a generous green bower. Our back garden harboured an orchard of fig, apple, citrus, but best of all a broad hipped, sturdy mulberry tree that grew barely a skip from the backdoor. Uncle George, a man who loved the grain of wood so much he crafted beautiful wooden bowls in his workshop, was a bachelor with a mi... posted on May 5 2019 (7,301 reads)

January, we shared a list of 20 social change books to read in 2019. As was bound to happen, we’ve found more interesting books (and one report) that we want to check out, and that you might be interested in too. Some of these are from our partners like Enspiral Foundation, The P2P Foundation, and Sharing Cities Sweden. Others were recommended to us. Take a look at what we’ll be reading and let us know what you think. If you have ideas for other books we should check out, let us know at info@shareable.net. We’ll consider your submission in the next edition. Below are summaries, excerpted from each book’s website: Better Work Toge... posted on Apr 28 2019 (8,971 reads)

excerpt From Living in Flow: The Science of Synchronicity and How Your Choices Shape Your World by Sky Nelson-Isaacs, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2019 by Sky Nelson-Isaacs. Reprinted by permission of publisher. Stephen Gaertner, a Czechoslovakian Jew living in Hamburg, Germany, was eight years old in 1937 when he came down with tuberculosis. Stephen’s doctor advised him to go to a sanatorium in the Bavarian mountains, as was the common prescription of the day for treatment of tuberculosis. (Antibiotics were not yet fully developed….) Even at that young age, Stephen had a sense of the unrest occurring in his country. He protested to his mothe... posted on May 7 2019 (9,575 reads)

The Elusive Obvious: The Convergence of Movement, Neuroplasticity and Health by Moshe Feldenkrais, published by North Atlantic Books; Reprint edition copyright © 2019. Reprinted by permission of publisher. Many things are not obvious. Most psychotherapies use speech to get to unconscious, forgotten, early experience. Yet feelings go on in ourselves long before speech is learned. Some pay attention not to what is said but to how it is said. Doing this enables one to find the intentions behind the structure of the phrasing, so that one can get to the feelings that dictated the particular way of phrasing. In short, how one says what one does is at least as important as what one say... posted on Apr 29 2019 (4,789 reads)

Fetzer' Institute's blog: Each year, as spring begins, we share a reflection on the season by Parker Palmer. In 1995 Parker wrote a welcome for the Fetzer Institute's newly built retreat center, Seasons, which included a reflection on each of the four seasons. Here we excerpt his musings on spring in the Upper Midwest where he lives and where the Fetzer Institute is located. While the seasons may differ in your part of the world and the movement of Parker’s "inner seasons" may be quite unlike your own, we offer his reflections in the hope that you might be encouraged to explore the seasons of your own life and work. I will wax ro... posted on Mar 21 2021 (14,593 reads)

Fox M.A. is the founder and director of the Prison Yoga Project, (PYP), an organization dedicated to establishing yoga and mindfulness programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers worldwide. Since 2002, Fox has been teaching yoga and meditation to prisoners at San Quentin Prison as well as other California State prisons. The Prison Yoga Project helps incarcerated men and women build a better life through trauma-informed yoga with a focus on mindfulness. It helps prisoners make grounded, conscious choices instead of reactive ones. Fox says the practice of yoga was “a gradual awakening” for him. With a background in international affairs, he was recruited into ... posted on Apr 25 2019 (4,961 reads)

followed a path that led me into one of these woods, through a tunnel of green gloom and smoky blue dusk. It was very quiet, very remote, in there. My feet sank into the pile of the pine needles. The last bright tatters of sunlight vanished. Some bird went whirring and left behind a deeper silence. I breathed a different air, ancient and aromatic." A joyful observer of the quotidian, playwright, novelist and essayist J.B. Priestley shares his heart's delight in the quiet manifestations of beauty and magic in everyday life--a quiet pine wood at dusk, a spray of plum blossoms, the light and warmth of sunbeams. Celebrate the everyday wonders of the natural world with J.B. Pries... posted on May 2 2019 (6,602 reads)

handmade Gratitude Tree has hung in our hallway for years. We keep the tree lively by writing on leaves made of brightly colored paper, then tape them to the tree. It’s usually filled with life affirming reminders like hugs from Daddy, going to the library, bike rides, playing cards with Grammy, and yes, winning arguments.  The year my youngest son Sam was six, he got so inspired that he said he was grateful for a hundred things. A bit dubiously I offered to type the list while he dictated. I was astonished as he kept going until the list numbered 117. Listing what we’re grateful for is increasingly popular. Studies show that those who practice gratitude are h... posted on May 6 2019 (8,186 reads)

Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Hermann Hesse, translated and with commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer, published by North Atlantic Books, English translation and commentary copyright © 2011 by Ludwig Max Fischer.  All poems by Hermann Hesse from Sämtliche Werke, Band 10: Die Gedichte, copyright © 2002 by Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH, all rights reserved and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books. Nature: Source of Strength and Solace (commentary from Ludwig Max Fischer, Phd) Nature was Hesse’s first and foremost teacher: the garden, the forest, an... posted on Jun 9 2019 (9,017 reads)

earth is a machine with inputs and outputs, and the same is true for management. Our MBA thinking looks at an organization as a well-oiled machine, where we have human resources as inputs, and then you try to maximize your outputs. And it's full of engineering language. And it's just fascinating to see how consistently organizations who are led by some of these visionary founders or leaders talk about their organization as a living system, as a living entity, as an ecosystem, and use images and language and metaphors from nature.. And so that has indeed profound implications, like, a machine needs to be programmed. Otherwise it doesn't move. You need a strategic plan, and t... posted on May 13 2019 (7,832 reads)

life and also to marvel at the intricate web of dependence and care that holds us all. May we honor the work of taking care of each other. It is in the recognition of our profound interconnection with one another that we can rise up to protect what we hold most sacred. Let us be moved too by the thousands of activist mothers before us. Let us appreciate and celebrate our deep bonds with each other.  And let us not forget that we need each other’s care. The images above are excerpted from Everyday Gratitude © by A Network for Grateful Living; book design and lettering by Alethea Morrison; watercolors and cover illustration © Katie Ebe... posted on May 12 2019 (8,482 reads)

Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province, China.. Credit: By Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org - Original Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future. That’s because the problems these ideas are designed to solve, critical as they are, are symptoms of an even more profound problem: the implicit values of a gl... posted on May 16 2019 (6,642 reads)

own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so. Consider these two old beliefs that carry the wisdom and challenge of holding and listening. The first is the age-old notion that when holding a shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean. It always seems to work. The scrutiny of medicine has revealed that when you hold that shell to your ear, you actually hear your own pulsations, the ocean of your blood being pla... posted on Jul 26 2019 (9,363 reads)

following is an adapted excerpt from A New Republic of the Heart by Terry Patten, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2018 by Terry Patten. Reprinted by permission of publisher. In this pivotal moment of truth for our species, a whole wave of radical conversations is inevitable. For these conversations to really make a difference, we must break through our personas and our inauthentic poses. This is a deeper level of discourse than has hitherto seemed thinkable in public—disarming, tender, and authentic. To my knowledge, we have never had such a public conversation. Any such conversation requires an extraordinary degree of freedom and clarity and intelligence&mda... posted on Jun 2 2019 (5,749 reads)