knowing the extremes of sadness and joy we can never fully know or feel all that life is.   Melancholy by Edgar Degas. Credit: Edgar Degas [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. “There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.” Leo Tolstoy What if melancholy can be passed down through generations, not just culturally but at the level of our DNA? Melancholia has long been seen as a key element in artistic inspiration, along with a way of turning pain and sorrow into healing, and ultimately, an acceptance of life’s ... posted on Jun 26 2017 (12,747 reads)

are those who give a lot to others? They’re the first to help and the first to speak a kind word. Life rewards them with opportunities. Or showers them with gifts. Call me crazy but I think that love is physically visible on these kinds of people’s faces. You may not see it all the time but to me people who are generally giving and loving show this with their eyes, their brows and their smile. You can’t really help but liking them back for their loving and kind nature. I believe that because of this love should be like confetti. It’s not something that should be saved for important people or rare events but rather be spread all around to those who s... posted on Jul 6 2017 (15,614 reads)

Webster and others are now advocating is something far more radical than recent efforts to reduce waste. In its purest form, Sustainability 3.0 — the circular economy — emulates the natural world. Allen Hershkowitz is a veteran recycling advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-founder/president emeritus of the Green Sports Alliance. He noted in his opening keynote address at the Wharton conference, The Circular Economy: From Concept to Business Reality, “In nature, there is no waste. One organism’s waste becomes nutrients for another organism.” In the same way, the circular economy moves past the notion of consumable products, viewing manu... posted on Jul 18 2017 (7,062 reads)

is the first thought that comes to your mind when you think of Rajasthan? Definitely, desert, heat and infinite stretches of dunes that go on for miles with no greenery in sight. One man is on a mission to change it for real. With repeated observations of climate change occurring across the globe, such acts towards nature conservation is the need of the hour. What started in 2003 as a collective effort to resuscitate few Neem trees in the campus of the college where he was teaching, later saw Shyam Sundar Jyani, an associate professor at Government Dungar College, Bikaner, and his students planting saplings across the state for 11 years. Coming up with concepts such as Famil... posted on Jul 20 2017 (7,533 reads)

as the source of her incredible success in the kitchen. “ ‘These are my children,’ says Jeong Kwan as she ushers me through her garden. ‘I know their characters well, but even after all this time, they surprise me every day.’ ” With that she chuckled as she gazed over her garden. Cucumber Becomes Me It is in this way that Kwan’s own garden is the source of the magic she creates in her kitchen.  She gives herself over to being a part of nature, and in turn nature does not hold back from her. Her garden is abundant but it is not an orderly, controlled plot. It is more of a patch that is a haven to the animals as much as a food source ... posted on Jul 26 2017 (17,813 reads)

is from the word re-speculate, which means to look a second time.  Often when confronted with life, we succumb to “first gaze.”  First gaze asks, “How is this about me?”  Or “How do I make it about me?” Through respect, we recognize that first gaze does not always satisfy. How do we learn to give that important second look that releases us from ego tyranny?   Fr. Richard Rohr suggests that we go outdoors in nature, find one object and grant it respect.  It can be a flower, a leaf, a lizard, a pebble, a bug.    We respect this tiny, unassuming part of nature by seeing it and loving it ... posted on Sep 14 2017 (16,021 reads)

or her own way and always alone, each member of his group will repeat this process as he or she starts the day. This is not a ceremony or ritual repeated just once a week or once each day. It is a way of life. In the Native American culture, everything from the ordinary to the monumental is sacred. Rather than everything being an expression of God, the perception is that everything contains the presence of God. Everything is part of the Great Circle. Human beings are part of creation and nature, not at the top of it. Everywhere, everything, and every moment is a church. Every moment contains a prayer. A Lakota saying teaches, “Things always work out if you keep your prayer in fr... posted on Aug 18 2018 (12,482 reads)

analytical — there’s a massive set of changes that happen. And everybody in this room, I daresay, is, to some extent, WEIRD. [laughter] Ms. Tippett: [laughs] OK. A third premise is that morality “binds and blinds.” Mr. Haidt: This is the one I’m most excited about. This is the one that I feel unlocks so many of our hardest problems, particularly the ones we’re here to talk about tonight. So if you go with me that morality is part of human nature, that it is something that evolved in us as our primate ancestors became cultural creatures that lived in larger groups, then these groups competed with each other, and the groups that were abl... posted on Sep 21 2018 (17,753 reads)

so when they got there, they called the heart doctors and they called everybody who was on staff that could possibly save her and me, and they did --they saved both of us. I was born and she didn't die, but she was so weak that she was immediately transferred. They had to make a spot for her in Omaha so that she could have this heart surgery. In the meantime, my dad took me home to the Badlands in South Dakota where I got to meet my grandmother. It was there I started learning about nature. She spoke Lakota to me. I was in a crib, way out in the middle of the grasslands, in a cabin. So the window was open and I learned from a very small age about being alone, because it was me, h... posted on Jan 7 2018 (9,323 reads)

urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.” Perched midway in time between Thoreau and Solnit is a timeless celebration of the psychological, creative, and spiritual rewards of walking by the Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859–July 6, 1932), best known for the 1908 children’s novel The Wind in the Willows — a book beloved by pioneering conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson, whose own splendid prose about nature shares a kindred sensibility with Grahame’s. Kenneth Grahame Five years after publishing The Wind in the Willows, Grahame penned a beautiful short essay for a commemor... posted on Jan 27 2018 (12,735 reads)

leadership and the learning organization—particularly its capacity to self-organize. Meg is an author of nine books including the bestselling book, Leadership and the New Science and her new book, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, where she turns to the new science of living systems to help leaders persevere in this time of great turmoil. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Meg and I spoke about the cyclical nature of life and how we are currently in a destructive end phase of the cycle of history in the United States. How we need to see this clearly and also the despair we can feel in looking at this rea... posted on Mar 29 2018 (27,976 reads)

life. You’ve run the Aspen Institute (a nonpartisan educational and policy studies think tank), had leadership roles at CNN, and were the editor at Time. You’ve also been the biographer of some of the greatest innovators in human history. Your new book is Leonardo da Vinci. How do you write a biography of someone who lived half a millennium ago? Isaacson: The good thing about Leonardo da Vinci is he left 7,200 pages of notebooks. We can look every day at this mind dancing across nature. We all keep notes digitally these days. When I tried to do Steve Jobs’ period in the 1990s — when he was in the wilderness between his stints at Apple, he worked at NeXT Compute... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,837 reads)

leadership and the learning organization—particularly its capacity to self-organize. Meg is an author of nine books including the bestselling book, Leadership and the New Science and her new book, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, where she turns to the new science of living systems to help leaders persevere in this time of great turmoil. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Meg and I spoke about the cyclical nature of life and how we are currently in a destructive end phase of the cycle of history in the United States. How we need to see this clearly and also the despair we can feel in looking at this rea... posted on May 17 2018 (16,481 reads)

possibly if I met those people in person, I would never begin to trust their judgements. But somehow they have an authority because they’re in print or they’re on screen. And so if they can inspire our trust, life certainly should! Part of the whole cycle of trust is, as you said, working one’s way through the anxiety. One has to make wrong decisions and do things the wrong way before one gradually begins to see what might be the better way. So I think it’s the nature of Act One or Two to be anxious, to make those plans. And then in time to see those plans upended and realise that it wasn’t so terrible after all. [Laughs]. Something I&rsquo... posted on May 11 2018 (12,514 reads)

two other crucial standards—that those family and community relationships embrace all the other species, plants and animals alike, and the living ecosystems on which they depend, and that they be considered, as the Irokwa nation has expressed it, with the interest of the next seven generations in mind. There is one other good way of assessing human-scale technology, as expressed in a sage axiom of the British philosopher Herbert Read: “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.” Far from serving an apprenticeship, modern industrial society works to enslave nature, for the benefit of humanity (or some small part of it), and regards m... posted on May 4 2018 (8,107 reads)

by certain kinds of talking therapies and external experiences. And I’m a great believer in those therapies, and also continue to work in those areas and arenas. There’s a lovely passage from The Winter’s Tale, which I quote toward the end of the book, beautifully phrased, and I wish I had it in front of me. I’d read it out loud. MS. TIPPETT: Here’s a sentence I think may have been from that passage, or your commentary on it: “If humanity is of nature, then so are our inventions.” MR. SOLOMON: Yes, exactly. And it ends, that passage, with then the line: “That art itself is nature.” MS. TIPPETT: You also quote the poet... posted on Jun 19 2018 (14,813 reads)

help me, but I should never talk about it. I kept it secret for a long time.  I actually wasn't diagnosed as severely hearing-impaired until I was six years old, because my family thought I was living in my own little world.  When I went through first grade, I was flunking because I wasn't able to follow what was going on. At that point, I was diagnosed.  Because I grew up in an area with extreme poverty and anti-semitism, I spent a lot of my childhood living in nature. I would enter the dream state my Aunt taught me. I lived more in the spirit world than this world. Most of my relationships were with helping spirits. And that’s what Shamanism is about.... posted on Oct 8 2018 (9,961 reads)

has been suggested that the linear theory of time is related to the experience of time in the Northern (and Southern) hemispheres, where it is marked by seasonal changes: life begins in the spring, matures in the summer, and dies in the fall, to begin a new cycle the following spring. Bali, however, lies in the region of tropical rain forests near the Equator where there are no reasons to synchronize the growth schedules of all livings things. Instead, the processes of growth and decay proceed at different rates all over the forest, all the time. A flower is on a short, rapid growth cycle; a tree, a much longer one; a rock, longer still. The cycles mesh in this world, the Middle World, to... posted on Jul 3 2018 (7,069 reads)

to fill our days with lively presence comes in Be Still, Life (public library) — a splendid illustrated poem of a picture-book by Ohara Hale, whose work I have long cherished and who has the loveliest back-flap author bio I have ever encountered: Ohara Hale is a self-taught artist who works with many different forms and materials. She sings, writes, draws, and performs sounds, words, colors, and movements that are questions and ideas about love, life, nature, and all the unseen, unknown, and dreamed in between. Hale lives on planet Earth with her rescue dog, Banana. From the slumbering snail to the purposeful gentleness of the ... posted on Jun 16 2018 (7,195 reads)

servant leadership approach is always testing your humility. Humility allows us to keep learning, growing and improving. The Japanese call it ‘Kaizen’. There is always room to improve. Who wants perfect leaders who know everything and never recognize their mistakes? - Humanity: We are dealing with people not only things or projects. Authentic leadership has to do with methodologies but more importantly it understands emotions. An authentic leader has to have insight into human nature and be able to contemplate its four facets (physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual). He/she has to be skillful in identifying and engaging other people’s talent, and also in help... posted on Sep 2 2018 (15,496 reads)