Harrod Buhner is an award-winning author of 22 books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers that include Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. He says that the greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather, C.G. Harrod, who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911. Buhner, who says his DNA prevents him from working for others, has been a fulltime therapist in pri... posted on Mar 9 2018 (24,715 reads)

in response to the needs of our times—such as helping people transition to a less consumeristic, more sustainable way of living; re-educating people in traditional simple living skills; developing new technologies to convert waste into usable materials; retooling our economy to run on renewable energy sources; repairing and healing our polluted oceans, rivers, and lakes; reforesting our denuded hillsides; paying our artists and musicians and caregivers, and so on. One of the important images I’ve seen in years occurred in the last few months and was posted to the Internet. It was taken by a satellite that left the solar system and looked back, taking a picture of the Earth, i... posted on Nov 12 2020 (28,714 reads)

of the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. Credit: By Phillip Maiwald (Nikopol) - Own work. I say ‘Allahu akbar’ dozens of times a day. I say it during prayer. I say it as an expression of reaffirmation and gratitude to God. I said it when my daughter was born, and there will be someone to say it over me when I am buried. I say it when I witness beauty. ‘Allahu akbar.’ In 1985, Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendahl, in defending the building of a Mormon temple by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Stockholm, enunciated “Three Rules of Religious Understanding:” “When tryin... posted on Mar 14 2020 (3,653 reads)

Baliga found herself sitting in a room with a murderer and his victim’s parents, who had come seeking something more than punishment for their child’s killer. Sujatha, and the process of Restorative Justice, was uniquely positioned to help. She came to that meeting through rigorous academic training, and also through harrowing personal experience. She grew up in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania where she experienced ongoing sexual abuse by her father. As an adult, after several emotional breakdowns related to the early childhood traumas, she decided to travel to Dharamsala, India to visit the Dalai Lama. Through slim odds, she was granted an audience with the exiled leader. Aft... posted on Mar 5 2018 (18,508 reads)

IN THE BODY: EXPLORING NEW HOPES FOR HEALING Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, a professor in the department of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and the director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, which Congress established to raise the standard of care and improve access to services for traumatized children, their families, and communities.  Dr. van der Kolk’s newest book, The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, offers a sweeping and revolutionary new understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma and how to heal t... posted on Apr 21 2018 (60,579 reads)

selected poems below are from Mark Nepo’s book: The Way Under The Way: The Place of True Meeting (Sounds True): INSEPARABLE BY MARK NEPO A small voice swept through the hole in my heart, right there in the middle of a day filled with the sweetness of things outlasting our mistakes. The voice led me to a thatch of berries I had to eat, though the berries were nested in a ring of thorns. But this was the only food that would heal. And everything I’d been through, every path I’d tried, every love I’d lost, every friendship I’d held onto like a handle in a fire, every certainty that had crumbled into doubt—all of it said,&n... posted on Apr 8 2018 (26,863 reads)

was a guy named Ken, who was a homeless guy in Half Moon Bay, where we live. He'd lived under the bridge at Main Street. He lived in his car and he made woodcarvings. So he had all his wood carvings lined up over there under the bridge, and he would just be hanging out there during the day. At the time, I had just gone through a really painful divorce, my life was just kind of very unsettled. I was feeling very unsettled and unhappy, wondering what I was going do, what was going to be in my life. One time, I was walking along Main Street with my son, Adam, who at that time was about 12 or 13 years old. He was just beginning to get interested in drums. He said, "Dad, I... posted on Jan 30 2018 (12,411 reads)

having these horses is to have a four day ceremony with them every single month, and I take new people to them. So I was doing that and Happi was at the camp. And then I got a text message early in the morning, and someone said to me, "If that was my son, I would be crying." And I was thinking, "What are they talking about?" It was someone from camp. So I drove up on the hill, at Pe'Sla, where I could get a signal and be with the horses, and then I just got tons of images. People started sending me things. And there was a live feed going on and there was my son locked onto one of those excavation equipments and they were singing songs for him. And he was singing... posted on Jan 7 2018 (8,998 reads)

is more to life than increasing its speed. – Mahatma Gandhi It’s the status symbol no one talks about, woven into our work, play, homes, and family lives. It takes up space on our calendars, to-do lists, and endless roster of appointments and meetings. It can leave us exhausted or invigorated, constantly tugging at our drive to do more, give back, and leave our mark. It can be a source of increased stress and frequent complaints one minute, and unbridled joy the next. Busyness is the new currency by which we measure our success, our fulfillment, and ultimately, the richness of our lives. “In certain cultures, spending your time relaxing, spending your ti... posted on Dec 26 2017 (20,954 reads)

physicist Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) was a champion of scientific culture, graphic novel hero, crusader for integrity, holder of the key to science, adviser of future generations, bongo player, no ordinary genius. In this fantastic animated adaptation of an excerpt from Christopher Sykes’s celebrated 1981 BBC documentary about Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out — which gave us the great physicist’s timeless words on beauty, honors, and curiosity and his fascinating explanation of where trees actually come from — Fraser Davidson ca... posted on Mar 4 2018 (9,605 reads)

venerable Lynne Twist has traversed the world speaking about finances, leadership, and social justice.  She has inspired thousands to rethink their relationship with money and will be one of the many brilliant speakers featured at the Success 3.0 Summit this October 31st. You have talked to over 100,000 people all over the world about creating a healthy relationship around money. What common obstacles do we all share? People are caught in what I call the lie of scarcity. By that, I mean an unconscious unexamined set of assumptions that come even before beliefs, that there’s not enough to go around and that all resources are scarce. This perception of the wo... posted on May 12 2018 (6,837 reads)

by Laura M. Brown, Desert Elephant Conservation Beneath the arid surface of northern Namibia run hidden veins of water that rise through a network of dry river beds during brief periods of rain. This austere landscape, the most ancient of all the world’s deserts, is home to a small number of elephant families, who have learned to survive on its sparse resources. They bring the underground water sources seeping to the surface by digging in the sand river beds with their tusks and trunk, and feed on the trees and bushes that grow along the banks. Despite human persecution and the increasing fragmentation of their habitat, these elephants endure through their steadfast love ... posted on Mar 25 2018 (16,698 reads)

Wheatley is a writer and management consultant who draws upon systems analysis, chaos theory, and other diverse fields of study to inform her work. She is the author of Leadership and the New Science and Who Do We Choose to Be?, among others. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks with Margaret about the cycles of life and history, especially as they apply to the chaotic contemporary world. Margaret emphasizes that we need to see our present moment with clear eyes, even if doing so might court despair. Tami and Margaret speak on the need to create "islands of sanity" within our communities and what it means to become a warrior for the... posted on Mar 29 2018 (27,461 reads)

the Journal for Strategic Performance Measurement, April/May 1998 Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we've created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw their futures and design them into clearly better forms. We push them, we prod them. We try fear, we try enticement,. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use ... posted on Apr 11 2018 (13,974 reads)

Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas are pioneers in the field of animal writing, New York Times bestselling authors, and best friends. The following excerpt is from their book Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)—an engaging collection of essays that offer extraordinary insights into the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals. It is reprinted with permission from the publisher. They flash in front of flowers and feeders for seconds, wings a blur, and then whiz away. Next they’re back — but before you can gasp at the beauty, they’re off again. A glittering fragment of a rainbow; a flamingo comet... posted on Feb 19 2018 (13,725 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 (13,691 reads)

at NeXT Computer — we went back to try to get all the emails and memos. He couldn’t get them out of his machine. The operating system couldn’t retrieve them anymore. But paper is a really good technology for the storage of information. I asked Simon & Schuster, the publisher who did Leonardo da Vinci, to “do it all on art paper and not one of these things where you put the things in the center.” I want it throughout to be that heavy quality, coated, color images because I wanted to show that paper is actually sometimes good for transmitting information. Grant: You’ve picked a lot of original thinkers throughout history. Why da Vinci? Isaacs... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,638 reads)

world without poverty, unemployment or environmental devastation seems like a utopian dream. But it doesn’t have to be. In his new book, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus shares his vision for a kinder, gentler planet. It starts with recognizing what he describes as the inherent cruelty of capitalism, the need to value the abilities of every human being and understanding that saving the environment must be a collective effort. Yunus, who won the Nobel for his work in microfinance, encourages us to see the world not through the lens of profit, but of social impact. He spoke about his book, A World of Three Zeroes: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment... posted on May 5 2018 (9,874 reads)

makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, 'an escape from personality'? Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels? Zadie Smith on literature's legacy of honourable failure January 13, 2007: 1. The tale of Clive I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he's intelligent and well read; he's made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory - those elegant bluepri... posted on Mar 14 2018 (11,958 reads)

Ag Assarid (MAA): I don’t know my age. I was born in the Sahara desert, with no papers. I was born in a nomadic camp of Touaregs, between Timbuktu and Gao, in the north of Mali. [...] J: What do they do for a living? MAA: We shepherd camels, goats, sheep, cows and donkeys in a kingdom of infinite and of silence… J: Is the desert really so silent? (MAA): If you are on your own in that silence you hear your heart beat. There is no better place to meet yourself. J: What memories do you have of your childhood in the desert? MAA: I wake up with the Sun. The goats of my father are there. They give us milk and meat, and we take them were there is water and ... posted on Mar 22 2018 (11,522 reads)