excerpt is from Ben Goldfarb’s new book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher www.chelseagreen.com Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream. What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle. It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong. Let’s... posted on Aug 15 2018 (8,009 reads)

have been barraged in the past couple of weeks by a series of major news events – some of them unsettling. President Trump’s trip to Europe left many unsettled about the future of the decades-old U.S. relations with Europe, and a summit with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin left many uneasy when Trump did not forcefully back the findings of American intelligence agencies. This all happens after hysteria on all sides over a Supreme Court nominee and a fountain of bad news about natural disasters, immigration issues, growing addiction rates, and a startling 30 percent increase in deaths of despair. It doesn’t matter which s... posted on Aug 17 2018 (30,593 reads)

multitude of voicemails and text messages from desperate neighbors flooded Jessica Ramirez’s cell phone on a brisk morning in October 2013. Winter was coming. Using social media to reach potential donors as well as those seeking help, Ramirez created a makeshift donation center on the sidewalk outside her Southwest Detroit home. There, the community organizer and her neighbors handed out warm clothing to children and recycled beds, dressers and microwaves to new mothers who needed furniture. When school began the next year, she was at it again, donating reams of school supplies she had collected from businesses and individuals. “Everything was being done out of my home ... posted on Aug 21 2018 (5,987 reads)

USA Today poll revealed that many voters consider their political opponents to be hateful, stupid, or racist. What are the solutions? There are many, no doubt, but here’s one to consider: moral elevation. That’s the “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion,” according to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, now the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business. Take, for example, the undocumented immigrant in Paris who saved a child dangling from a balcony. Or the boy who raised over a million d... posted on Aug 28 2018 (10,257 reads)

kids find this hard to believe, but when I was a child I’d never heard of zucchini. We knew of only one kind of summer squash: the yellow crooknecks we grew copiously in our garden. They probably also carried those down at the IGA in summertime, if any unfortunate and friendless soul actually had to buy them. We had three varieties of hard-shelled winter squash: butternuts, pumpkins, and a green-striped giant peculiar to our region called the cushaw, which can weigh as much as a third-grader. We always kept one of these on the cool attic stairs all winter (cushaw, not third-grader) and sawed off a piece every so often for our winter orange vegetable intake. They make delicious pie... posted on Sep 14 2018 (13,881 reads)

land on the red planet this August. Much has changed since the heady early days of spaceflight, when, fueled by cold-war rivalries, the United States and the Soviet Union spared no expense to send the first astronauts into orbit and eventually to the moon. The last manned mission to the moon was in 1972. Since then, NASA has focused on the space shuttle program and sending unmanned robotic probes to the planets, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transmitted never-before-seen images of the far reaches of the universe. Is space travel a pointless luxury or a psychic necessity? How will venturing still farther into space change our view of ourselves? Are we ready to do so... posted on Sep 16 2018 (13,816 reads)

is the transcript of a talk that Rev. Bonnie Rose delivered at an Awakin Circle in the summer of 2018.] I think I am going to speak about 'Sacred Imperfection' today. I was sitting here meditating, thinking why did I pick something so hard?  It occurred to me that my whole life, particularly as a minister, there's been a lot of pressure to be a certain way my whole life. I've been trying to get it right and finally be perfect enough to be a really good minister. And what I've discovered in the last couple of years as I've grown more and meditated more deeply -- also through a lot of the values that I've practiced because of ... posted on Sep 4 2018 (8,668 reads)

resident of Vietnam, Giang Dang came from a traditional background in development.  After some years of working in a multi-national aid organization, she started to notice a need for depth of local connections and started Action for the City in Hanoi.  Showing how small scale actions can affect change through community's inter-connections, Giang is a champion of minimizing consumption of resources, reducing transportation emissions, and promoting green spaces and organic urban agriculture.What follows is the edited transcript of an Awakin Call with Giang. You can listen to the recording here. Xiao: Today I'm very excited to be moderating this phone ca... posted on Sep 5 2018 (3,745 reads)

Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. A prolific writer, his books include War Is a Lie, When the World Outlawed War, War No More: The Case for Abolition, War Is Never Just, A Global Security System: An Alternative to War, and his most recent, Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? All are available on his website. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio and is a three-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.&... posted on Jan 28 2019 (6,169 reads)

discovered that breathing more deeply helps us center ourselves, but did you know why? A friend recently emailed me an article by Dr. Shawna Darou, ND in the 11/30/15 issue of UPLIFT magazine (http://upliftconnect.com), on the mechanics of how it works. Included are exercises that can help us reduce inflammation in the body, as well as jack up a flagging immune system. The secret is to activate the Vagus nerve, which travels all the way from the brain to the digestive system, operating via the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you or someone you know complains of digestive disturbances, high blood pressure, depression or some inflammatory condition, don’t ... posted on May 8 2019 (16,763 reads)

have a folding plastic chair that I keep near the horse paddock, home to a small family of six horses. Many times a week, I hoist the chair over the railing, unfold it in the middle of the enclosure and just sit. It’s the perfect way to not only ‘share territory’ with my equine companions (a deceptively simple but potent training technique), but to observe their behaviors. Sometimes things are tangibly still, like sitting inside a Tibetan monastery. Sometimes, things are moving—one horse pushing another with silent subtle gestures, which leads to the movement of others—a sea of to and fro. At other times, things are playful and robust, with dust flying and ... posted on Sep 22 2018 (20,992 reads)

by Sheila Menezes My dark skin, so much like my patients: In residency, I trained at a county hospital in Los Angeles. Black and brown patients lay on gurneys in the emergency room, and lined the halls on the wards. Our patients were mostly poor, often undocumented. The doctors were mostly white. One of my Guatemalan patients told me that on the difficult month-long walk into the US, with blisters and diarrhea, our hospital was known as the first place to get decent, free care. As residents, we worked and lived in the hospital so many nights. It felt like home. On one of my days off, in street clothes, jeans, and a T shirt, I went into the hospital to finish dictati... posted on Sep 25 2018 (9,981 reads)

want to be a member of a thriving and diverse social movement, not a cult or a religion. Occupy Love, Hella Love Oakland March, February 14 2012. Credit: Flickr/Glenn Halog. CC BY-NC 2.0. As an intersectional activist who is concerned about the future of our movements, I’m really worried that social justice activism in the West is stuck in a dangerous state of disrepair. Ideological purity has become the norm. Social justice movements, which were originally about freeing marginalized people from oppressive institutions and social structures, have become imbued with their own narrow framework of morality. Our knowledge base is made up of reactionary think-pieces, self-rig... posted on Oct 24 2018 (8,274 reads)

Angell at Longhaul Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York. Credit: Theo Angell. For most of my life I‘ve been a political activist, believing the story that social transformation comes through radical legislation pushed along by brave elected leaders. I once imagined becoming one of those leaders myself, and had a mental picture of giving a speech to a massive group of people in what looked like the National Mall in Washington DC.   I know I inherited that picture from my father, who harbored dreams of being a politician who had something true to say to people that would lead them out of the wilderness. He ran for Congress in 1972 unsuccessfully in the same commu... posted on Oct 28 2018 (7,308 reads)

summer, I invited our congregation to participate in a kindness challenge. I said, “Approach strangers and ask, ‘Is there anything I can do or say to help you have a better day?’ Since I encouraged the congregation to engage in this practice, I thought I should give it a try as well. Not that I wanted to. At all. I had many concerns. I’m reclusive by nature. I was afraid people would think I was weird. Or even worse, people would ask me to give something beyond my capacity to give – and then I would feel like a disappointment when I couldn’t deliver. I often tell people to serve beyond their comfort zone t... posted on Oct 6 2018 (11,721 reads)

Books, 1992 Have you ever read Badger’s Parting Gifts? It tells the story of an old Badger who knows he will be dying soon, and worries about how his friends Mole, Frog, Fox, and Rabbit will cope with his departure after he goes down “the Long Tunnel.” The rest of this beautifully illustrated book revolves around the touching and creative ways in which Badger’s friends end up cherishing his legacy, and working through their loss. It is one of my favorite children’s books, and it has a very special place in my heart because it was first read to me on the night before my mother died. She was a gifted psychotherapist who worked fo... posted on Dec 6 2018 (11,897 reads)

Shamasunder is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder of Heal Initiative. He completed his Internal Medicine residency at Harbor UCLA. He has worked extensively in Rwanda, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and India. In 2010, he was named an Asia 21 fellow as well as the Northern California Young Physician of the Year. The piece below was originally published in the October 2006 edition of New Physician. Photo credit Frederic Martin Duchamp  The largest Tibetan refugee colony in the world lies five hours from where I spent the summers of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Bangalore,India. Neither my mother nor my father n... posted on Mar 14 2019 (5,489 reads)

Newton-John on Stephen Jenkinson Having taught classes on grief and dying, I’ve read many books on the subject of death, but nothing quite like Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise. From the moment I opened it, I was galvanised, not just by the depth of its insights, but by its remarkable prose style. Eschewing the cool, objective tone of most modern non-fiction, Stephen adopts a storyteller’s voice: passionate, poetic, at times elliptical and difficult, but always engaged at the level of heart and gut. For all the obvious intelligence, there is nothing academic here: these are the outpourings of a man who has grappled with death intimately, in the trenches of ... posted on Oct 19 2018 (12,394 reads)

out of line and questioned. Jamal: I showed the passport officer a flyer of the three of us doing an interfaith, inter-spiritual program, and she kept saying, “A Rabbi, a Muslim, a Christian pastor? This is good, very, very good.” She took it upon herself to guide me through all the procedures, escort me to a supervisor, wait with me in line, and her constant mantra was “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. This is good, very good.” Ted: Two images were important to me during our trip. Many churches are built on places where a great teaching of Jesus occurred. But, the church buildings actually hide the place where something happened. And... posted on Oct 13 2018 (5,888 reads)

inch of water wobbles in the handmade bowl cupped between my hands. I raise the clay vessel to the cloudless sky, praising rains long past for nourishing the land, for allowing streams to flow, for recharging the subterranean aquifer whose miracle waters runs through my household tap. Although right now no water comes through the tap; something has gone awry with the shared well and our neighborhood is without water. The land that holds a community well also holds remnants of ancient pottery: plain potsherds buried in sand between pinyon and juniper. Some of the broken pots once held water, the priceless treasure of the desert. This land is dry and crisp with cheatgrass. The monsoo... posted on Oct 11 2018 (8,485 reads)