way what traditional cultures called soul loss. This was the most feared condition to indigenous people. It led to a flattened world, disenchanted and emptied of vitality, joy, and passion. Relations with the living, singing world were silenced in this condition, leaving one stranded in a deadened world. Soul loss is experienced as a depletion in our vital essence, leading to a decreased sense of potency and power. In mythological imagery, we have entered the wasteland. Here, images appear in dreams of ghettos and prisons, ragged orphans and barren stretches of empty buildings. Psychologically we call this depression, but to the indigenous soul, depression is the symptom, ... posted on Mar 4 2021 (10,974 reads)

to stay in her home, where she lives with her biologist husband and two now-teenage daughters. Rhodes spent those weeks following Barman everywhere. They went to the market, where the conservationist stuffed her cloth bag to the brim with vegetables, refusing to use plastic. They went to schools and villages, where people treated Barman like a celebrity. Rhodes even attended a wedding with Barman, who somehow convinced the couple to adorn their ceremony with statues of hargilas and to paint images of the birds on guests’ hands with henna. Rhodes repeatedly marveled at how much influence Barman had on just about everyone, including the police. If someone reports an injured hargil... posted on Mar 19 2021 (5,622 reads)

vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart.   --Carl Jung I have been writing poems since childhood. My notebook became a friend with whom I could have a quiet dialogue. This relationship has continued and sustained me for decades.  It is in observing the small things that make up a daily life that calls me into making a poem. It is the simple topic, a commonality that I choose to explore, so when I walk down a street, open a can of soup, view a fading poster on the wall, or imagine what I might write in wet cement, I ask myself what am I noticing and what is my response in the moment. The action of allowing a pause to set down words wit... posted on Mar 27 2021 (5,164 reads)

is it about Dutch photographers that makes them so visually eloquent at capturing the human condition? From Jeroen Toirkens comes Nomad (public library) — a fascinating and strikingly beautiful visual anthropology of the Northern Hemisphere’s last living nomadic peoples, from Greenland to Turkey. A decade in the making, this multi-continent journey unfolds in 150 black-and-white and full-color photos that reveal what feels like an alternate reality of a life often harsh, sometimes poetic, devoid of many of our modern luxuries and basic givens, from shiny digital gadgets to a permanent roof over one’s head. Since the beginning of time,... posted on Mar 28 2021 (5,413 reads)

the spring of 2017, Nandini Murali, a South Indian journalist and author, returned from an out-of-town assignment to an eerily quiet home. Typically, her husband would greet her at the front door, but that morning he hadnt answered her phone calls. It was Nandini who discovered his body, and confronted an unfathomable reality. T.R. Murali, one of the most prominent urologists in India, and her beloved husband of 33 years, had ended his own life. "Space dissolved," writes Nandini, of that moment. "Time stood still. The axis of my life heaved, cracked and split." On the first anniversary of her husband's death, Nandini launched SPEAK (Suicide Prevention Postvention E... posted on Apr 13 2021 (6,862 reads)

day that I think we should all do, if I may, because it connects us to life in a very vivid way, and it brings so many gifts. And anyway, circling back to the question, I think the best way to transmit and to radiate awe is just to live it as much as you can every day. Fabiana: Something that I've also been thinking about, from an archetypal point of view -- I don't want to make it too complicated -- but archetypes are these energies and impulses, constellations of energies and images and impulses that live in us and through us.  For example, the nurturing instinct, the mother instinct, the lover, the seeker, the sage, the hero, these are different archetypes that form ... posted on Apr 17 2021 (5,985 reads)

softened my conviction to avoid becoming a mother. Eventually I learned that the conscious part of my personality did not, in fact, have all the answers. At twenty-eight, I was studying international relations in New York. I planned to go to law school next, so that I would be equipped to continue my exciting work with international nonprofts. But some deeper part of myself had other plans. Upon arriving in New York, I began having dream after dream set in the subway. These subterranean dream images mirrored a psychic descent. In spite of my efforts to avoid doing so, I was falling into a depression. The work that had heretofore given my life a sense of purpose and meaning now seemed empty... posted on Apr 20 2021 (8,210 reads)

credit: Aura Glaser   The Alphabet Heart Sutra came to me whole, arriving with the light of morning. I followed an inner prompting and immediately wrote it down. Never having composed poetry or prayer in acrostic form before, I was quite surprised by the structure it took. Upon reflection, I wondered if perhaps impressions from childhood, reciting acrostic Hebrew prayers and passages, filtered into the Alphabet Heart Sutra that early morning.   It is said that the essence of the Heart Sutra, and the entire voluminous Perfection of Wisdom Sutras to which it belongs, is contained and expressed in one syllable: Ah.  Knowing this, I also refer to the ... posted on May 9 2021 (8,124 reads)

are some striking passages that I feel kind of invite someone inside your sense — who you are, and how you hold a sense of that that goes so much farther back than the story matrix that most of — that American culture is aware of, most of the time, or ever — this kind of cosmic sensibility you have. I don’t see you using the word “spiritual” very often. Is that too narrow a word? Harjo:I think part of that comes from not wanting to — so many images of Natives are stereotypes. They’re usually around bloodthirsty warriors, or spiritual guardians who know everything and are protective and so on. And certainly, because these lands are i... posted on May 24 2021 (5,662 reads)

the third century CE to this day, bowing to the Buddha is the most common practice for Asian Buddhists. However, among Westerners, bowing practice, as compared with meditation, is not as well-known. Last summer, I had an opportunity to speak with Reverend Heng Sure, the director of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, and asked for more information about Buddhist bowing and repentance. In the late 1970s, Reverend Sure and a fellow monk did a three-year bowing pilgrimage for world peace along the coast of California. Their journey began in Pasadena and ended three years and 800 miles later at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah. And most astonishingly, their knees had already endured ... posted on Jun 1 2021 (6,141 reads)

the form of strangers who had been reading for some time, and in the form of stories written in support. With that support behind her, Ra has since published three books. Sack Nasty: Prison Poetry, is a compilation of poetry and prose centered around her 437 days of incarceration. These true stories are about the illusion of dignity, the malleability of justice, and the fluidity (and fluids) of the human condition. Dinosaur-Hearted is decorated with sign board images and handscribed doodles constantly reaffirming the message that you are loved. Flowers and Stars is about inevitable transitions. Within its pages a little flower and a big star ... posted on Jun 23 2021 (4,360 reads)

meaning as well. To fully experience this side of our being and to integrate it into our personalities, we are dependent on the presence of nature like a symbolic mirror or a repertoire for expressing our inner lives. We gather the food for our thoughts and mental concepts from the natural world. We transform plants and animals into emotional/cognitive symbols according to their real—or presumedly real—qualities: the snake, the rose, the tree, for instance, are powerful organic images that recur in art, myth, and cultural rituals throughout human history. These forms of nature seem to have a deep connection to the individual as well as the cultural subconscious. In their liv... posted on Jun 29 2021 (3,863 reads)

the Introduction to John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul:(Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to the What Our Souls Know and Healing the World) Published by Harper One & Harper Collins UK (July 2021) We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught. And some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our culture or religion or nation has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred, and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and ... posted on Jul 14 2021 (5,041 reads)

a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now. In consonance with John Steinbeck’s life-tested, Nobel-earning conviction that “in writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration,” she adds: Small increments of writing time may matter more than we could guess. One thing leads to many — swerving off, linking up, opening of voices and images and memories. Nearby notebooks — or iPads or tablets or laptops — are surely helpful. With this, Nye turns to the ongoing dialogue between the magic of creation and the mechani... posted on Jul 24 2021 (5,887 reads)

grief and regret. As that first year of mourning concluded, I received a bulging 10 x 13 envelope in the mail from my Mom's older half-sister from Chicago, who I thought was dead. Now in her mid-eighties, Aunt Pearl was briefly a reporter for a Chicago paper in the 1930s and soon she would demonstrate her journalistic chops. While trying to wrestle a large manuscript from the envelope, a yellowed newspaper clipping also fell and cascaded toward the kitchen floor. The clipping showed images of four young people. I recognized one surname--Pfeiffer--since that was my maternal grandmother's maiden name. But this young woman was not my grandmother. She was Martha Pfeiffer, and the... posted on Jul 30 2021 (4,730 reads)

because I take everything in my stride, smile through everything, doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain, loss or get hurt, it just means that every day I make a choice to transcend the negative and use every moment there is breath in this body to positively impact the world around me."  -- Preethi Srinivasan Born in 1979, Preethi was a very gifted and hard working child. She became the captain of the under-19 Tamil Nadu women's cricket team, and led the state team to the national championships in 1997 at the age of 17. She was also a gold-medalist national level swimmer. She excelled academically in her school life which spanned 9 countries across 3 cont... posted on Sep 18 2021 (4,547 reads)

just went by here in Chennai. And we are halfway through the Tamizh month of Purattasi, a month well-known in communal lore for a second brief summer heat-scorch, before the monsoon rains arrive. And while the heat is real -- my body can testify to that -- what marks September for me is a different visual and tactile experience -- splotches of chewed splatter on the pathways -- spat-out remnants of Punnai fruits, that the fruit bats leave behind every morning, following their nightly feast. This is what my family and I do on September mornings; we use the coconut-frond broom to scrape Punnai fruit spit from the concrete pathways near our ... posted on Oct 8 2021 (4,108 reads)

repeating “I want to speak with…”? The poem uses those exact words almost 20 times. Rosemerry invited us to come up with a similar phrase: “I want to sit with,” or “I want to go to,” or “I want to dream of,” and so on. The words that rose up in my mind and demanded to be used were “I want to play like….” (Big surprise, eh?) We had twenty minutes to write a poem that repeated and completed our chosen phrase with images. As always, before we started to compose, Rosemerry urged us to lower our expectations and just have fun. This is the poem that tumbled out of me, tweaked a bit the next day: I Want to Play ... posted on Nov 3 2021 (4,296 reads)

shares an image and a quote every day on her Tumblr page http://julesofnature.tumblr.com and on Instagram @julesofnature. Knowing Julie and her work has taught my eyes how to see more deeply. In turn, that deeper vision emerges in how I write songs and poems. We are in a joyful dance of mutual inspiration. There are songs that ride on the dancing tides That swirl through all the oceans And some that dream in the bitter seed That grief will set in motion. When her images and my songs meet – as they do in the music video, “There Are Songs” – they join in a praise song for Life itself. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Life! *** ... posted on Nov 16 2021 (5,713 reads)

the next 20 years, a minimum of $35 trillion, and up to $70 trillion, in wealth will transfer from the post-World War II generation to the next younger generation. Most of that wealth will flow in the upper canopy of the wealth forest, between family members in the world’s wealthiest 0.1%.   This intergenerational transfer will only further entrench racial and economic inequalities, aided by a veritable army of financial professionals devoted to minimizing taxes and maximizing family inheritances within narrow bloodlines.   But some beneficiaries of this system are working to disrupt it, with the help of financial advisers who have a very different outloo... posted on Apr 26 2022 (4,111 reads)