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 (3,862 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 (5,040 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 (5,886 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 (4,729 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 (4,107 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 (5,712 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 (4,110 reads)

is far more successful in all its enterprises than violence; indeed, violence generally frustrates its own purpose, while gentleness scarcely ever fails.” Gentleness has a formidable list of proponents — Buddha, Lao Tzu, the Prophets Jesus and Muhammad (PBUH), and the Sufi masters. Art, along with poetry and music, employs gentleness in a more pragmatic fashion — by observing subtle emotions, nuances of colours and form. Gentleness made a comeback through moving images on television sets across the world, of health workers comforting Covid patients, especially those dying without their families around. The world has clearly moved away from business as usua... posted on Dec 22 2021 (5,073 reads)

credit: Aura Glaser An invitation to abide in unconditional Presence. To Be the Light we are.  Opening ourselves to the suchness of this moment, to the vibrant alive stillness beyond thoughts and concepts, we realize in the depth of our being, we are already whole—we are already one with the timeless essence of all life. Opening ourselves to our world, we find we are living in churning, whirling, unraveling times. In such times it becomes ever more important to rest in, and draw upon, fathomless, timeless, dark radiant source for strength, courage, and renewal.  To remember vastness—and beauty. To know a... posted on Dec 21 2021 (6,952 reads)

in Common Ground All of us want, or need, to be loved. The need for love is one of the most basic human impulses. We may cover this need with patterns of self-protection or images of self-reliance. Or we may openly acknowledge this need to ourself or to others. But it is always present, whether hidden or visible. Usually, we seek for love in human relationships, project our need onto parents, partners, friends, lovers. Our lack or denial of love often causes wounds that we carry with us. This unmet need haunts us, sometimes driving us into addictions or other self-destructive patterns. Conversely, if our need for love is met, we feel nourished in the depths of our being. Love... posted on Dec 30 2021 (6,183 reads)

but some fight back and this is the fictional story of one who, by his wits and youth and ingenious courage, does – and he lives to tell the tale. I had to keep reminding myself that Chester himself had not experienced the ghetto firsthand, although his life was permanently marked by witnessing the results of carnage as a young soldier liberating a death camp at the end of the war. That meant that, in order to write this book he had to deliberately bring back the feelings and the images of that world, heart, mind and spirit. He had to immerse himself in the stories of survivors, remember the sights and sounds of unthinkable horror, and re-imagine himself a young boy having the... posted on Feb 2 2022 (4,074 reads)

2009, 24-year-old Kseniya Simonova stunned judges and audience alike on "Ukraine's Got Talent", by creating mesmerizing pictures on an illuminated sand table. The series of haunting images that bloomed beneath her swift-moving fingers depicted Germany's invasion of Ukraine during World War II, and its impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. That war claimed the lives of one in every four of Ukraine's population. Today, as the world prays for the safety and well-being of the many millions of lives in that region, Kseniya's performance art is a profound reminder of the long and terrible shadow of war. Watch her demonstration here. ... posted on Feb 25 2022 (17,870 reads)

existence is itself a contradiction. Built by men who waged war for a living.  Built to shield children from death by that same war. I am a bomb shelter. I am a space dug deep below the campus of St Bakhita Girls Primary School in South Sudan.  Like a grave, but much larger; big enough to hold a dozen young girls who’ve dashed out from their classrooms upon hearing the fearful thrum of an approaching Antinov warplane.  Everyone here knows that sound, which reaches us long before the plane comes into view. Everyone here has seen the cascade of bombs that follow, cluttering the sky, crashing into earth, slicing trees in half, severing limbs from lives, flatten... posted on Mar 20 2022 (3,755 reads)

short and lovely poem about how to be a poet and a complete human being, Richards considers what drew her to the metaphor of centering and what it reveals about the poet in each of us: I am an odd bird in both academic and craft worlds, perhaps because I am a poet, and thus, by calling, busy with seeing the similarities between things ordinarily thought to be different, busy with feeling the sense of relatedness grow through my limbs like a smoke-tree wafting and fusing its images, busy with the innerness of outerness, eating life in its layers like a magic cake made of silica sounds shapes and temperatures and all the things that appear to be separated stacked together ... posted on Apr 10 2022 (3,643 reads)

our children can teach us, as well as what we want to impart to them, because some of this they know, and they actually know more immediately than we do, because we lose it. I remember watching something terrible on the news the other day. And my daughter said, So many beautiful lives in the world, and this is what they focus on. Boorstein:Well, I think the beautiful and wonderful lives in the world — I certainly am not a sociologist of journalism — aren’t as compelling images as the others. Tippett:They don’t make good headlines.  Boorstein:They don’t make good headlines. It would be wonderful — [laughs] I don’t know if it would be... posted on May 8 2022 (4,399 reads)

encouraged to grow. That sort of thing about being moved by and a sense of a sacred space, for example—I’m not trying to say anybody could be persuaded, because it’s all in this realm that is not cause and effect. In fact, there is sort of the linear side of the brain that is yes/no, cause/effect. The more that you are forced to always be in that area of left-brain logic, what you’re cut off from is the right brain. And the right brain has within it such things as images, dreams, the sense that it can handle different thoughts, feelings that may not be coherent, may actually be opposites, but they can be held in the right brain, as dreams are held there, while ... posted on May 9 2022 (3,997 reads)

a wonderful visit from my favorite studio mate in Thailand… Over the past two months it’s been a joy to be with my parents in Bangkok. In our precious time together, I am acutely reminded of my familial lineage, what is passed on to us, and what lives on through us. My mother was the first to teach me about finding and creating beauty in everyday life. She continually called my attention to the smallest of details and always pointed me in the direction of refinement. Of course, as a wild tomboy of a child and even more rebellious teenager, I found this all just too annoying. I could not be bothered with being so picky about appearances or how food was always plated an... posted on May 26 2022 (3,443 reads)