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 (5,072 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 (6,951 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 (17,869 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 (3,642 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 (4,398 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)

to a past life or a kernel of memory. As a result, these activists don’t rest. They don’t hydrate. They don’t sleep well.  And so, for every victory—every indictment or conviction of an abusive police officer, every policy change or increase in the voter rolls—they find themselves sicker or dealing with anxiety and other stress-related ailments. I rejoice when I hear about a movement leader taking a sabbatical or going on vacation, or when I see images of them laughing or dancing. As much as I want collective change, I want collective healing—whether or not the dismantling of White supremacist systems or laws ever happen.  What ... posted on Jun 8 2022 (2,662 reads)

the yet to come. Now, modernity has a story. A myth that we are all safe, that we are all true, that there is no problem at all. Let me boil it down to three myths. There is one that says, we’re stable, we’re found, and that we’re coherent. Those are one of the three deceptions or delusions of modernity, that we’re indebted to nothing, we need to give thanks for nothing. All we need to do is to look at each other and appease each other and worship each other’s images, and that there is nothing more to be done. It’s remarkably easy, for most of us born in sedentary civilization to forget how precarious things really are, how lost we really are, how sus... posted on Jun 16 2022 (2,477 reads)

credit: Snigdha Manickavel I don't remember when the monkeys first started coming to our house. Possibly, it was while I was away at college. In those days something about the long, hot bus-rides home made me sleepy in a way that I could never shake off completely. At home, I listened to my parents talk about the things that the monkeys had done and though I love my parents dearly, I often felt that they were exaggerating, in their sweet, old people way, making up unbelievable stories about monkeys to hold my attention. Over time, I too would become enchanted, could not stop talking about the monkeys, telling city friends stories that they did not know what to do with... posted on Jun 29 2022 (3,602 reads)

while science suggests it is an important way to replenish the mind and generate new ideas. It is possibly more productive than communicating at the rate of 1,000,000,000 bits a second on one’s digital device. Art, even when a work is made at great speed — as Sadequain and Picasso often did — evolves out of a painstaking process of practice and formation of ideas. Art and photography can, quite literally, stop time by capturing a moment. We are fascinated by slow motion images, as they allow us to see the details we would otherwise miss. Here lies the value of slowing down — to notice, observe, process and evolve our responses, whether we are paying attentio... posted on Aug 4 2022 (3,819 reads)

the introduction to Gold by Rumi, translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori, published by NYRB Classics. Rumi was a preacher before he was a poet. Born into a line of Islamic theologians, he was a celebrity delivering sermons to hordes of followers by the time he was thirty-eight. Eloquent and magnetic, dressed in a crown turban and silk robe, he evangelized in mosques and theological institutions throughout Konya. Disciples and admirers from Nishapur to Damascus to Mecca called him Molana—our Master. He was growing weary of fame. It was a trap, he would later suggest in his writings, as was dogma, as were the obsessions with title, rank, a... posted on Aug 12 2022 (4,109 reads)

should be at the heart of all ritual; not a frozen form, but a flexible form. Dance is at the heart of our prayer. We do circle dancing. We dance to DJ music and live music. And we also do spiral dancing. Getting the body involved is so important. You don't have a Hindu body or an atheist body or a Buddhist body. You have a body. We're all human there, so we can all dance together and look each other in the eyes. We use a video jockey (VJ) to tell the theme that we're honoring in images. We've done a Mass of the African diaspora, for example, several times where we tell the story of the African-Americans in America. It began with a ria positiva dance honoring the stories o... posted on Sep 8 2022 (3,130 reads)

from Writing Open the Mind, Ulysses Press, 2005 Could you be open to the proposition that the murky and quirky part of your mind is wiser than the thrust-and-parry datebook mind? Here we have discovery by means of imagination. No need to grip the steering wheel so tight. Enjoyment is what it’s all about. Let go. The mind likes t​hat.​ It responds well to indulgence. People talk about "freewriting.” Free. Writing. What would it be to write totally free? To be liberated from all the niggling habits, the tendency to adopt a certain stance? What might your mind do and say if it weren’t in the office drafting memos? A sassafras hickey zowie brainstorm. ... posted on Sep 15 2022 (4,010 reads)

following is excerpted from Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse, by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy. Co-publisher: Transition Resource Circle.  “In the dark theopoetics of the cloud, might the very fold between our non-knowing and our non-separability begin to appear [as] possibility itself, posse ipsum?” -- Catherine Keller Post capitalist philanthropy is a paradox in terms. A paradox is the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species. Those of us who are embedded in the muddled sub-sect of humans working in the sector known as philanthropy find ourselves pushed even furt... posted on Sep 20 2022 (4,606 reads)

I was growing up, my mama made up songs for everything.  Potty training? Sing about it.  Your heart’s deepest longing? In song.  I learned: like birds, we sing.  Simple plain,  because we’re alive.  For me Song is a protection mantle, a wise friend, a presence meditation, a comic relief.  Song anchors us in our breathing bodies, resonant chambers.  Song lives in the crosshairs of Right Here + Right Now. Turns out there’s an upwelling of folks who need to sing like we need to breathe.  We are finding each other and reclaiming our voices as a pathway to Belonging. We  bask in the pleasure of harmony and the power of ... posted on Sep 28 2022 (5,696 reads)

in his new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Our cardiovascular systems were not built for the stress of a Wall Street job and single decisions that move billions. Humans evolved as collective hunter-gatherers who cohabitate, not hyper–individualized competitors locked away in steel skyscrapers. And the psyche was not designed to handle a single entire life and all its inevitable blemishes compared with billions of people’s photoshopped images cherry-picked to share only their happiest milliseconds. Moreover, all of that roughly describes what many consider “success” and says nothing about poverty, racism, or sexism&md... posted on Oct 2 2022 (6,172 reads)