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 (4,603 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)

following is an excerpt from Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, May 2022, Harper Wave Publishers Navigating Noise Over the past fifty years, mindfulness meditation has taken a remarkable journey from remote monasteries of Burma and Thailand to the pinnacles of mainstream power—places like Apple, Google, GE, and the Pentagon. While some of this rise is attributable to increasing openness to new mindsets and worldviews since the revolutions of the 1960's, we believe the biggest reason for its newfound popularity is straightforward: There is a deep yearning for silence in a world of more and more noise. Whether we consciously realize it or not, we sense that p... posted on Oct 4 2022 (3,227 reads)

like to offer some words in praise of chickadees. Though seven different species inhabit North America, four of them in Alaska, here I will focus on the black-capped chickadee, the bird that transformed my life nearly three decades ago. Because they’re among the most common birds to inhabit the Anchorage area—and much of our continent—nearly everyone can recognize black-capped chickadees (which I sometimes simply call black-caps) and their familiar chick-a-dee-dee calls. At the same time, I suspect that most people largely ignore black-caps, don’t give them much thought, simply because they are so common (those who put out bird feeders being exceptions... posted on Oct 18 2022 (7,316 reads)

delivered in January 2023 for the 20th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at University of Pennsylvania. The evening was graciously hosted by Symposium Committee, Office of the Chaplain and Office of the President.] Thank you for such a heartfelt introduction. To be in the company of such inspired love-warriors from the community and to be in shared field of honoring Dr. King's legacy is a tremendous honor.  Having just spent a couple of months in India, today, I'm hoping to build a bit of a Gandhi-Dr. King bridge that perhaps points us to the hem of the Infinite. I want to start in 1958. Dr. King was 29 years old, his first book had come out, and he was&nb... posted on Feb 2 2023 (9,057 reads)

FUERTH LEMLE April 11,1916---April 17, 2011 For the first 58 years of my life, I would have to say that my relationship to my mother was a complex and difficult one. She was a huge personality, full of great passions, creativity, rages, and generosity. I remember saying to friends that I loved my mother in small doses, but that she didn't come in small doses. She was a force of nature. She had no sense of boundaries; my memory of going to restaurants with Edna, was that as the waiter placed my plate in front of me, her fork would be in my food before I was even able to lift my own. She would often just show up at my house anywhere in the world, uninvited. She was also very contro... posted on Jul 1 2016 (46,663 reads)

Shamasundar (left) with June Jordan (right). Photo courtesy Sriram Shamasunder. I remember being a kid with shaky confidence. I entered the University of California, Berkeley, as a freshman, a child of Indian immigrants, keeping my head down and taking primarily science classes. To fill a humanities requirement, I meandered into a class called Poetry for the People, a course taught and conceived by June Jordan, the great poet and activist.  Even though I fulfilled the requirement in just one semester, I stayed in the class for two years, not so much because I thought I was a poet, but because June—as I later came to call her—made me feel that even a youn... posted on Feb 14 2023 (2,937 reads)

way it happened was we were there in the monkey house and it was Stan and me and Myrrena, who had just learned to sit up. We were reading the sign by the orangutan cage and the orangutan, who was an old female with wrinkled, pendulous breasts, came up to the corner of the cage where we were and she was looking at Myrrena’s feet. Stan had Myrrena on his shoulder and it was a hot day so there were her bare legs and bare feet sticking out of the diaper and that was all the orangutan could see of her. This lady orangutan had one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, expressive brown eyes with wrinkles all around so that seeing her face was a revelation of tenderness... posted on Feb 20 2023 (2,727 reads)

from Nightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound, by David Rothenberg. Published by University of Chicago Press (May, 2019.)  Are you surprised there are nightingales in Berlin? They have flown thousands of miles to get here, up from Africa and over the sea like refugees of the air. They sing from wells of silence, their voices piercing the urban noise. Each has his chosen perch to come back to each year. We know they will return, and yet when they do arrive every song still seems a wonder. Of all the days to schedule a midnight concert in Berlin’s Treptower Park, we have somehow chosen May 9, the one night people descend upon this park in the... posted on Feb 21 2023 (2,607 reads)

by Rupali Bhuva We live in an age of spiritual smorgasbord: People are mixing concepts, aphorisms, and insights from a broad variety of mystical and faith traditions. A blend of notions culled from many spiritual paths is now surfacing as popular prescription for all and sundry seekers: “Believe everything will turn out perfectly”; “deny the power of the negative by emphasizing the positive”; “always trust your intuition”; “focus on being and becoming over doing or engaging in activism”; “don’t get caught up in the world of forms and illusion”; “live in essence.” Such a list is clearly a simplistic ... posted on Mar 3 2023 (2,358 reads)

neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she lost feeling in her teeth. She had been grinding them as a profound stress response to burnout from her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and tenure-track professor. Knowing from her academic work that the brain can change, she told herself at the start of summer, “before I quit my own career, let’s see if I can get my own brain to change.” She had just heard a talk about the power of meditation to change brain images from another neuroscientist. And although she had grown up in a Hindu family, born in the Indian city of Gandhi’s ashram – where meditation practice was “in the air&rdquo... posted on Mar 9 2023 (4,880 reads)

or brainstorm new ideas. Creative rest reawakens the awe and wonder inside each of us. Do you recall the first time you saw the Grand Canyon, the ocean or a waterfall? Allowing yourself to take in the beauty of the outdoors — even if it’s at a local park or in your backyard — provides you with creative rest. But creative rest isn’t simply about appreciating nature; it also includes enjoying the arts. Turn your workspace into a place of inspiration by displaying images of places you love and works of art that speak to you. You can’t spend 40 hours a week staring at blank or jumbled surroundings and expect to feel passionate about anything, much less com... posted on Mar 21 2023 (14,825 reads)