I tell her that the painting is my work. She smiles and opens up with motherly warmth. She tells me that she has enjoyed the painting ever since she received it. We spend the next 45 minutes talking about perfection, beauty, and reality. I ask her if the three are perhaps one and the same. She is quiet for a while and then tells me, “No.” They are different, but there is a place where they all come together. She also talks about cave paintings and about the fact that they are images of hunts and battles. At first it is not clear to me as to what she is getting at, but later I realize that perhaps art has always been an arena for battle: a battleground for our egos, our des... posted on Apr 16 2016 (14,511 reads)

up, Jim Doty had many strikes against him: an alcoholic father, a mother with depression, a family living in poverty. But somehow—in a journey he recounts in his new book, Into the Magic Shop—he managed to overcome them. Dr. Doty is now a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. He founded and directs the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), where the Dalai Lama was a founding benefactor. As a philanthropist, he has given millions of dollars to support health care and educational charities around the world. He attributes his success partly to a kind woman named Ruth, who took 12-year-old Doty under her w... posted on Jul 5 2016 (57,134 reads)

the fall of 1979, Yalda Modabber had just moved from Iran back to her birthplace in Boston. Her timing was bad: Just weeks later later, a group of armed Iranians took more than 60 U.S. citizens hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran. As a result, her fellow students bullied her ruthlessly. Golestan Education's Yalda Modabber “It was nonstop for two years,” says Modabber, who has dark curly black hair and a warm smile. “That period in my life was so hard that I blocked it out. I don’t even remember my teachers’ names. The entire class turned on me.” Modabber is now the principal and founder of Golestan Education, a Persian-language prescho... posted on Jul 8 2016 (33,131 reads)

happens when we become too dependent on our mobile phones? According to MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, author of the new book Reclaiming Conversation, we lose our ability to have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with others, changing the nature of our social interactions in alarming ways. Turkle has spent the last 20 years studying the impacts of technology on how we behave alone and in groups. Though initially excited by technology’s potential to transform society for the better, she has become increasingly worried about how new technologies, cell phones in particular, are eroding the social fabric of our communities. In her previous book, the bestselling Al... posted on Jul 31 2016 (30,922 reads)

met Marvin Sanders during a film festival at Berkeley Art Center. At the time, Sanders ran the Sunday evening music series there. On the first evening of film screening, Sanders was there to help at the front desk. Chatting with him, I discovered he plays the flute.      "Jazz?" I asked.       "You say that because I’m black, don’t you?" he replied.         I was taken aback, but realized I’d been offered an opening to a deeper level of conversation. I admitted he was right and before long, we were in the middle of an unexpectedly rich exchange. The question of the use of music in... posted on Aug 7 2016 (11,882 reads)

the past five years, I haven’t lived anywhere for more than six months. I spent 28 days in Lisbon, three months in Bali, and a random half-year in downtown Las Vegas. With just two suitcases in tow, I was lucky enough to scuba-dive in Thailand, explore the ruins of Pompeii, and do karaoke with a Korean movie star. According to Melody Warnick, author of the new book This Is Where You Belong, that makes me a Mover with a capital M. And I have plenty of company: These days, the average American moves nearly 12 times in their lifetime, and 12 percent of Americans move in a given year. But moving continuously has its downsides, according to Warnick. Research sho... posted on Aug 31 2016 (15,202 reads)

Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. Hirshfield turns to the role of language in concentration and the role of concentration in language, in writing, in poetry itself: Great sweeps of thought, emotion, and perception are compressed to forms the mind is able to hold — into images, sentences, and stories that serve as entrance tokens to large and often slippery realms of being… Words hold fast in the mind, seeded with the surplus of beauty and meaning that is conc... posted on Sep 6 2016 (11,056 reads)

‘Oh, what a blessing! Thank you, God!’” “Rainbows just turn the place upside down!” Krumpelman added. Their pleasure in rainbows and sunsets at first struck me as childlike—odd to find among women in their 70s and 80s. But I soon realized it was deeply rooted in contemplation and prayer. Their love of nature derived in part from the texts they have studied and prayed over, they said, especially the Psalms, the ancient Hebrew poems that utilize images of mountains, birds, and stars to express the glory of divine creation. “The Psalms rave about nature, so I probably imbibed the beauty of it when I prayed,” Knabel said. They fe... posted on Sep 26 2016 (9,577 reads)

Eisenstaedt, Children at a Puppet Theatre, Paris, 1963 Each summer I teach creative writing classes at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. It’s a wonderful job for many reasons: my colleagues are uniformly, eccentrically brilliant, I’ve taught at campuses all over the country, from Los Angeles to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and since the program is a sleepaway camp, the mood is always more summer vacation than school-day drudgery. But the real reason I love this job, what makes me cross an ocean and leave my spouse behind for six weeks every year, is my students: my breathtakingly intelligent students, radiating curiosity and teenage awkwardness and de... posted on Sep 28 2016 (34,035 reads)

read it in the news every day. From climate change to overfishing to deforestation, it seems that we are on the brink of a natural disaster on an epic scale. If we cannot do something to reverse these trends, we will surely make our planet uninhabitable. But how do we encourage people—especially our kids—to care more and take action? Social scientists are beginning to look for answers to this question with some promising results. Research indicates that motivating people to care takes more than just reciting facts and making doomsday predictions. Instead, it requires promoting compassionate concern for our natural world, which comes from early contact with nature, em... posted on Nov 3 2016 (12,292 reads)

much at home in the academy. The kind of community I am calling for is a community that exists at the heart of knowing, of epistemology, of reaching and learning, of pedagogy; that kind of community depends centrally on two ancient and honorable kinds of love. The first is love of learning itself. The simple ability to take sheer joy in having a new idea reaffirming or discarding an old one, connecting two or more notions that had hitherto seemed alien to each other, sheer joy in building images of reality with mere words that now suddenly seem more like mirrors of truth this is love of learning. And the second kind of love on which this community depends is love of learners, of tho... posted on Nov 13 2016 (13,008 reads)

kids spend less and less time outdoors, and it’s taking a toll on their health and well-being. Research has shown that children do better physically and emotionally when they are in green spaces, benefiting from the positive feelings, stress reduction, and attention restoration nature engenders. No one has brought attention to this issue more than Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Children & Nature Network and author of Last Child in the Woods, The Nature Principle, and, most recently, Vitamin N: 500 Ways to Enrich the Health & Happiness of Your Family & Community. Louv has written eloquently about the impor... posted on Nov 23 2016 (16,330 reads)

you remember the last time your to-do list was short enough to be, well, do-able? How about the last time you looked at your list and actually wanted to do everything on it? Earlier this spring, I started getting loads of requests for help managing too-long task lists, and so I published this process for organizing them. Ineffective task lists make us feel like we have too much to do in too little time, which makes us feel overwhelmed. Ironically, this makes us worse at planning and managing our time. You might have a perfectly organized task list, though, that is still triggering overwhelm—I just went through one with a client, and frankly I was exhausted just ... posted on Dec 17 2016 (22,862 reads)

your life were a movie, where would the plot be headed right now? You may not be immortalized in film anytime soon, but your life is still a story. According to psychologists, we all have an internalized narrative that explains how we became the person we are today and where we are headed tomorrow. Like any Hollywood blockbuster, this narrative has settings, scenes, a plot, characters, and themes. As we ponder resolutions for the coming year, New Year’s can also be a time to reflect on our life story—and to figure out how everything fits together. Incorporating our goals into the larger narrative of our life can give us more energy to pursue them, and to become the ... posted on Jan 1 2017 (20,830 reads)

had a vivid sense of her as he took his morning bath. Up until then, he seemed always to be thinking of her absence, of the vast hole her absence left in the world. Real, living people have a presence that is so much bigger than what we can see and name. It is so subtle and particular and alive, it slips right through the net of words. After the death of his Joy, Lewis realized that if we are to be as fully alive, we have to let go of our attachment to our cramped and dark little thoughts and images and “stretch out the arms and hands of love.” We have to embrace the mystery of the unknown. Practicing forgiveness, asking and granting forgiveness, is practicing stretching out th... posted on Jan 23 2017 (10,871 reads)

the recent Thanksgiving break, I had the opportunity to meet with friends of extended family members, a couple who are engaged in both disaster relief and community planning work. She is from Nepal and he is from the U.S., and together they relayed a story about their time visiting Nepal during the devastating earthquake of 2015. The two of them were hiking in the mountains when the 7.8 magnitude quake struck. Shaken but not hurt, they made their way back to Katmandu as quickly as possible to check in on family members and then to offer their assistance to others. Originally assigned the task of loading water jugs on trucks, they then volunteered and were enlisted for their... posted on Feb 4 2017 (25,917 reads)

I tell people that I teach a class in law and meditation at UC Berkeley’s law school, I often hear snorts of disbelief. “It’s easier to imagine a kindergarten class sitting in silence for half an hour,” a friend said to me, “than two lawyers sitting together in silence for five minutes.” Charles Halpern (left, foreground) leads a Qigong exercise at a retreat for 75 lawyers at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.Richard Boswell But the class is no joke. In fact, it’s part of a ground-breaking movement that has quietly been taking hold in the legal profession over the past two decades: a movement to bring mindfulness—a medi... posted on Jan 27 2017 (12,558 reads)

is in the air! When we hear that phrase, we might picture, perhaps, a young giddy couple freshly struck by Cupid's arrow or maybe an older couple holding hands as they stroll quietly along a boardwalk awash in a sunset glow. Perhaps the phrase conjures images of roses, chocolates, and candlelit dinners. But love is so much broader an emotion and action than romance. In this Daily Good Spotlight on Love, we look back through Daily Good features and revisit some of love's many-splendored dimensions and expressions. Love is in the air, alright. Everywhere we look. Love for Students Loving teachers transform classrooms....and students. No one falls... posted on Feb 14 2017 (16,451 reads)

Torres clings to a well-worn notebook covered with a photograph of his two children as though it were a lifeline. He beams at the image of his kids, ages 5 and 8, and scans the papers inside, which are his notes on how to communicate with their school, a schedule for their after-school activities, general guidelines for helping them with homework and important contact information in case Torres has a panicked moment. One year ago, Torres was in serious trouble. The single father could barely keep his head afloat at his construction job, let alone handle the seemingly endless reports of his son’s violent explosions at school. After a tumultuous few months, the children were ta... posted on Feb 24 2017 (9,466 reads)

the end of her first day at her first job at a prestigious design firm in Mumbai, 20-year-old Miti Desai came home and wept for five hours straight. Questioned by her concerned parents, the explanation that instinctively rose to her lips was this: “Every aspect of what happens there ultimately comes down to a financial transaction. I can’t live my life that way.” Twelve days later she quit. A few months later she flew to Atlanta, Georgia, a freshly enrolled graduate student of the Portfolio Center. A week after classes began she turned up at the dean’s office with an announcement: “I think I need to leave the school.” Why? “Everythi... posted on Mar 1 2017 (9,010 reads)