invite you to sit with me under the wide umbrella of the old fig tree that was planted behind this house before we were born. All around us life is breaking open: the orange trees are covered in white buds, which, softened by yesterday’s rain, will release the rapturous scent that always reminds me of new beginnings and weddings. It is a perfect time to visit. I want to remind you of a way of thinking and offer you the gift of a practice. Both have helped me travel across the tumultuous terrain of learning to live the life I love and love the life I am living. I am asking you to reclaim what may have become a dusty and numb habit and transform it into a practice of breaking... posted on May 30 2014 (25,469 reads)

Treasurer is one of my favorite business authors - not just because his books are good - but because he reminds me of the Wizard of Oz - his work always offers three important elements: brains, heart, and courage. His newest book, "Leaders Open Doors" is no exception. I've been eager to talk to Bill about it and he graciously made time for an interview. BJ: I love the story behind your new book, "Leaders Open Doors." Would you share it with me again, for the benefit of my readers? Bill: For over two decades I've been a senior ranking member of the Legion of Leadership Complexifiers (LLC). We're the folks who make our living out of plumbing, parsing,... posted on Jun 21 2014 (20,132 reads)

I started this blog, I posted this on my Berkeley Community Acupuncture Facebook link. It was received very positively and so I’d like to repost here: Today, after receiving acupuncture during my donation based shift, a patient asked me why I was “giving away” such amazing treatments for free. Don’t you value your skills? She asked. Don’t you want to demand that others value your skills too? Don’t you want them to show you respect by paying you what you are worth? Then she saw my perplexed expression and then added, oh, I see you are trying to fix the world. You are trying to help people in need because they are lacking. That is good of you. ... posted on May 28 2014 (23,800 reads)

this, of course. Not a busy city street.       I used the same exercises for a while with my own students. I’d take them down to the beach in a quiet place and then go through the whole thing. Then I’d say, now pick up your cameras and walk like you’re walking on eggs and look, and see. And make a photograph of what you respond to.       It’s a very different state. You’re in a different state. I find that I still make my best images when I do that today. RW: This is very different, but I’d imagine that many students, or at least some students, would find this quite wonderful. JU: Oh, yes. Some did. But some saw... posted on May 12 2014 (22,576 reads)

Loses Son To Cancer, Starts Charity To Transport Kids To Chemo Richard Nares stands in front of one of many vans his foundation uses to transport children to and from chemotherapy treatments. Facebook, The Emilio Nares Fou Richard Nares faced a parent's worst fear when his son Emilio was diagnosed with leukemia in 1998 and died from the disease two years later. But he managed to transform his grief into charity by helping hundreds of families face the complex challenges of childhood illness, by giving them a lift. After his son died, he returned to Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego and asked staff how he could help others. Their answer: transportation. Child... posted on Jul 10 2014 (18,914 reads)

Orunamamu The best teacher my children ever had growing up was in Kindergarten. Mary Beth Washington did almost everything contrary to the rules: she took the kids out walking in the rain; she slept with them during naptime; she came to school dressed like a circus performer. She was in love with birds, dancing, poetry and people. The School Board, more than once, voted to fire her, but the parents came to her defense again and again and won the day. She was about 30 years ahead of her time, a Flower Child before the era of flower children, with a genius for teaching kids. Once my own were in high school, the School Board finally had its way and kicked her out. I ran into her this ... posted on May 5 2014 (25,820 reads)

creative activities like knitting and cooking can boost your levels of serotonin and decrease anxiety. Photo by Asife/ Shutterstock. Do you consider yourself creative? If the answer is "no," you are not alone. We have been working as creativity facilitators for close to two decades, and whenever we ask people this question, shockingly few hands go up. It turns out that you don't have to be a great artist to be creative. Creativity is simply our ability to dream things up and make them happen. Cooking breakfast, planting a garden, even developing a business plan are all creative acts. But here is where the arts do come in. Participating in the ar... posted on Jun 5 2014 (1,860 reads)

of giving in, the deepest thing we can do with trauma is to transmute pain into actions that heal ourselves and help other people. A powerful meditation on love, loss, recovery and resistance.   In 1998 my wife Shoshana was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. An accomplished artist and psychotherapist who worked with Holocaust survivors (of whom she was one), the woman who once spoke eight languages could barely speak at all. Did Shoshana know who I was? There were good days and bad. During the bad days I would say that the ‘light was definitely out.’ On the good days, I would come to her and embrace her. I w... posted on Jun 15 2014 (23,563 reads)

thought he was crazy. But I also admired him for wanting to have the experience.” TRAVIS TRANI, WARDEN, COLORADO STATE PENITENTIARY IN CANON CITY © Feng Yu – Fotolia.com When Rick Raemisch, Colorado’s new Chief of Corrections, asked to spend time in solitary confinement at a prison in Cañon City, some people thought he had lost it. But Raemisch, in an effort to ignite a larger discussion about the overuse of solitary confinement, knew he needed to walk the walk in order to talk the talk. His stint – twenty hours in a cell alone – garnered national headlines and encouraged prison administration and policymakers to question th... posted on Jun 18 2014 (19,622 reads)

and day of the week accordingly. 3-4 year olds 1.It's never too early to share Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss with your children. As kids start to get a stronger grasp on the meaning of the words they're hearing, Silverstein and Seuss combine great poetry with silly sounds and ideas that all kids can relate to (not to mention some really important life lessons). 2.Play a simple rhyming game with your children. Pick up objects from around the house, or point to things in images, name them, and see if your children can come up with a rhyming word to complement that object (don't point to an orange though–that's just cruel). 3.Play “gobbledygook&r... posted on May 31 2014 (17,142 reads)

McFerrin: This is what I want everyone to experience at the end of my concert is everyone has this sense of rejoicing. I don't want them to be blown away by what I do, I want them to have this sense of real, real joy from the depths of their being. Because I think when you take them to that place then you open up a place where grace can come in. Krista Tippett, host: Who better to contemplate the human voice — its delights, its revelations, and its mystery — than Bobby McFerrin? He's won 10 Grammys and is as comfortable with Chick Corea as with Mozart. He's also known for drawing thousands of strangers into singing the Ave Maria, beautifully, to... posted on Aug 15 2014 (14,493 reads)

Kingsnorth examines the collective fear of the future and the progressive concept of space colonization. He urges us to deflect the delusions created by our techno-industrial society. It was perhaps most popular in the 1950s, as a new consumer society began confidently rolling off the production line, and the age of literary science fiction arguably reached its peak. It was particularly popular with children, who read about it in comics with titles like Fantastic Adventures and Planet Stories. But many adults were equally sold on the promise offered. It was assumed fairly widely that by the year 2000 the promise would have been kept, and that humanity would benefit greatly. ... posted on Jul 27 2014 (14,301 reads)

creative activities like knitting and cooking can boost your levels of serotonin and decrease anxiety. Photo by Asife/ Shutterstock. Do you consider yourself creative? If the answer is "no," you are not alone. We have been working as creativity facilitators for close to two decades, and whenever we ask people this question, shockingly few hands go up. It turns out that you don't have to be a great artist to be creative. Creativity is simply our ability to dream things up and make them happen. Cooking breakfast, planting a garden, even developing a business plan are all creative acts. But here is where the arts do come in. Partici... posted on Jun 5 2014 (37,735 reads)

is a time-honored strategy in the repertoire of nonviolence, but we must learn to use it properly. Poke fun at the problem not the person. Credit: http://breakingstories.wordpress.com. All rights reserved. Five or six men stood over me yelling as I sat in a chair at the Ministry of the Interior in San Salvador in 1989. I was there to renew my visa as a member of Peace Brigades International (PBI), an NGO that provides 'protective accompaniment' for teachers, trade unionists, students, indigenous leaders, church workers and other activists when faced by threats of violence. I was on the verge of tears, with horror stories fresh in my mind about people who had b... posted on Jul 8 2014 (36,229 reads)

not swimming in Walden Pond, Linda Booth Sweeney, a systems educator and writer, focuses on how to clearly and creatively teach students of all ages about living systems to help them make better decisions in the world. She spoke with Lisa Bennett, communications director for the Center for Ecoliteracy and coauthor of Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence, about leaving a career in advertising for education, teaching her own children about living systems, and feeling hope for the future. LISA BENNETT: You live in Concord, Massachusetts — home of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walden Pond. I assume that you... posted on Jul 5 2014 (19,171 reads)

stuff of our lives — perishable and processed, luxurious and essential, mass-marketed and handcrafted, manufactured and farmed — arrives safely and conveniently, thanks to a complex web of wraps, packs, and pallets. Yet this packaged world also comes to us at an undeniable cost. In the U.S., containers and packaging materials constitute 32 percent of the municipal solid waste stream, over 800 pounds per person annually. To keep goods moving, 500 million new wooden transport pallets (enough material on a volume basis to frame 300,000 houses) are added each year. More than 80 percent of these pallets are used once before being ground up, incinerated, or thrown away. S... posted on Aug 14 2014 (15,693 reads)

science is just beginning to understand how Facebook has changed our social lives since it was born ten years ago. Over the past ten years, Facebook has added a new dimension to the social lives of over a billion people—and together with other social media like Twitter and Instagram, it has created an entirely new category of social ties. Given their popularity, social media have become the topic of a growing body of research in the social sciences. For Facebook’s tenth birthday, I collected ten discoveries this research has yielded. If you’re on Facebook, then these studies apply to you! 1. Facebook might increase dissatisfaction with your life. Th... posted on Nov 16 2014 (28,992 reads)

become the tools of our tools; And the fault – and the solution – lies not in our tools, but in ourselves. The digital revolution promised so much at the outset: computers would make air travel safer, health care more affordable, and education more widely available. But for all the evident benefits – and there are many – the tools have taken over the toolmakers. - Complex algorithms, beyond human understanding, replace even the most high-valued jobs, including the jobs of algorithm writers; - Yet even as jobs and income disappear, mobile devices bombarded with messages urging endless consumption of finite resources. The resulting ... posted on Aug 4 2014 (24,878 reads)

years ago I was living in a small, second-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One day my refrigerator stopped working. It still managed to store my food, but kept it warm rather than cold. When I called a repair shop they said it would cost fifty dollars just to send someone to look at it. As an impoverished graduate student with little disposable income, I resolved to fix the refrigerator myself. First I went back to the used furniture guy who sold me the refrigerator. Based on my description of what happened, he said it probably needed an electrical part that cost only a few dollars, and told me where to buy it. I went to the electrical supply store, and the ... posted on Sep 4 2014 (19,825 reads)

UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “We tried to stay away from politics because we serve diverse communities,” Feder says. “But what happened with Babi pushed us to the forefront of a very public struggle. He’s part of our family.” The Garden Library started a Facebook page called “freeBabi.” Within four hours the new group had over 300 “Likes.” It quickly grew to over 1,000. People across Tel Aviv, even some Israelis abroad, posted images with supportive slogans. Ibrahim was released on July 24. “I wouldn’t be free today without the Garden Library community,” he says. On July 29, the Garden Library team s... posted on Nov 1 2014 (19,135 reads)