Diana Beresford-Kroeger: The Call of the Trees, by Awakin Call Editors
Beresford-Kroeger is a world-recognized botanist, medical biochemist and author (and now filmmaker). She is known for her extraordinary ability to translate scientific complexities of nature for the general public with both precision and poetry. "If you speak for the trees, you speak for all of nature", says Beresford-Kroeger, one of the world's leading expert on trees. She has studied the environmental, medicinal, and even spiritual aspects of trees, has written about them in leading books, and maintains gardens on her property that burst with flora. From a very young age, she understood she was the last voice to bring Celtic knowledge to the New World. Orphaned at age 1... posted on May 9 2020 (7,527 reads)

Warriors Wanted: Why One Woman is Training People to Defend the Human Spirit, by CBC Radio
year old writer, consultant and activist Margaret Wheatley has studied the cyclical nature of civilizations throughout history and she is quite confident that the end of our civilization is closer than we might like to think. And she is doing something about it… something radical. Wheatley is building an army of 'warriors for the human spirit' with people who want to lessen the suffering in the world - whether it be from natural disasters, political strife, war, famine, or from the tyranny of daily injustices in modern life. Her warriors are trained as leaders with compassion, kindness, servitude and generosity as prime requirements. Wheatley ... posted on Jun 17 2020 (9,438 reads)

The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity , by Shelly L. Francis
from The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity by the Center for Courage & Renewal and Shelly L. Francis (Berrett-Koehler, 2018). Fight. Flee. Freeze. Flock. But for each stress reaction, an option exists to get us out of our corners: fortify. As when we take vitamins and essential minerals, we can fortify ourselves for the hard times. When fortified, we can choose how to respond instead of simply reacting, and our choices come from a healthier, more self-aware stance. Fortitude is another word for courage. When Thomas Aquinas wrote about bravery in the thirteenth century, he used the Latin word fortitudo, and held that courage was a disposition required for ever... posted on Jul 22 2020 (6,219 reads)

At a Tipping Point -- Towards Healing the Climate, by Breanna Draxler
change is the undercurrent that drives and shapes our lives in countless ways. Journalist Judith D. Schwartz sees the term as shorthand. “It’s almost as if people think climate is this phenomenon, determined solely by CO2, as if we could turn a dial up or down,” she tells me over the phone. “We are missing so much.” In her quest for climate solutions, Schwartz leans into the complexity of natural systems. As she and I talk, I come to imagine our climate as a beautiful series of overlapping Rube Goldberg-style cycles of carbon, water, nutrients, and energy. Those systems have been knocked out of alignment, sure, but as Schwartz sees it, repair is not imp... posted on Sep 5 2020 (4,994 reads)

The Gift of Ecological Humility, by Leah Penniman
my early 20s, I apprenticed myself to the The Queen Mothers of Kroboland in Ghana with the hope of understanding more about my cultural heritage. Early one morning, I arrived at the compound of Paramount Queen Mother Manye Nartike, who was particularly animated by a rumor she had heard about our diasporic practices in relation to land. In disbelief she admonished me, “Is it true that in the United States, a farmer will put the seed into the ground and not pour any libations, offer any prayers, sing, or dance, and expect that seed to grow?” Met with my ashamed silence, she continued, “That is why you are all sick! Because you see the Earth as a thing and not a being.&rdqu... posted on Feb 23 2021 (5,227 reads)

The World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane, by Kozo Hattori, Sue Cochrane
Hattori on the meaning of Aloha... Probably the most important concept or word in Hawaii is Aloha. Aloha has been commercialized so much that the original meanings were lost. So what I've been feeling into is the deepest aspects of Aloha. And what it comes down to for me is what they call Kapu Aloha. Kapu means 'sacred'. It's actually the same word that the word taboo came from. Taboo is actually Polynesian word. The Hawaiian K was originally a T. Kapu Aloha is sacred Aloha, which is “I’m going to love no matter what.” If you come and steal my land, I’m going to love you. You come and beat me, I’m going to love you. You come and stri... posted on Mar 2 2021 (8,653 reads)

It Couldn't Be Clearer, by Betsey Crawford
become an instant cliche as the pandemic reveals the threadbare fabric of our culture: the truly essential people that make day-to-day life possible are often the ones in the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. As grateful as I am to have professional people in my life, I am utterly dependent on the people who grow, harvest, and distribute food. The people who stack grocery shelves and check us out. The people willing to shop for the elderly and immunocompromised. The people picking up our garbage, manning the water and sewer systems. And, of course, the health care workers. It doesn’t take a pandemic to tell us that our culture has its values and rewards upside down. B... posted on Apr 3 2021 (5,335 reads)

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, by John Philip Newell
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 (5,164 reads)

The Descent to Soul: An Overview of the Terrain, by Bill Plotkin
a wise person or else keep silent for those who do not understand will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive what longs to be burned to death…. …And so long as you have not experienced this: to die and so to grow you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. — johann wolfgang von goethe This is a field guide to an ecstatic and hazardous odyssey that most of the world has forgotten — or not yet discovered — an essential spiritual adventure for which you won’t find clear or complete maps anywhere else in the contemporary Western world. This journey, which begins with a dying, enables you to grow whole and wild in ... posted on Jul 26 2021 (7,961 reads)

How the stunning abstract art of Hilma af Klint opens our eyes to new ways of seeing, by Joanna Mendelssohn
Hilma af Klint, The Secret Paintings. Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1986, those art historians who see art as some form of linear progression “improving” with time received a rude shock. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition The Spiritual in Art — Abstract Paintings 1890 – 1985 introduced a hitherto unknown woman artist. The issue was not just that this art was so exquisitely beautiful — but that the paintings had been painted in the early 20th century. Hilma af Klint was once known as a minor academic Swedish artist. Born in 1862, she had been one of the first women to graduate from the Royal Academy of Fine Art... posted on Aug 17 2021 (6,674 reads)

From Tolerance to Appreciation, by Meghana Anand
the current Executive Director of the Charter for Compassion, which provides an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide. In December 2019, she spoke with MEGHANA ANAND about the organization, its partners, and the work done through the Charter in different countries. Marilyn is an educationist-author and writes about world religions and cultures, bringing out their diverse and uniting threads. MA: How did it all begin, your work with the Charter for Compassion? MT: Well, I think it all started when I was a child from a hyphenated American family, in this case Croatian-American. I grew up in an immigrant neighbo... posted on Aug 18 2021 (3,135 reads)

Fire Season, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
by Breno Machado. Courtesy of Unsplash.com We waited through the Winter of the pandemic, wearing masks, hiding from our darker fears. And then Spring came—apple blossom pink, pear blossom white. The wisteria falling lavender-blue over the garden shed, and then the jasmine, a wall of bright white, filling the evening air with sweetness. Here was another story, each year returning, and longed for as the garden comes alive with colors and fragrance, and in the vegetable garden harvesting the first lettuces, planting the tomato seedlings for later. And the California poppies painting the edge of the pathway orange and yellow, wild roses pink beside the roads. How we waite... posted on Aug 19 2021 (6,977 reads)

A Palestinian Woman Building Peace From the Bottom Up, by Fathom Journal
Abu Arqoub is Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a network of civil society organisations working in conflict transformation, development, and coexistence in the Middle East among Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews. A Palestinian, she is also a leading supporter of Women Wage Peace (WWP). Fathom assistant editor Sam Nurding spoke to her about the challenges faced by a Palestinian feminist engaged in conflict-resolution activism. PERSONAL JOURNEY Sam Nurding: I read that your family defended Jews in the riots in Hebron in 1929 and that when as a young woman you wanted to join the First Intifada in Hebron your Communist-leaning mother told yo... posted on Sep 22 2021 (3,572 reads)

Place, Personhood & the Hippocampus, by Maria Popova
and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her lyrical love letter to her native Highlands, echoing an ancient intuition about how our formative physical landscapes shape our landscapes of thought and feeling. The word “genius” in the modern sense, after all, originates in the Latin phrase genius loci — “the spirit of a place.” I find myself thinking about Shepherd as I return to the Bulgarian mountains of my own childhood, trekking the same paths with my mother that I once trudged with tiny feet beside her, astonished at the flood of long-ag... posted on Sep 26 2021 (4,279 reads)

Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter, by Oliver Burkeman
our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life. The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly finite. If you’re lucky and you live to 80, you will have lived about four thousand weeks. This truth, which most of us ignore most of the time, is something to wrestle with if we want to spend our limited time on this earth well. Given that, it follows that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Yet the modern discipline of time management (or productivity) is depressingly narrow-minded, focused on devising the perfect morning routine or trying... posted on Dec 12 2021 (13,852 reads)

Turn New Year's Resolutions into Revelations, by Kristi Nelson
is no other time of year that stirs our cultural and personal interest in self-improvement more than the shiny, clean slate of an impending new calendar year. For many of us, January 1st beckons with vast possibility; we are encouraged to front-load the year with an abundance of hopes lost and built up since the last New Year. It is the legitimated time for new beginnings, big dreams, lofty goals, and resolutions that can make us feel like this is deja-vu all over again. How many of us could simply cross out an old date and write “This year” at the top of dozens of lists of resolutions we have made over the years? New Year’s resolutions tend to be abo... posted on Jan 1 2022 (5,202 reads)

Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, by Knowledge@Wharton
are plenty of books that teach how to influence the behavior of others, but anyone who’s set a personal goal knows it’s a lot tougher to apply those lessons inward. Ayelet Fishbach, a behavioral science and marketing professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has written a new book that can help. Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, which was released in January, offers a framework for setting and attaining goals, working through roadblocks, and keeping the temptation to quit at bay. “It’s really important to set goals that are not so abstract that you cannot come up with a plan,” Fishba... posted on Feb 15 2022 (3,425 reads)

Experiments with Wild Grace, by Chelan Harkin
WHAT WAS THAT?! WHAT JUST HAPPENED THROUGH ME?! That was 21 year old me tingling from head to toe and gaping in shocked awe at the computer screen after conducting an experiment on myself that saved, liberated and transformed my life. I had been in a place of acute hopelessness and inner anguish in which I felt so profoundly alone in the world and disconnected from even the possibility of authentic connection. Somehow amidst all that I found the wherewithal to listen to an inner prompting that urged me to try an experiment. This experiment was to allow myself to write a “bad poem” every day for a month. Writing poetry had been an important practice of m... posted on Apr 6 2022 (4,545 reads)

When Love Breaks Your Heart, by Jill Suttie
is inevitable. Romances end, loved ones die, friends let us down. These experiences might be universal, but their impact can still be devastating. 
This is what science journalist Florence Williams discovered after her husband of 25 years unexpectedly asked for a divorce. William found herself in a daze, shocked and miserable, and even ill. 
 “Physically, I felt like my body had been plugged into a faulty electrical socket,” she writes. “In addition to weight loss, I’d stopped sleeping. I was getting sick: My pancreas wasn’t working right. It was hard to think straight.” To help understand what was happening to her, she t... posted on Apr 13 2022 (7,786 reads)

How to Break the Cycles of War and Violence, by Jeremy Adam Smith
all seen the images of violence coming from Ukraine, as the Russian invasion continues. They’re hitting Anastasiia Timmer harder than most of us, because she was born and raised in Ukraine. Now a criminologist at the California State University, Northridge, Timmer studies why people commit acts of violence. “Growing up in Ukraine and learning our history shaped my desire to better understand causes of behavior, beliefs, and generational trauma,” she says. â€¨ She and her team of Ukrainian, Russian, and American researchers went to Ukraine in 2017, after the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian provinces of Crimea and Donbas. At that ... posted on Apr 23 2022 (3,291 reads)