Ben Quilty: Artist Activist, by Jessica Raschke
Quilty is like any other human being: complex, flawed, obvious, messy, courageous, funny. As one of Australia’s best-known and internationally acclaimed artists, his public profile as an “artist activist” can invite intense public scrutiny. He gets fairly and unfairly described as all kinds of things, yet his modus operandi is humanity and compassion. In 2002, Ben won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, and was a finalist in the Wynne and Archibald prizes. His success continued: he won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 with a portrait of Jimmy Barnes, and in 2011 he won the coveted Archibald Prize with a portrait of artist and mentor, Margaret... posted on Nov 20 2019 (4,844 reads)

Mark Tredinnick Heals with Poetry, by Julie Perrin
first met Mark Tredinnick’s work through The Little Red Writing Book—recommended by a teacher I loved. Within the opening pages, I was hooked. I read the text avidly, for the author’s voice came to me with clarity, and elegance. Exercises adeptly invited me to ‘Try this’.  I was drawn to the way Tredinnick connected rhythm and sentence-forming to breath and walking in the natural world. Little did I know he was already a revered and award-winning poet and nature writer. In the years that followed I gave Mark’s book on writing craft to friends and family, using it to coach and encourage other writers. Through a Melbourne winter I met up with ... posted on Dec 2 2019 (5,633 reads)

What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in School?, by Diana Divecha
50 U.S. states require schools to have a bullying prevention policy. But a policy, alone, is not enough. Despite the requirement, there’s been a slight uptick in all forms of bullying during the last three years. Bullying can look like experienced basketball players systematically intimidating novice players off the court, kids repeatedly stigmatizing immigrant classmates for their cultural differences, or a middle-school girl suddenly being insulted and excluded by her group of friends. Bullying occurs everywhere, even in the highest-performing schools, and it is hurtful to everyone involved, from the targets of bullying to the witnesses—and even to bullies t... posted on Nov 4 2019 (6,535 reads)

A Chorus of Thank Yous, by Elizabeth Aquino
Editor’s note: As we begin this year’s season of thanksgiving with Thanksgiving Day in Canada (October 14, 2019) we offer the following invitation (originally published in 2015) to consider how gratitude might arise and serve “even as we mourn and starve and hurt.” Thanksgiving is a formal holiday for giving thanks, for sharing community with family and friends, but it’s also the holiday that represents most vividly the paradox of feeling gratitude even as we suffer or cause the suffering of others. Some of us live close enough to our immediate families that sitting down with them and sharing a meal on this one day is less about family and... posted on Nov 28 2019 (4,010 reads)

Spirit Bathing for the Worried and Beleaguered, by Patricia Adams Farmer
all who feel deeply about the world, for all who mourn a planet under siege, for all who care about justice and human dignity and democracy and the welfare of the most vulnerable — these are hard times. Shocking and dispiriting days. I feel it, you feel it. When is it all going to turn around? It will turn around, I’m convinced, but at a great price of waiting too long. My theory is that we humans are an eleventh-hour species, waiting until it is almost too late to do anything to save ourselves. But we do, history tells. We do. Barely. By the skin of our teeth. While the future remains open with no guarantees, I truly believe that the current moral sickness will break like... posted on Dec 6 2019 (7,182 reads)

The Lost Words, by Jackie Morris
by Jackie Morris from "The Lost Words" It has been described as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ by The Guardian, but really it is just a book of spell-poems and paintings. Created as a response to the realisation that we humans were losing sight of the common species, the everyday names of wild things that share our earth, the book’s aim was to re-connect, re-focus, revitalise. As Robert said ‘we do not love what we cannot name, and what we do not love we will not save’. It had come to our attention that words were slipping out from the mouths and the minds of children, but it was only once the book was complete and beginning to make i... posted on Dec 12 2019 (6,866 reads)

Annie Dillard on the Winter Solstice, by Maria Popova
considered the cold season the time for tending one’s inner garden. “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,” Albert Camus wrote a generation later. “If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely,” Adam Gopnik observed after many more revolutions of the Earth around the Sun in his lyrical love letter to winter. But if we are to reap winter’s quiet and invisible spiritual rewards, it seems that special regard must be paid to day of the season’s onset as the time to set such interior intentions. That’s what Annie ... posted on Dec 21 2019 (12,206 reads)

Shaped by a Silky Attention, by Jane Hirshfield
request for concentration isn't always answered, but people engaged in many disciplines have found ways to invite it in. Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest or boredom. However it is brought into being, true concentration appears -- paradoxically -- at the moment willed effort drops away. It is then that a person enters what scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described as "flow" and Zen call... posted on Jan 18 2020 (5,377 reads)

Love Letters from La Pineta, by Jane Jackson
Letters from la Pineta" by DailyGood volunteer Jane Jackson is more than a book -- it is a living gesture of love that wings its way between the visible and invisible world. A book that embodies hospitality in its deepest sense. For to truly welcome love and all its bright gifts we are required to keep our hearts open when grief's shadow descends. And that is exactly what Jane does in this book letter by heartfelt letter.  Written in the years following her beloved husband Blyden's passing, the letters are addressed to him, and to Jasmine their granddaughter who arrived on this Earth after he had "changed address." She writes them from Mornese -- the It... posted on Feb 14 2020 (4,771 reads)

Learning to Move from Strength Instead of Strain, by Awakin Call Editors
a young man he trained for a decade in the classical dance form of bharatanatyam. As an adult he studied yoga, and ran a studio of his own. Until one day he decided to put aside every shred of training he had received and announced he was going to observe his students in silence, and see what arose …it was a radical decision, and for Gert van Leeuwen, it was a moment that changed everything. Gert van Leeuwen is the founder of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy, and the director of two Critical Alignment schools in Amsterdam and Russia. Over the last forty years his work has largely flown under the radar, drawing a small and dedicated following around the world. He has... posted on Feb 20 2020 (5,114 reads)

From What Is to What If, by Rob Hopkins
the state of the world, the message of despair is pretty convincing. Things look grim. But something about that doesn’t sit quite right with me. In fact, there’s evidence that things can change, and that cultures can change, rapidly and unexpectedly. And that’s not just naïve, pie-in-the-sky thinking. In How Did We Do That? The Possibility of Rapid Transition, Andrew Simms and Peter Newell tell the story of Iceland’s 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, which sent fine dust into the sky that spread for thousands of miles and grounded most of the world’s planes. Then what happened? People adapted. Quickly. Supermarkets replaced air-freight... posted on Mar 19 2020 (10,589 reads)

Every Act a Ceremony, by Charles Eisenstein
2019 I met a woman a few weeks ago who works with a Kogi mama, or shaman, from the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. He came to California a few years ago and performed extensive ceremonies on a particular spot of land. He said, “You’d better do a ceremony here regularly, or there will be serious fires.” No one did the ceremonies, and the next year there were forest fires. He came back afterward and repeated his warning. “If you don’t do the ceremonies, the fires will be even worse.” The next year, the fires were worse. He came again and issued his warning a third time: “Do the ceremonies or the fires in this part of the world will be worse still.&r... posted on Apr 25 2020 (8,540 reads)

Erich Fromm: The Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation, by Maria Popova
be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope. Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and desp... posted on Mar 30 2020 (14,895 reads)

Courage & Vulnerability: Corona & the Wisdom of Elders, by Parker Palmer
every crisis of my life, learning has helped me find my way thru. That means paying attention, allowing myself to feel as well as think, looking at things from different angles, gathering the best info available, trying to connect the dots, and “living the questions” when the answers elude me. That’s why I love this excerpt from T.H. White’s novel “The Once and Future King,” based on the legend of King Arthur. The wizard Merlyn, who’s been entrusted with educating the young Arthur, is speaking to the future king at what we'd call a "teachable moment." As Americans and world citizens, we’re at a teachable moment called &qu... posted on Apr 6 2020 (17,114 reads)

Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation, by Charles Eisenstein
years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous.... posted on Apr 16 2020 (14,194 reads)

This Is Not a Rehearsal, by Hala Alyan
by Michelle Urra Two years ago, I had an ectopic pregnancy. It was sudden and unexpected, and left me reeling. It happened during this time of year. The weather was slowly turning. The days suddenly getting longer. I sat in our new backyard and read and deep-breathed and cried. I scooted my chair to chase the sun across the lawn. I watched spring outside my living room window, the women in their sundresses and sandals. Their joy felt a lifetime away from my bitterness. I waited. I waited to see if my body would erupt. This is what these days remind me of. These days of waiting and foreboding. I sit and wait. But there’s one difference—this time, the wh... posted on Apr 11 2020 (12,600 reads)

Powered by Love --- an Emerging Worldview, by James O'Dea
was invited to write a reflection that I've titled: Powered by Love---an Emerging Worldview It is on my website, being circulated in other forums by Club of Budapest, Science and Medical Network in the UK, and others. There is a worldview that has come to dominate every aspect of global reality affecting human civilization, the natural world and planetary climate conditions. It can be summarized as the quantitative worldview. The quantitative worldview is in a crisis so deep it is leading, in an interconnected and interdependent world, to deep systemic disruptions, chaotic conditions and signs of complete failure. If this worldview were a patient receiving care it wou... posted on Apr 17 2020 (11,130 reads)

Rachel Remen: The Grace of Being Seen, by Rachel Naomi Remen
9th, 2014 I wanted to share with you a letter that meant a great deal to me that was posted to my website in response to my last blog. Carol addresses it to physicians but it is true of us all; everyone who goes to work every day in this broken healthcare system in the hopes of helping others, despite everything. It has never been harder to be a health professional and I have never been prouder to be counted among the people who choose this work. We are what is right with the system. Perhaps some day we can build a system truly worthy of our patients and of us all. Love, RACHEL Dear Rachel and all other Physicians, It makes my heart ache to read about how you ca... posted on Apr 21 2020 (8,233 reads)

From Emergency to Emergence, by David Korten
COVID-19 emergency has exposed our societies’ failure to address the needs of billions of people. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a fundamental truth about human nature: There are those among us eager to exploit the suffering of others for personal gain. We can be reassured, however, by how few of them there are. Their actions contrast starkly with the far greater numbers at all levels of society demonstrating their willingness, even eagerness, to cooperate, share, and sacrifice for the well-being of all. The pandemic has also exposed extreme vulnerabilities in the global market economy, including its long and highly specialized linear supply chains, corporate monopolies shield... posted on May 2 2020 (7,876 reads)

Dr. Phuoc Le: HEAL-ing Others and Paying Forward the Blessings, by Awakin Call Editors
Phuoc Le is an advocate for equitable healthcare worldwide. He is a physician and co-founder of the HEAL (Health, Equity, Action, and Leadership) Initiative, which trains front-line health professionals to build a community dedicated to serving the underserved. With a name meaning blessing or good fortune in both Vietnamese and Chinese, Phuoc was born in Vietnam at the end of the war and fled at age 5 with his family by boat -- narrowly escaping death at sea. Now a highly educated and trained physician, Phuoc has worked with Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health to provide healthcare to the world's poor in their homes and communities, including in Africa and post-earthquake Haiti. &... posted on Dec 31 1969 (275 reads)