Gathering Gratefully in the Time of Coronavirus, by The Gratefulness Team
our daily realities continue to shift in the face of Covid-19, A Network for Grateful Living remains committed to exploring how gratefulness can support us in these times. The hardships we face may feel amplified by our increasing need to stay home, isolating ourselves from others in service of the common good. Discovering ways to foster ease, belonging, kindness, and well-being under these circumstances may feel challenging, yet opportunities for nourishment can find their way into our worlds. The gifts of technology can offer us meaningful connection and support as many of us find increasing comfort in even the simple sound of another person’s voice over phone or video. Perhaps we... posted on May 12 2020 (7,101 reads)

The Value of Being Uncomfortable, by Maria Popova
with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least,” Georgia O’Keeffe, impoverished and solitary in the desert, wrote in considering limitation, creativity, and setting priorities as she was about to revolutionize art while the world was crumbling into its first global war. There are echoes of Stoicism, of Buddhism, of every monastic tradition in O’Keeffe’s core insight — that only in the absence of our habitual comforts, without all the ways in which we ordinarily cushion against the hard facts of our own nature and our mortality, do we befriend ourselves and disco... posted on May 15 2020 (8,626 reads)

Appalachia's Front Porch Network Is A Lifeline, by Alison Stine
County school bus driver Paul Cochran loads his bus with food boxes that he will deliver to students in Charleston, West Virginia. PHOTO BY BRIAN FERGUSON / 100 DAYS IN APPALACHIA On any day in Appalachia, you can find gifts in front of houses, left on porches for the people inside: mushrooms just foraged, cookies freshly baked. The porch is an extension of the home in Appalachia—not only a gathering spot for conversation, but a traditional sharing place. If you want to exchange tools, plants, or hand-me-downs with your neighbor: you put them on the porch. In times of struggle, porches are the vessel to deliver food: frozen meals to new parents, casseroles for griev... posted on May 16 2020 (5,181 reads)

Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being, by Mukta Panda
from Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being, from Chapter 3, “Connecting the Dots.” A Mother/Physician with the Multiple Hats Syndrome Despite the neighborly support, I was stretched thin with all the hats I wore, striving to perfection in every role: mother, sister, daughter, wife, physician, teacher, friend, colleague, acquaintance, and so on. For seventeen years I left home at six in the morning with both children plus three or four other neighborhood children in the carpool. I’d drop the girls off at the girls’ school, the boys at the boys’ school, then come to work. After a long day at work, I would pick them up and d... posted on May 18 2020 (5,530 reads)

7 Ways Protestors Showed Up For Black Lives, by Lornet Turnbull
of people gathered on the Malieveld in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 2, 2020, in protest of violence against Black people in the U.S. Photo by Robin Utrech / SOPA Images / Light Rocket / Getty Images. In the past week, demonstrations have erupted in big and small cities across the United States and in countries around the world over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Amid the outpouring of outrage over Floyd’s death, the killing of Breonna Taylor by a police officer in Louisville, Kentucky, and of Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes in Georgia, along with pent-up anger, exhaustion, and fear experienced by Black, Brown, and Indigenous ... posted on Jun 4 2020 (8,211 reads)

Resources for Unlearning and Transforming Racism, by The Gratefulness Team
situates one well to know what can be and must be done to challenge inequity. It situates one to see opportunity where others see despair.  ~ Lucas Johnson Message from The Gratefulness Team: As our organization commits to engaging with and supporting anti-racist work, we share these resources with you as an invitation to join us in learning, taking action, and working toward individual and collective change. We offer this compilation as a starting point with the recognition that the work extends far beyond what’s included here and happens over the course of a lifetime. How Race Was Made For much of human history, people viewed them... posted on Jun 13 2020 (9,504 reads)

Jolanda van den Berg: We Are Each Other. No Victims, No Heroes:, by Awakin Call Editors
just know it, we are each other .. no victims no heroes .. just this" Jolanda van den Berg defies the conventional labels our world has to offer. Over the last quarter of a century her work has touched and transformed the lives of thousands of put-at-risk children in Peru. She has created a series of boutique hotels,  and offers private 1:1 sessions with people struggling with various kinds of life challenges. By some definitions, this mother of two might be dubbed a philanthropist, a social entrepreneur, a life coach, or even a mystic. But Jolanda's expansive life resists reductive titles. No neat label could possibly capture the rippling qualit... posted on Jun 24 2020 (6,093 reads)

Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, by ted.com
of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.  I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it ... posted on Jul 7 2020 (21,950 reads)

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, by Preeta Bansal
following is based on the July 8th, 2017 Awakin Call with Thom Bond. Thom Bond brings 27 years of study and training experience in human potential to his work as a writer, speaker and workshop leader. His passion and knowledge of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) combine to create a practical, understandable, humorous, and potentially profound approach for learning and integrating skills that help us experience more compassion and understanding. Thom is a founder and the Director of Education for The New York Center for Nonviolent Communication. He is best known as the creator and leader of The Compassion Course, a comprehensive online NVC-based training, Since 2011, more than 14,00... posted on Jul 11 2020 (8,050 reads)

Iris Murdoch on Storytelling & Why Art is Essential to Democracy, by Maria Popova
of the functions of art,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in contemplating art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem, “is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.” Because self-knowledge is the most difficult of the arts of living, because understanding ourselves is a prerequisite for understanding anybody else, and because we can hardly fathom the reality of another without first plumbing our own depths, art is what makes us not only human but humane. That is what the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919&ndas... posted on Jul 16 2020 (5,862 reads)

A Bit of Heaven, by Phyllis Cole-Dai
me tell you about Don. He’s a retired DC firefighter, about to turn 89, living alone in his Maryland apartment. Father of six, grandfather to a tribe, he’s an Irishman, and darn proud of it. Around the start of the pandemic, he dropped me a line out of the blue, a reader offering his take on my novel Beneath the Same Stars. Since then, we’ve struck up a fairly regular email correspondence. We share stories about family escapades, our bad knees, the loved ones we’ve lost and are losing, the dear ones who take care of us and bring us joy. We banter about politics and public health and books and the best way to cook broccoli. We swap original poems. We ... posted on Aug 4 2020 (8,494 reads)

DH Lawrence on Trees, Solitudes and What Roots Us, by Maria Popova
walk among trees is to be reminded that although relationships weave the fabric of life, one can only be in relationship — in a forest or a family or a friendship — when firmly planted in the sovereignty of one’s own being, when resolutely reaching for one’s own light. A century ago, Hermann Hesse contemplated how trees model for us this foundation of integrity in his staggeringly beautiful love letter to trees — how they stand lonesome-looking even in a forest, yet “not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.” Celebrating them as “the most penetrat... posted on Jul 27 2020 (6,058 reads)

Bill Drayton: Half the Population is Out of the Game, by El País Semanal
País Semanal November 10, 2019 A fighter for civil rights who was raised to value empathy and was fascinated by Gandhi's India, Bill Drayton believes that Ashoka’s entrepreneurial model, to which he has dedicated himself for years, can change the world. Drayton created Ashoka 40 years ago and it now has the largest network of social entrepreneurs on the planet. Drayton insists that technological progress creates a new inequality that must be addressed before any other. The search for solutions to social problems should not be a bureaucratic and bland task. Ideally, people would deal with it with the spirit and drive of a Steve Jobs-type of person. Drayton recognize... posted on Jul 29 2020 (3,705 reads)

Breathing Miracles Into Being: The Linda Scotson Technique, by Awakin Call Editors
Scotson is an artist-turned-neuroscientist, and founder of the Linda Scotson Technique (LST) -- an approach that has restored functionality and well-being in the lives of thousands of people navigating a wide-range of health conditions, including autism, brain injuries, anxiety, hypertension and much more. Three days after his birth, Linda Scotson's son Doran was given a terrible prognosis. His back arched, his hands were fisted, his eyes crossed, he couldn't hear. She was told that he had severe athetoid cerebral palsy and severe bilateral hearing loss.  His doctors explained that he would never be able to sit, stand, walk independent... posted on Jul 30 2020 (13,596 reads)

What Qi Gong Taught One Doctor About Healing, by Cynthia Li, MD
following piece has been adapted from Thrive Global I first met Master Mingtong Gu 8 years ago. A friend had invited me to his studio in Petaluma, CA, for a qigong workshop. Qi (“chee”) means life-force energy, gong means cultivation. Slow, easy movements. Low risk enough. And evidence-based. I was a doctor of internal medicine, trained to think critically and methodically, cautious of anything that might fall into the realm of “miracles.”  But I was also desperate. I had suffered for years with complex autoimmune illnesses, including Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and chronic fatigue syndrome—the shadow conditions of Western medicine. Despite conv... posted on Aug 3 2020 (13,979 reads)

Finding Balance in an Unstable World, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
by Diane Barker The present pandemic, which in a few short months has wreaked havoc across our world, is most likely caused by an imbalance in the natural world, as loss of habitat and biodiversity is not only driving animals to extinction but directly causing animal viruses to spread to humans. In response our leaders are using the images of conflict: “We are at war with Covid 19,” we keep hearing; it is an “invisible enemy” we need to “vanquish.” But although this virus is disrupting our lives, causing sickness, death, and economic breakdown, it is itself a completely natural phenomenon, a living thing reproducing itself in the way nature in... posted on Aug 9 2020 (15,474 reads)

The Soil's Story is the Story of Us, by Annie Leonard, Tom Newmark
Arias, senior farmer at Finca Luna Nueva, harvesting turmeric. Photo by Tom Newmark. Wendell Berry called it “the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.” Ninety-five percent of our food is grown in it, it stores and filters our water and provides a home for the majority of life on the planet, and yet most of us rarely pay much attention to it. We dump poisonous chemicals on it, inject it with synthetic nutrients, slash it with plows, strip it of its natural diversity, and bury our trash in it. But soil has a story to tell us, and we are all a part of it. For as long as humans have engaged in agriculture, and even bef... posted on Aug 13 2020 (6,379 reads)

The Dugnad in Our DNA, by Phyllis Cole-Dai
it with me: dugnad (doog-nod). It’s a Norwegian word I learned this week; an ancient word, traceable to the Viking Age, when villagers would labor together to bring ships ashore after long seafaring trips. That’s dugnad. In later centuries, Norwegian farming communities would work together to prepare for harsh winters and to survive other hardships. Dugnad. In the 1940s, Norwegians rallied to resist five brutal years of Nazi occupation. Dugnad. Traditionally, dugnad is the collective effort of individual Norwegians who sacrifice their personal desires, and allow their own sense of “normal”... posted on Oct 3 2020 (8,192 reads)

Crochet Jam: Radical Social Justice Through Folk Art Traditions, by Ramekon O'Arwisters
Jam 2017, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU),  photograph courtesy VCUArts Excerpts from an unpublished manuscript... Creativity makes us kin . . . the goal is to quickly and easily engage participants in a relaxed and creative state by transforming cloth strips into soft sculpture, using folk-art tradition of rag-rug making. Crochet Jam . . . is a bridge that unites people and cultures. I grew up on a small farm. My father harvested a bounty of vegetables–cabbage, green peas, onions, white and sweet potatoes, green beans, corn, beets, squash, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes, green and red peppers, lettuce. We raised pigs, chickens; and even earthw... posted on Oct 14 2020 (6,490 reads)

8 Questions to Help Navigate Election Stress, by Jeremy Adam Smith, Jill Suttie
are you doing? For Americans facing the COVID-19 lockdown and economic instability through the spring and summer, that became a difficult question to ask—and to answer. Things were already pretty bad. And then the presidential election began in earnest. A new survey from the American Psychological Association finds that this election is a significant source of stress for more than two-thirds of American adults—up from half during the 2016 presidential election. According to a new report based on three surveys by the nonpartisan organization More in Common, “About 7 in 10 Americans are worried about the risk of widespread violence brea... posted on Oct 21 2020 (11,456 reads)