Joyce Carol Oates On the Art of Beholding Beauty, by Maria Popova
lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.” Perhaps counterintuitively, the diaries of celebrated artists, writers, and scientists, private as they are, are often reminders not only of their humanity but of our own, brimming with deeply and widely resonant insights on our shared struggles and yearnings. Such is the case of The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (public library) — a chronicle of Oates’scharacteristically self-reflexive, sometimes self-conscious, but always intensely intelligent and perceptive meditations on literature and life. One of her most beautiful reflections, penned on a cold December morning in 1977 — a pivotal time in Oat... posted on Jun 19 2014 (9,926 reads)

Starved for Time? Here's a Surprising-and Easy-Solution, by Christine Carter
Carter explains how "doing nothing" could be a key to happiness... and productivity.  Although I think I spent most of my childhood daydreaming, I seldom do it anymore. Occasionally, I’ll catch myself spacing out in the shower, just standing there, and I’ll try to hustle myself back on track, lest I waste any more time or water. Rarely do we just let ourselves stare into space these days. Like many people, I feel uncomfortable when I’m not doing something—uncomfortable “wasting time.” We humans have become multi-tasking productivity machines. We can work from anywhere, to great effect. We can do... posted on Jan 19 2015 (36,547 reads)

A Conversation with Lily Yeh: Art for Social Transformation, by Richard Whittaker
my email one morning I found a note from Nipun Mehta: We’ve lined up an incredible guest for the July 5th Awakin Call, artist Lily Yeh, and we were wondering if you were available to interview?  I quickly Googled Lily Yeh and yes, I would be available. I’ve done a few other Awakin Calls and, thanks to the remarkable guests, each one has been inspiring. Awakin Calls are one of ServiceSpace’s several avenues for spreading social nourishment, and the guests are always well chosen. Writing now, some months after the conversation with Lily, I find myself struggling for a description that will capture my own experience of it. The language one t... posted on Feb 22 2015 (25,500 reads)

Art As Experience: John Dewey on Why the Rhythmic Highs and Lows of Life Are Essential to Its Creative Completeness, by Maria Popova
have no choice but to express their lives,” Anne Truitt wrote in her penetrating reflection on the crucial difference between being an artist and making art. This creative inevitability is at the center of artistic endeavor and has been articulated by a multitude of humanity’s most celebrated artists. “Every good artist paints what he is,” Jackson Pollock asserted in his final interview. So why, then, do we so readily reduce works of art to objects and commodities, forgetting that they are at heart transfigurations of lived human experience? My recent conversation with Amanda Palmer about patronage and the future of a... posted on Jun 26 2016 (12,094 reads)

The Uninvited Guest of This Universe, by Andrew Hinton
& the Monk won the 2016 Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Short Documentary. As a tribute to the compassion at the heart of this story, the filmmakers are offering the film in its entirety for viewing here. Lobsang Phuntsok is a former Tibetan monk who trained with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and spent years teaching Buddhism and meditation in the West. In 2006, he disrobed and moved back to his native India, establishing a community in the Himalayan foothills for orphans and impoverished children. Jhamtse Gatsal Children’s Community—“jhamtse gatsal” means “the garden of love and compassion” in Tibetan—is the sc... posted on Oct 18 2018 (123,107 reads)

How Nature Makes Us Healthier and Happier, by Kristophe Green & Dacher Keltner
100 studies have shown that being in nature—or even watching it in videos—benefits our brains, bodies, feelings, thought processes, and social interactions.   Humans have long intuited that being in nature is good for the mind and body. From indigenous adolescents completing rites of passage in the wild to modern East Asian cultures taking “forest baths,” many have looked to nature as a place for healing and personal growth. A large body of research is documenting the positive impacts of nature on human flourishing. Why nature? No one knows for sure; but one hypothesis derived from evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s “biophil... posted on Dec 7 2017 (16,357 reads)

What Gets in the Way of Gratitude?, by Robert Emmons
workshop sponsored by the the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley showcased the newest and hottest findings in the science and practice of gratitude. Impressive as the advances were, not one speaker (myself included) grappled with what may be the single biggest question that stands in the way of making the basic science useful for practical applications: What must be overcome as a culture or as individuals in order for gratitude flourish? We live in a nation where everyone is on the pursuit of happiness. Each individual has his or her own path this journey takes. For some, the search begins in books; for others it comes through service. But perhaps the most po... posted on Feb 7 2018 (16,919 reads)

Nature and the Serious Business of Joy, by Maria Popova
origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Rachel Carson wrote in reflecting on our spiritual bond with nature shortly before she awakened the modern environmental conscience. The rewards and redemptions of that elemental yet endangered response is what British naturalist and environmental writer Michael McCarthy, a modern-day Carson, explores in The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (public library) — part memoir and part manifesto, a work of philosophy rooted in environmental science and buoyed by a soaring poetic imagination. McCarthy writes: ... posted on Aug 22 2018 (9,919 reads)

The Joy of Being a Woman in Her Seventies, by Mary Pipher
article originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review, on January 12th, 2019. When I told my friends I was writing a book on older women like us, they immediately protested, “I am not old.” What they meant was that they didn’t act or feel like the cultural stereotypes of women their age. Old meant bossy, useless, unhappy and in the way. Our country’s ideas about old women are so toxic that almost no one, no matter her age, will admit she is old. In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging. Our bodies and our sexuality are devalued, we are denigrated by mother-in-law jokes, and we’re rendered invisible in the media. Yet, most ... posted on Feb 27 2019 (471,770 reads)

Gratitude Behind Bars, by The Gratefulness Team
my circumstances may not be exactly as I wish, I still have reason to be grateful. Right now, as I sit in my cell, it’s hot and the air is stale — but I hear a little bird chirping happily somewhere outside my window. ~ Scott Zirus, TX Does gratefulness truly make us happy? How does gratefulness serve us during difficult times? What is your experience of gratitude as a person who is incarcerated and denied so many of the freedoms and privileges associated with happiness?These are some of the questions we explored through Grateful Anyhow, a recent project in partnership with Prisoner Express (PE) that engaged approximately 350 incarcerated men and women ... posted on Aug 28 2019 (5,746 reads)

Charlie Chaplin: Let Us All Unite, by Charlie Chaplin
sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor.  That's not my business.  I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.   I should like to help everyone if possible. We all want to help one another -- human beings are like that.  We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful.  But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. ... posted on Nov 3 2020 (9,693 reads)

Nature and the Serious Work of Joy, by Maria Popova
origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Rachel Carson wrote in reflecting on our spiritual bond with nature shortly before she awakened the modern environmental conscience. The rewards and redemptions of that elemental yet endangered response is what British naturalist and environmental writer Michael McCarthy, a modern-day Carson, explores in The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (public library) — part memoir and part manifesto, a work of philosophy rooted in environmental science and buoyed by a soaring poetic imagination. McCarthy writes: ... posted on May 4 2021 (5,037 reads)

Prayer for Atheists, by William Irwin
has it that the physicist Niels Bohr had a horseshoe hanging above his door. A colleague asked him why, to which he responded, “it’s for luck.” The colleague then asked him if he believed in luck. Bohr reassured him that as a scientist he did not believe in luck. Puzzled, the colleague asked again why Bohr had the horseshoe hanging above his door. Bohr responded, “I’m told that you don’t have to believe in order for it to work.”  Bohr may not have realised it, but the same is true of prayer. We are not talking about being agnostic. The agnostic’s prayer is like watering an apparently dead plant. The plant probably will not respon... posted on Sep 21 2021 (6,824 reads)

Why You Should Write That Thank You Note, by Richard Gunderman
may be more beneficial than we commonly suppose. One recent study asked subjects to write a note of thanks to someone and then estimate how surprised and happy the recipient would feel – an impact that they consistently underestimated. Another study assessed the health benefits of writing thank you notes. The researchers found that writing as few as three weekly thank you notes over the course of three weeks improved life satisfaction, increased happy feelings and reduced symptoms of depression. While this research into gratitude is relatively new, the principles involved are anything but. Students of mine in a political philosophy course at Indiana University are reading ... posted on Nov 13 2022 (5,072 reads)

An Antudote to the Age of Anxiety, by Maria Popova
we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity — a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year’s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible? This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness — the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience — largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan ... posted on Sep 19 2023 (4,160 reads)

How to Love a Country, by On Being
Being Studios · Richard Blanco — How to Love a Country What follows is a transcript syndicated from on On Being, of an interview between Krista Tippett and Richard Blanco. Krista Tippett, host: As a longtime civil engineer by day and poet by night, the Cuban American writer Richard Blanco has straddled the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to form the meaning of home and belonging. In 2013, he became the fifth poet to read at a presidential inauguration — also the youngest and the first immigrant. At Chautauqua, I invited him to speak and read from his books. The wit and the deep thoughtfulness and elegance of Richard Blanco’s p... posted on Nov 22 2020 (4,481 reads)

10 Evolving Expressions of Simplicity, by Duane Elgin
Simplicity has become a “modern classic” because it gives voice to ways of living that are vital for building a workable and meaningful future.  As we awaken to an endangered world, people are asking, “How can we live sustainably on the Earth when our actions are already producing dramatic climate change, species extinction, oil depletion, and more?”  For a generation, a diverse subculture has grappled with these concerns and, in the United States and a dozen or so other “postmodern” nations, this subculture has grown from a miniscule movement in the 1960s to a respected part of the mainstream culture in the early 2000s.  G... posted on May 1 2012 (34,885 reads)

The Medicine of Gratitude, by Tami Simon
Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Angeles Arrien. Angeles is a teacher, author, and cultural anthropologist, and somebody I am so pleased to be able to call a friend. Her teachings, which connect the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion, focus on humanity’s shared beliefs and values, along with ways to incorporate this wisdom into our modern lives. With Sounds True, Angeles Arrien has created the programs The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom, which is both a book and audio series; an audio program called Gathering Medicine: Stories, Songs, and Methods for Soul Ret... posted on Sep 17 2012 (30,309 reads)

Money and My Relationship with It, by Richard Whittaker
the evening of June 21, two years ago, the upstairs room at Awakin CircleTeance in Berkeley was jammed full of people with a long waiting list of those not able to fit in. They were tuned in, however, for the live-stream of the evening program: a Service Space Awakin Circle being held on the topic of our individual relationship with money. I was lucky enough to have squeezed in. There was a palpable feeling of anticipation in the air. Birju Pandya got things going... Richard Whittaker  Birju Pandya:  Good evening. My name is Birju. Looking at you all, the image I have is of an Indian rickshaw where you look in there and say, "How did they fit 12 people into that thi... posted on Oct 2 2017 (11,071 reads)

Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment, by James D. Showkeir, Jamie Showkeir and Maren Showkeir
following is an excerpt from Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth an Commitment, Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2008 We were consulting with a large East Coast newspaper grappling with a multimillion-dollar shortfall and the plagues of the industry in general: declining circulation, shrinking advertising revenue, and increasing newsprint prices. The problems of this newspaper were compounded by changes in the region’s demographics, which raised questions about whether the paper’s content was relevant to the readers in their market. Layoffs seemed inevitable. Hundreds were likely to lose their jobs. In preparation for a large group meeting about the... posted on Oct 22 2017 (12,169 reads)