How to Create a More Caring World, by Tsering Gellek
following excerpt by Tsering Gellek is from Tarthang Tulku's new book 'Caring' (Dharma Publishing, 2018).  To care is to really understand that we are in a very concerning situation. As the individual in modern society moves through various spheres of life, from home, to school, to work, to perhaps hospitals and eventually death, she often has less and less support from the people around her. When I imagine earlier times, I think there was a deeper sense of care from family, friends and neighbors, from our religious or sacred communities, from the towns and villages we lived in. This atmosphere of care, of embeddedness, of being inter woven ... posted on Nov 1 2018 (9,552 reads)

A Small Dark Light: Le Guin on the Legacy of the Tao Te Ching, by Maria Popova
and a half millennia ago, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu wrote a poetic and profound short text known as the Tao Te Ching. With uncommon elegance, it crystallized the teachings of Taoist philosophy on such perennial matters as power, happiness, and the source of meaning in human life. As its wisdom radiated West over the centuries, it went on to influence minds as varied as John Cage (who wove it into his pioneering musical aesthetic), Franz Kafka (who considered it the clearest view of reality), Bruce Lee (who anchored his famous metaphor for resilience in it), Alan Watts (who placed it at the center of his philosophy), and Leo Tolstoy (who leaned on it in his pr... posted on Mar 10 2019 (7,057 reads)

George's Best Friend: A Christmas Story, by DotMatrix
mother was a single mom, and I was her only child. We lived in the ’60s in the city in a tiny apartment. My Aunt Rose and cousins lived next-door. Every December my mom spread the word to anyone alone on Christmas Eve that she would be having an open house. My mom believed that no one should be alone during the holidays. If she could, she probably would have put an ad in the paper inviting the world. As it was, our tiny apartment was stuffed, every room but my bedroom filled with partying adults on Christmas Eve. Sleep was impossible, but I tried to fall asleep anyway because Santa would not leave gifts for little girls who were awake (so I was told). As I lay in bed, I wondered ... posted on Dec 25 2022 (19,192 reads)

Guarding the Tongue: The Importance of Right Speech, by MIrka Knaster
few years ago, I went through an estrangement with a close friend because of the words I used to refer to her partner's behavior. Although he did not hear what she and I said in our phone conversation, by "chance" he saw my e-mail that followed it. I meant no harm. I thought I was being supportive of my friend. But it was careless speech on my part, and it has cost me dearly. The painful repercussions of my experience awoke me to a simple fact. While I had been careful in watching the movement of breath in meditation, I had not been as attentive in watching the words coming out of my mouth. I'd neglected an essential aspect of spiritual practice--"guarding the tongu... posted on Mar 16 2020 (9,127 reads)

The Age of Overwhelm, by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
van Dernoot Lipsky is the founding director of The Trauma Stewardship Institute and author of the best-selling Trauma Stewardship. A pioneer in the field of trauma exposure and an activist for social and economic justice, she has worked with communities around the world for more than three decades. Her TED Talk was one of the first to be delivered inside a women’s correctional facility. When our beloved dog had cancer, we did all we could to help him be comfortable toward the end of his life. Because Rottweilers are so strong, they require a lot of pain medication, so we y had to give him what seemed like horse tranquilizers. While we were all caring for him, my daug... posted on Apr 2 2019 (7,622 reads)

The Joy of Motion, by Mary Webb
Webb, an English writer of the early 20th century was an acute observer of nature and its multi-dimensional splendor. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease at the age of 20, Webb soon discovered that nature played a powerful role in her periods of recovery. The Spring of Joy compiles a series of essays on nature, penned by Webb with the aim of bringing comfort to ‘the weary and wounded in the battle of life.’ They are a testament to Webb's capacity to bear witness to the record of nature and to draw nourishment from it in a way that continues to benefit readers far beyond her lifetime. The following is an excerpt from The Spring of Joy: A Little Book of Hea... posted on Apr 10 2019 (6,030 reads)

Green Renaissance, by The Gratefulness Team
in our feature “Grateful Changemakers,” we celebrate programs and projects that serve as beacons of gratefulness. These efforts elevate the values of grateful living and illuminate their potential to transform both individuals and communities. Join us in appreciating the inspiring and catalyzing contribution these Changemakers offer to shaping a more grateful world. Green Renaissance Justine of Green Renaissance. The creative project of a couple from South Africa, Green Renaissance works to spread positive stories that reflect the wonder of the world. With the goal of sharing ideas and inspiring change, Green Renaissance produces gorgeous short films that are po... posted on Sep 17 2019 (11,834 reads)

The Challenge of Relationships, by John J. Prendergast
tend to be the most challenging arena for spiritually-oriented people. We may be fine reading our spiritual books and being on retreat but what happens when we deal with a friend, partner, or family member with whom we are in conflict? Inner peace can fly out the window in the blink of an eye followed by days of inner turmoil. As a result, we may want to avoid the messy business of relationships and hole up in a monastery for awhile. We can approach human relationships as a catalyst rather than an obstacle to spiritual growth. Relationships are where the rubber hits the road, where residues of the separate-inside-self, large or small, get exposed and worked through. It is th... posted on Jul 4 2020 (6,518 reads)

Dial Up the Magic of This Moment, by Maria Popova
people have stood at the gates of hope — through world wars and environmental crises and personal loss — with more dignity, wisdom, and optimism than Joanna Macy during her six decades as a Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, and pioneering philosopher of ecology. Macy is also the world’s greatest translator-enchantress of Rainer Maria Rilke, in whose poetry she found refuge upon the sudden and devastating death of the love of her life after fifty-six years of marriage. Indeed, our mortality, as well as our quintessential resistance to it, is a subject Rilke unravels frequently and with deeply comforting insight in Macy’s&nbs... posted on Sep 1 2020 (6,459 reads)

Brian Conroy: The Art of Storytelling, by Brian Conroy
Stones: Buddhist Parables is the culmination of nearly twenty-five years of reading, writing and telling Buddhist stories. The initial impetus for collecting these stories came in the autumn of 1997 when longtime Buddhist monk, Reverend Heng Sure, asked me to teach a storytelling class at the newly opened Berkeley Buddhist Monastery. An outstanding storyteller himself, Reverend Sure has for decades utilized stories to enliven his Dharma lectures. Knowing that I was a professional storyteller, he urged me to dig deep into the trove of Buddhist tales and restore them to a living, oral tradition where they belong.  Two months later, I began teaching a weekly clas... posted on Sep 3 2020 (4,938 reads)

Hope: An Owner's Manual, by Barbara Kingsolver
very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides. Let me begin that way: with an invocation of your own best hopes, thrown like a handful of rice over this celebration. Congratulations, graduates. Congratulations, parents, on the best Mother's Day gift ever. Better than all those burnt-toast breakfasts: these, your children grown tall and competent, educated to within an inch of their lives. What can I say to people who know almost everything? There was a time when I surely knew, because I'd just graduated from college myself, after writing down th... posted on Nov 4 2020 (10,065 reads)

Q&A: Dr. Paul Farmer on His New Book: Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, by Partners in Health
Farmer stands on the Tengeh Town Bridge with Ibrahim Kamara in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 2015. Photo by Jon Lascher / PIH PIH co-founder talks about Ebola’s effects in West Africa, offers lessons for COVID-19 times In November 2014, Partners In Health Co-founder and Chief Strategist Dr. Paul Farmer was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, breaking bread with a group of Ebola survivors as the world’s largest epidemic of the virus raged across the country. “It was the night I met Ibrahim,” Farmer recalled, referring to one of the survivors. “We started talking and he told me he’d lost 23 members of his family to Ebola. I was shocked into silence... posted on Dec 16 2020 (3,726 reads)

When Love Rescued Christmas, by Laura Grace Weldon
Story One year it seemed we were having the worst Christmas ever. That autumn my husband had been in a car accident. His broken neck was healing, but it left him with severe migraines and what doctors thought might be a seizure disorder. Because he wasn’t medically cleared to return to work, we had to pay for health insurance through COBRA (which cost more than our mortgage) while not receiving a paycheck. In addition, my mother was fighting cancer, my brother-in-law was recovering from open heart surgery, and my son was struggling with asthma so severe that his oxygen intake regularly hovered at the “go to emergency room” level. We were broke and worrie... posted on Dec 25 2020 (6,366 reads)

Happy Men, by Winter Miller
me set the scene: I walk up to five men skateboarding by the statue in Prospect Park, they are hanging with each other and I approach and I say, "Hey, I wrote a poem about you, for you, can I read it to you?" All five of them look up at me like, what, what the hell is happening here? And then one by one they say, "Yeah, sure, do it." My phone has 1% battery left. It might die before I even begin. I am a white queer woman in her 40s wearing layers dressed to go running and only my eyes are visible. They are five young men of color, in their 20's, all masked. This scenario is admittedly the kind of thing you'd make fun of. By all means, do. I almost walked... posted on Feb 11 2021 (10,055 reads)

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, by Katherine May
following passages are excerpted from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, by Katherine May, published by Riverhead Books, Nov 2020  Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeing rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings cree... posted on Feb 17 2021 (11,856 reads)

Rising from the Fire: The Art of Transformation, by David Ulrich
can we reconcile the immensely destructive force of fire with its equally limitless creative potential? Forest managers light intentional blazes to clear overgrowth and begin anew the cycle of life. A fireplace becomes a hearth, offering heat, light, and survival for the home’s residents. And fiery volcanic activity can obliterate what stands in its path all the while creating new land in a matter of hours and days that becomes highly fertile soil in thousands or millions of years. The element of fire—and its life-giving results in the form of heat and light—represent both a powerful metaphor and an undeniable fact of organic and spiritual transformation. Evelyn Underhil... posted on Aug 10 2021 (2,857 reads)

The Quest to Understand Consciousness, by ted.com
of Antonio Damasio's 2011 Ted talk. I'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds. The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder. We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world. We would have no pains, but als... posted on Aug 15 2021 (8,398 reads)

My 94-Year-Old Dad Talks About COVID-19, by Abbey Algiers
7, 2020 Looking to the past for clues on navigating today and beyond… How many of you started the year thinking your biggest concern might be to write out “2020” on important documents instead of abbreviating the year like we did in ‘19, ‘18?  Yeah, I wish that was the worst part of 2020. But it’s dealt us a few more challenges.  Like… this global pandemic and how it’s changed every aspect of our lives.   Beyond the obvious concern of contracting COVID- 19, we’ve had to deal with isolation,  separation from loved ones, and a complete shift in how we interact with the world.  I don’t need to re... posted on Aug 21 2021 (13,238 reads)

Does Your Worldview Affect Your Well-Being?, by Sam Woolfe
worldview, our beliefs about what reality is, our views on what (if anything) has value and meaning, what Aldous Huxley called an ‘individual’s philosophy of life’, contributes more significantly than we often think to our mental well-being. From pessimism to existentialism, might reading certain philosophical ideas actually lead to depression? The connection is not so simple. Philosophy can both depress and inspire us. But, at the end of the day, our worldview matters – it matters what we think, writes Sam Woolfe. The psychology of philosophy is a relatively new field. It refers to the relationship between psychological traits and philosophical beliefs. This f... posted on Nov 13 2021 (5,767 reads)

What Can We Do When a Loved One is Suffering?, by littlewoo
can we do when a loved one is suffering? This question has come up a lot so I wanted to share some thoughts in case it may be helpful to you or a loved one.  First, I acknowledge how challenging it is to witness any kind of suffering, whether it is physical, emotional or existential pain. But let me throw in a specific curveball…  What if they are suffering yet there is not much that you can do about it?  This challenging scenario can arise for many reasons. Sometimes, the solutions are not known or available. Sometimes, your ability to help is limited.  Sometimes, the person cannot receive your help. One of ... posted on Apr 15 2022 (11,672 reads)