Mind the Stream: Where Mindfulness and Technology Meet, by Emily Rose Barr
Sunday morning, and my puppy is curled up in my lap, as she often is. The rainfall outside has subsided for now, replaced only by the occasional medley of bird calls. The hum of my computer, a familiar sound, seamlessly blends into the background. My phone sits in the other room, unattended, until it pings for my attention. My tablet rests in the closet for now, idling before I dive back into one of the three books it currently stores. Look around you. How many devices are bidding for your attention? If someone came into your dwelling space, could they tell what year it was by the technology that immediately surrounded you, or would they have to dig a little deeper? When was th... posted on Oct 11 2017 (13,735 reads)

Seven Ways to Help High Schoolers Find Purpose, by Patrick Cook-Deegan
the past decade, I have had the chance to ask thousands of teenagers what they think about school. I’ve found that the vast majority of them generally feel one of two ways: disengaged or incredibly pressured. One thing nearly all teens agree on is that most of what high school teaches them is irrelevant to their lives outside of school or their future careers. One study found that the most common feelings among high school students are fatigue and boredom. Another study concluded that 65 percent of the jobs that today’s high school graduates will have in their lifetime do not even exist yet. But we are still teaching them in the same way that we t... posted on Dec 12 2017 (47,254 reads)

How Can Our Gratitude Contribute to World Peace?, by Kerry Howells
day we witness the brutality of war and atrocity, and can feel hopeless or doubt that anything we do as an individual can have a positive impact. International Day of World Peace was celebrated recently so now might be a good time to reflect on how our own gratitude can make a difference. I love the Zen saying: If there is light in the soul, There is beauty in the person, If there is beauty in the person, There will be harmony in the house, If there is harmony in the house, There will be order in the nation, If there is order in the nation, There will be peace in the world. If we are to bring about world peace, we first need to ask ourselves if how we think and what... posted on Jan 9 2018 (14,957 reads)

The Intelligence of Plants, by Unknown Yet
Harrod Buhner is an award-winning author of 22 books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers that include Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. He says that the greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather, C.G. Harrod, who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911. Buhner, who says his DNA prevents him from working for others, has been a fulltime therapist in pri... posted on Mar 9 2018 (24,922 reads)

Why the Moral Argument for Non-Violence Matters, by Kazu Haga
Oh yeah, he’s great. He was always the principles guy.” That was what an old Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, organizer told me when I mentioned that I had been trained by Bernard Lafayette, co-author of the Kingian Nonviolence curriculum and a legend of the civil rights era. “I was always a strategies guy,” this elder went on to tell me. “I believed in nonviolence as an effective strategy, but Bernard was always talking about nonviolence as a principle.” I let out a little laugh. In that moment, I was proud to have been trained by “the principles guy.” When people talk about nonviolence in the... posted on Jan 15 2018 (15,606 reads)

Water Is Life: An Interview with Cheryl Angel, by Awakin Call Editors
Angel is an indigenous leader, wise (Sioux) Lakota elder woman, mother of five children, and lifelong devoted water protector who helped initiate and maintain the Standing Rock camp since April 2016, and who was vital in the nonviolent resistance to the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. Her voice among the water protectors is one of integrating deep prayer with nonviolent direct action, guiding two women-led actions at Standing Rock. A spiritual activist from the Sicangu (Rosebud) tribe -- one of the seven tribes that conform the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota People in the Great Plains of North America -- Cheryl moves from a deep space of love and nonviolen... posted on Jan 7 2018 (9,210 reads)

Bringing Life to Organizational Change, by Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Roger
the Journal for Strategic Performance Measurement, April/May 1998 Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we've created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw their futures and design them into clearly better forms. We push them, we prod them. We try fear, we try enticement,. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use ... posted on Apr 11 2018 (14,176 reads)

Spirit of the Earth: Indian Voices on Nature, by Unknown Yet
of the Earth: Indian Voices on Nature Edited by Michael Oren Fitzgerald and Joseph A. Fitzgerald, Foreword by Joseph Bruchac. World Wisdom (www.worldwisdom.com), 2017. PP. 136. $14.95. Paper Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos “[N]ot only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him (Wakan Tanka—the Great Spirit) continually in differing ways.” –Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) As contemporary life becomes more and more fragmented and unsustainable, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. It is the spiritual crisis brought about by a desacralize... posted on Mar 12 2018 (11,045 reads)

Can Love Be A Force for Social Justice?, by Bela Shah
I heard about Anne Firth Murray through a close friend, I was immediately intrigued. She’s a professor at Stanford University who teaches courses on international women’s health as well as a course entitled “Love as a Force for Social Justice,” the Founding President of the philanthropic organization, the Global Fund for Women, and a warm individual known for her tea gatherings and unusually exotic pets at her home in Palo Alto. I’ve been interested in women’s empowerment issues for quite some time, but to learn about someone who brings love into the field really piqued my interest.       Through this interview, I wanted to l... posted on Apr 4 2018 (13,343 reads)

Poet's and Sages Behind Closed Doors, by Laura Grace Weldon
flashes across the nursing home lobby when I enter. By degrees the brightness dims as the door swings shut. My eyes adjust to a line of wheelchairs, their occupants so still they might be in deep meditation. One woman rouses, her brown eyes searching me out. “Feet don’t work a’tall,” she says politely. “Not a lick of good.” I walk down the hall past living koans. A man is held in a chair with padded restraints resembling a life jacket. His arms extend forward as if he is about to swim, but he doesn’t move. He repeats over and over, “I, I, I, I.” An aide explains in a loud, cheerful tones to a w... posted on Feb 20 2018 (16,611 reads)

Under the Volcano, by Charlotte Du Cann
a mountain in Wales in the teeming rain, we sit in a yurt packed with people, the five of us, on hay bales, dressed in black suits and bowler hats. One of us has a pack of cards up his sleeve, another an African folktale, another a guitar and a song by Nick Drake from the 1970s. I have oak leaves in my hatband to signify an instruction circa 600 BC from the Sibyl who once guarded the door to the Underworld in the ‘Campi  Flegrei’ outside Naples. A link to the pre-patriarchal ‘uncivilised’ world, she guides a lineage of poets to the territory under the volcano where all deep transformations take place: Virgil,Dante, T.... posted on May 22 2018 (5,497 reads)

Uncolonising the Imagination, by Charlotte Du Cann
thing about Finnish is that it’s not linear, it’s orbital,’ said the ticket collector on the 10:35 train to Leeds. ‘The language comes from the land. You have to find the object in the sentence and then everything else around it will make sense.’ Here is the orginal conversation I held with the mythologist Martin Shaw for the latest Dark Mountain journal #11. We ran a shortened version for a DM blog series on the 'mythos we live by' in March, asking six writers who work with story to explore what a mythological response to an age of converging crises might look like. Follow us as we traverse a territory that includes underworld&... posted on May 13 2018 (7,646 reads)

Seeing the Whole , by Andrew Zolli
world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” W.B. Yeats Human perception is a fickle, paradoxical instrument. Our visual sense, while more acute than that of many species, is hardly the keenest in the animal kingdom. An eagle, for instance, has eyesight so sharp it can spot small prey more than three kilometers away. The next time you happen upon one in the wild, know that it saw you coming from far away, and waited patiently for you to arrive. Birds are also “tetrachromats”; in addition to the spectra that are visible to humans, they possess a fourth kind of cone in their retinas, which allows them to see u... posted on Aug 5 2018 (10,725 reads)

The Sunray Peace Village, by Elissa Melaragno
EASTERN CHEROKEE TRADITIONS RESTORED IN THE MOUNTAINS OF VERMONT FROM THE TRAIL OF TEARS TO THE LEGALIZED OPPRESSION OF THEIR SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, THE EASTERN CHEROKEE PEOPLE HAVE A HISTORY FILLED WITH VIOLENCE AND PAIN. THIS, HOWEVER, IS A STORY OF RESILIENCE, TRUTH-TELLING, SANCTUARY, AND SERVICE. Nestled in a valley within the Green Mountains of Vermont is a place called Odali Utugi—The Sunray Peace Village. Odali Utugi means Hope Mountain. On this beautiful 27-acre site, Sunray Meditation Society has, since 1987, been creating a Peace Village for today’s world, modeled after the Cherokee Peace Villages of the last century. It is a place where people of a... posted on May 31 2018 (9,700 reads)

Elucidating Human Consciousness Through Art, by Linda Codega
receiving his doctorate in neuroscience in 2011, artist Greg Dunn made an unconventional decision: to dedicate himself to his art. A long time observer of human consciousness, his images of the human brain have been displayed in museums all over the United States, including the Franklin Institute. He recently spoke with the Garrison Institute about his art, philosophy of the mind, and why he compares his work to that of Zen artists. How did you get started as a professional artist? My original plan was to go the academic route. Then I started painting the first year into my neuroscience degree. At some point, I realized that I just wasn’t producing anything in the... posted on May 7 2018 (11,825 reads)

I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy, by Knowledge @ Wharton
use of the term “empathy” has been expanding in recent years, from workplaces to prison systems to conversations about gun control. Research into mirror neurons in the 1980s and 1990s brought sharper focus to the notion of empathy, but it has since acquired numerous dimensions, according to Cris Beam, a professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey and the author of  a new book titled, I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy. Empathy is ingrained in the psyche from birth, although sociopaths and psychopaths may be born with a “disability” — that of missing empathy. Empathy skills also can be enhanced. Beam explored the var... posted on Jun 26 2018 (10,738 reads)

6 Habits of Hope, by Kate Davies
from Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times by Kate Davies, New Society Publishers  April 201 Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life. --Attributed to the Buddha The first habit of hope I’d like to discuss is being present. This means paying attention to whatever is going on and not getting sidetracked or distracted — in other words, living where life is actually happening rather than in our heads. To understand the difference between being present and not being present, think of a time when you felt completely alert and aware. What was happening? Where were you? What did you see and hear? Chances are you can probably remember ... posted on May 3 2021 (59,461 reads)

A Miraculous Life of More, by Anna Alkin
in the business of creating a miracle here on earth.” – Charles Eisenstein What is it like to be in the midst of a miracle? The idea of a miracle sounds so warm and delicious, the kind of thing you would aspire to experience in a minute, right? Well, in fact, here on earth we are in the middle of miracle school, whether you remember enrolling or not. And, much like life itself (a miracle in its own right), it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s very important to know the signs that one is participating in a miracle so you can see it through and not mess it up. Because miracles inspire panic, not awe, while they are in process. Keep this... posted on Jul 25 2018 (13,329 reads)

Healing Civilization Nature's Way, by Tom Anderson
ability to thrive in a changing world depends on a major overhaul of the way cities are built and organized, and a dramatic increase in the amount of land protected for the sake of biodiversity. Those were key components of the Garrison’s Institute’s recent symposium, Pathways to Planetary health (April 17-19, 2018), along with regenerative economics and pervasive altruism. In the third of our follow-up conversations, we talked to two of the leading thinkers and practitioners, Thomas Lovejoy and Jonathan F.P. Rose, about our cities and biodiversity. Tom Lovejoy’s credentials are almost too numerous to recount. He did seminal work in the Brazilian rai... posted on Jul 30 2018 (8,995 reads)

Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change, by Korsha Wilson
arms hurt as I walked through Brooklyn on a cold December night. I was carrying a 10-pound, party-size tray of macaroni and cheese with three cheeses, cooked to just a touch beyond al dente, with a breadcrumb topping. I was headed to a community potluck and had spent the better part of that morning making (read: babying) a mornay sauce, cooking the pasta, and baking the mixture in the oven. As I walked the six blocks from the subway station to the venue where the meeting was being held, my arms started to shake. I started to wonder why I didn’t just pick up a bag of chips and a jar of dip and call it a day, but then I remembered the excited messages I received when I told my fellow ... posted on Jul 9 2018 (8,088 reads)