Beyond Polarity
"This animated video offers hope for creating together the world that honors our collective needs by building on what unifies us. To make personal change that scales up to social change requires...
View ArticleThe Age of Invisible Stones
"We were old. We were weathered. We lost our youthful looks. We dotted Japans coastline. We stood at human height, sometimes taller. They called us tsunami stones. Our faces were carved with messages:...
View ArticleNavigating the Mysteries
"The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The...
View ArticleNeurodiversity and Creativity
"If we put neurodiversity with creativity together, what can we get? At the moment, what is dominant is what we call the deficit approach meaning, that we see neurodivergent processes as problems,...
View ArticleThings to Look Forward To
In 2020 when the pandemic tore across our globe, "She [children's bookmaker, Sophie Blackall] coped the way all artists cope, complained the way all makers complain: by making something of beauty and...
View ArticleThis Fantastic Argument of Being Alive
"Padraig O Tuama is a friend, teacher, and colleague to the work of On Being. But before that was true, Krista took a revelatory trip to meet him at his home in Northern Ireland, a place that has known...
View ArticleWatching River Otters
"Walking in the wetlands I encounter a family of river otters playing in the water, then sliding their sleek bodies onto the land. They tumble over each other in the sand, as a blue heron watches...
View ArticleThe Sounds of Silence
"When I was a sixteen-year-old naturalist in training, we were instructed to sit in the forest and wait for the return of something called the baseline symphony. The baseline symphony was the music of...
View ArticleProphets Without Robes or Staffs
"Today and always, the prophet confronts a dark object, a menacing, enigmatic, obdurate reality affecting the entire community. How to grasp that dark object? Where are the handholds? What approach...
View ArticleMeet the Four Characters of Your Brain
"I am a brain enthusiast. (I'm sure you have picked up on that by now.) But, beyond the beauty of this amazing organ we all have inside our heads, it is our remarkable brain cells that manifest our...
View ArticleOn the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening
"Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the...
View ArticleSurrendering and Opening to Hope in Times of Crisis
When Anna-Zoe Herr's father passed four years ago, she grappled with almost unbearable pain and grief and was finding it difficult to find hope. One night, she had a dream in which her father appeared,...
View ArticleTalking with Kids About What's Going On in the World
""Mom, I'm feeling nervous, my 12-year-old daughter shared one night as I tucked her into bed. "Are you just having nervous feelings or are you thinking about something?" I asked. "Ukraine," she...
View ArticlePainting with Mom
"My mother requires such presence, slowing down and attentiveness. Due to a very rare blood disorder, as we move her, we cannot let any part of her body bump into anything as it will create huge...
View ArticleBuddha of Oakland
When Dan Stevenson placed a stone Buddha across the street from his house in Oaklands Eastlake neighborhood, it was out of desperation.The corner had become an impromptu dump. City signs warning of...
View ArticleThey Still Draw Pictures
""They still draw pictures!" So wrote the editors of an influential collection of childrens art that was compiled in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War. Eighty years later, war continues to upend...
View ArticleAnna Breytenbach: The Animal Communicator
Anna Breytenbach is a professional interspecies communicator and the subject of a documentary titled, 'The Animal Communicator.' Breytenbach's lifework is dedicated to interspecies communication. Over...
View ArticleFor One Day of Freedom
""Even if life stops, love goes on." This quote of Bishop Steven Charleston's has never been more real to me than this year, which has seen the posthumous publication by ANTIBOOKCLUB of my husband...
View ArticleSuzanne Simard: Forests are Wired for Wisdom
"Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. Simard found that the...
View ArticleGrace Before Dinner
"As a cook, I am beside myself when I encounter even ten varieties of tomatoes at a farmers market. But to see such diversity among people was deeply moving; people from everywhere with great rough...
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