How Animals See Themselves
"In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexkll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species...
View ArticleThe Night Is Just Beginning
Vocal artist Mariana Sadovska traveled along the front lines of the first invasion of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2016, giving benefit concerts and meeting people in the...
View ArticleBarbara Kingsolver: The Urbicene
"Kin la Belle, the Congolese call their capital, and Ive looked for Kinshasas beauty. The Congo River, pulse of a planet, fifteen miles wide as it courses past? Abdims storks wheeling overhead, hippos...
View ArticleWe All Have a Brush
"Kazuaki Tanahashi is a Japanese calligrapher, translator of the Zen master Eihei Dogen's Shobogenzo (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), and a deeply committed peace worker, who is active in the...
View ArticleReturning to the Art of the Unknowable
"Colin Tudge is a science writer and broadcaster who is best known for his work on agriculture and the environment, with books such as 'Feeding People is Easy' and 'The Variety of Life'. His latest...
View ArticleScaling We: A Journey of Heart-Centered Deliberation
"Traci Ruble is a psychotherapist and the founder of an extremely successful community listening project Sidewalk Talk. One day, in the fall of 2015, Traci and 27 other listeners took their therapists...
View ArticleMonkey Stories, the Best Kind of Stories
"When the monkeys come we have to quickly close all the windows and close the doors that lead to the balconies because if we don't, the monkeys will come in and steal all our stuff. With their crinkly...
View ArticleReturning to the Whole
"What time is it on the clock of the world?" My mentor Grace Lee Boggs used to ask this question all the time, to anyone who came to visit and learn with her, in any meeting she attended, or speech she...
View ArticleThree Hours of Free Time in Berkeley
"Moving on, I began to notice feelings I'd never had as I walked past shops. The smaller ones, especially, touched me. Each spoke of someone throwing in on life, taking the chance of starting a...
View ArticleThe Divided Brain
In this RSA produced video, the world of today is explained by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. He came to prominence after the publication of his book The...
View ArticleLetters from Two Gardens
"In the late July swelter and dragonfly buzz of summer, poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay began a correspondence of poems -- sent the old-fashioned way, through the mail. Aimee wrote from her...
View ArticleZainika Jagasia: Mumbai's Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker
"Zainika Jagasia's mother, Reshma Jagasia, says she had a gut feeling throughout her pregnancy that 'there was something wrong'. "It was almost like my child was talking to me all the time," she told...
View ArticleMozart's Starling
"When beginning a new writing project, naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt takes her research seriously. For her book, Mozart's Starling, Haupt dutifully traveled to Austria, to see Wolfgang...
View ArticleAnatomy of a Wave: A Triptych
"We like to imagine --in our humanness-- waves as traveling water bodies. But that isn't quite accurate. Waves are kinetic energy from vibrating water particles interacting through seawater. The...
View ArticleThe Paradoxes of Healing
Lissa Rankin, MD, describes herself as a skeptic. She is a Western-trained ob-gyn, linear thinker, and evidence-informed scientist. In the same breath, however, she also describes herself as a mystic...
View ArticleGrateful Voices
"Grateful Voices is a video project highlighting the stories of seven individuals with seven different life stories, each of whom finds gratefulness amidst pain, suffering and all of life's challenges....
View ArticleHow We Wrestle is Who We Are
"My son Liam was born ten years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round as a cucumber on steroids. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn't. He was missing a chamber in...
View ArticleImprovisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
"Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves --those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive:...
View ArticleAgnes Callard: A Philosophy of Change
"We can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value wise, from the people we are now. There was a time when we were not even aware of the existence of some of the...
View ArticleBringing Back the Delight of Poetry
"The American poet William Stafford was often asked by friends, readers, students and colleagues: When did you become a poet? The response he regularly offered was: "The question isn't when I became a...
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