At the Gate
"Wheelchairs in wild spaces shouldn't be an anomaly some thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act, but here I am, in front of another gate, asserting my right to exist in nature. The very...
View ArticleThe Art of Emptiness
"The composition below is called Woodmaster and it is written for solo Taimu shakuhachi and dedicated to Ken Mujitsu LaCosse, designer and maker of Taimu. Taimu is a wide-bore, natural bamboo variant...
View ArticleTaking Time to Make Time
"When the 33-year-old Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Pope Julius II would impatiently ask him when it would be complete. The artist would reply, "When I am satisfied." Rodin took...
View ArticleEast Hill Farm: A Leap of Faith
"Once upon a time...many years ago, when a now very old man was but a youth, he felt something was mysteriously missing in his life, but he didn't know what it was or where to find it. He wasn't even...
View ArticleHow to Be a Citizen of Earth
"One small country, in which 0.0002% of the worlds population lives in one of the planets most biodiverse habitats, has taken it upon itself to model for the rest of humanity an inspired step along the...
View ArticleWoodSwimmer
This short film by engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, in collaboration with musician and animator bedtimes, offers a mesmerizing look into cross sections of a piece of raw wood as it goes...
View ArticleThe World's Hidden Harmony
"We've been blind-sided by our top-down approach. If the body is a bell, resonating to the world around it, it's as though we have stuffed the bell full of cotton balls that stifle its ringing. The...
View ArticleThe Lost Art of Breathing
"After recovering from pneumonia for the third time, journalist James Nestor took decisive action to improve his lungs. He questioned why so many humans -- and only humans -- have to contend with...
View ArticlePeter Singer: The Life You Can Save
"Say you're walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning. Would you try to rescue the child? That's the famous "drowning child" scenario that Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, presented...
View ArticleCooking in the Ainu Way
"Eiko Soga is a Japanese-born artist and teacher who has had a long-term interest in exploring new forms of relationship with the natural world.She has just completed a PhD research project at the...
View ArticleGold is the Deepest Love
"'Gold,' the title of my book, is a word that recurs throughout Rumi's poetry. Rumi's gold is not the precious metal but a feeling-state arrived at through the alchemical process of altering...
View ArticleThis Rising Up
This Climbing PoeTree music video highlights modern day freedom fighters and champions of justice by celebrating the beauty, power, talent, brilliance and humanity of Black people. Through powerful...
View ArticleThousand-Mile Walk Home
"Eight years ago this spring, I blew out a lumbar disc while running a jackhammer in the desert near my housean accident that was the result of simple bad luck, with the odds skewed by the fact that a...
View ArticleAntidotes to Fear of Death
Rebecca Elson was a Canadian-American poet and astronomer. In the 1990s she was among the first researchers to study images. She passed away at age 39. "A Responsibility to Awe," was published...
View ArticleLiving/Dying Man
"After he was diagnosed, we had a lot of conversation about how we were going to face the harsh reality that ALS is always fatal. We didn't want to waste our precious time trying to chase down miracle...
View Articlerobert wolff: Original Wisdom
"I have known truly free humans... As all First People they lived far away from roads, it required walking through jungle to reach them. I did not know a word of their language, but there was usually...
View ArticleEarth's Wild Music: Celebrating & Defending Nature's Songs
"I started thinking about how I could open people's hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I...
View ArticleThe Abundance of Less
"Nakamura and I were sitting there drinking tea on a winter's day at his fire pit in the middle of the floor, and the shoji screens were open. We were looking across the valley; the snow was clinging...
View ArticleWhen I Die Recompose Me
What if our bodies could help grow new life after we die, instead of being embalmed and buried or turned to ash? Join Katrina Spade as she discusses "recomposition" -- a system that uses the natural...
View ArticleMary Ruefle's Stunning Color Spectrum of Sadnesses
"Nearly two centuries after Goethe contemplated the psychology of color and emotion, Mary Ruefle's chromatic taxonomy of sadness cracks open the eggshell of our fragility to reveal within it a...
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