When Elves Took Over an Abandoned Gas Station
"I'm a sucker for enchantment, , especially when it arises from unlikely places. By a year and a half into the pandemic in the fall of 2021, I had become increasingly frustrated by the incursion of...
View ArticleSeth Godin: The Song of Significance
When Seth Godin made an exception to his no-flying for work rule to help run a conference for entrepreneurs working on climate, issues, it was at the request of a man named Dan in Australia whose...
View ArticleAlison Benis White: Light on the Page
"Chaos--confusion, bewilderment--these are things I'm always working against and within as a writer. Frost famously argued that a poem is a "temporary stay against confusion"--and by "stay," within the...
View ArticleThe Spiritual Awakening of a World-Class Drunk
"In 1940, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man who knew sin and failure like he knew the back of his hand, was living with his wife, Lois, in a tiny room at the Alcoholics Anonymous...
View ArticleParenting Advice from Mister Rogers
"Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough -- so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else's innermost...
View ArticleCultivating Wisdom: The Power of Mood
Do you believe that what you see influences how you feel? Actually, the opposite is true: What you feel - your "affect" -- influences all our senses -- what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch....
View ArticleCreating a Healthier Sense of Attribution
"At the heart of attribution theory is the question of control, or what factors contribute to outcomes: internal factors within our control (often referred to as dispositional) and external factors...
View ArticleIt Takes Brokenness to Find It
"My father was 67 when he died, and that's too young, but lately, as I stare at some hard realities of aging and mortality, I begin to appreciate the fact that he didn't have to endure a long period of...
View ArticleA Turtle's Silver Bead of Quietude
"One day in the fall, as water and air cooled, at some precise temperature an ancient bell sounded in the turtle brain. A signal: Take a deep breath. Each creature slipped off her log and swam for the...
View ArticleArwen Donohue: Care is a Creative Act
"I had sort of a grandiose idea that I was writing a big hybrid book--part oral history illuminated by portraiture, part graphic memoir, and part history of the peculiar role that the idea of...
View ArticleAmy Tan: Unintended Memoir
"Writer Amy Tans hit debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), catapulted her to commercial and critical success, spending over 40 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. With the 1993 blockbuster...
View ArticleMaggie Smith: Writing in a Way that is Brave, Real, and True
"Bestselling poet Maggie Smith has a gift for embracing the complexity of our human experienceand for writing about it with piercing intensity, clarity, and beauty. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks...
View ArticleCup of Karma
In the fall of 1987, Polly Simpkins met a man on the midnight train from Copenhagen to Amsterdam who shared with her his philosophy of life which focused on appreciating the people we love in this...
View ArticleA Case for the Porch
"Lately I've been trying to think like a porch. Trying to think between the natural and the human. Thinking how best to build during a climate crisis. I came across John Cage saying that progress in...
View ArticleThe Radical Act of Letting Things Hurt
"When psychotherapist Megan Devine -- creator of the excellent resource Refuge in Grief and author of its portable counterpart, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That...
View ArticleThe Many Lives of Water
"The water present with us on Earth has been here since the beginning of time. People have long journeyed to distant hot springs, mineral pools, misty waterfalls, and formidable geysers for the promise...
View ArticleEating the Wild
"In recent decades, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in foraging and cooking with food gathered from the countryside around us. In this article, Charlotte...
View ArticleHope and Feathers
"Africa is a place we all have in common. It is the widely acknowledged cradle of humankind, as most anthropologists agree that our hominid ancestors likely evolved there. So an Evolutionary Eve,...
View ArticleFumi Imamura's Floral Works
" What interests me about the plant world is that plants have no cranial nerves and relate to the world as open internal organs. I came to know this as the idea of the anatomist Shigeo Miki. The...
View ArticleCloudy is the Stuff of Stones
"Whenever I'm outside for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot -- my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the...
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