The Work of Love is to Love
"My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or...
View ArticleOn Calligraphic Perception: A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
In an interview begun in 2012, when being honored with the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry, Jane Hirshfield shares her experiential journey towards "the quick brushstroke of singular...
View ArticleBefriending Ourselves: An Invitation to Love
Is self-improvement sometimes a disguised version of self-agrression? If the focus is always on how I might be "better" in the future, it can be hard to extend toward myself a hand of friendship and...
View ArticleThe Literary Prize for the Refusal of Literary Prizes
Highly acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the problematic nature of receiving awards. Among those she says she would like to have is the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal. Named after Jean-Paul...
View ArticleDental Care Where There is No Dentist
In Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, Mary Otto describes how American dentistry came to the point of producing Hollywood smiles for some while leaving...
View ArticleTime for the Wild
In a short and strikingly beautiful cinematic journey to wild places we are asked to think about how we are leaving the natural world for generations to come. What if our children's children could...
View ArticleSpeechless
"One morning I woke up with no voice, just a faint, breathy whisper. This would be upsetting anytime, but on this particular day it felt as if I were in a fairy tale. In a matter of hours, I was...
View ArticleCherishing Our Connections
"We all belong to the world in concentric circles of relationship some more distant and others close, some with people different from us and others with people more similar. Living within this web of...
View ArticlePetra Wolf: Many Rivers Flowing
An early sense of abandonment, a missing gravestone, and an inheritance promised to her in a dream, were all part of the unusual chain of events that led Petra Wolf, a hairdresser-turned-environmental...
View ArticleGratefulness Embraces Parkinson's
"I was diagnosed with Parkinson's just over three years ago when I was 50. Receiving the diagnosis from a matter-of-fact doctor was a traumatizing experience, and I felt that my life and my family's...
View ArticleWorking for Peace in a Violent World
"The work of Joseph Campbell and countless others makes it clear that the destructive aspects of the world, and the knowledge that each of us will die, has forever been a deep challenge to reconcile...
View ArticleJane Baker: An Artist Who Gives It All Away
One day, San Francisco artist Jane Baker realized something. Now she operates from a new place -- new, but also very old: "I don't know art history that well, but it is only in the last few hundred...
View ArticleToni Morrison: On Borders and Belonging
"What does home mean and where do we anchor our belonging in a world of violent alienation and alienating violence? I use "alien" here both in the proper etymological sense rooted in the Latin alienus,...
View ArticleMercy Beyond Borders
Sister Marilyn Lacey is committed to go where the need is great, which, in the case of Mercy Beyond Borders, includes South Sudan and Haiti. The mission of Mercy Beyond Borders is to forge ways for...
View ArticleA Young Poet Tells the Story of Darfur
Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud writes poetry of resilience, confronting her experience of escaping the genocide in Darfur in verse. She shares two stirring original poems about refugees, family, joy and...
View ArticleA Green Approach to Gun Control
"Tajinder Singh, 47, a farmer in the North Indian state of Punjab, applied for a gun license. He told the authorities that he needed a revolver for self-defense. While tending to his 20 acres of land,...
View ArticleHow Cultural Differences Shape Gratitude
"Most of what we know about it [gratitude] comes from studying Americans--and, specifically, the mainly white American college students from the campuses where researchers work. That creates a cultural...
View ArticleBronnie Ware: Living Without Regrets
"Bronnie Ware is an author and speaker whose bestselling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, is based on her time as a palliative care worker. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Bronnie...
View ArticleA Man Without Words: The Story of a Contemporary Miracle
"When I met this man he was twenty-seven years old. Because he didn't know there was sound, because he didn't know he was deaf, he didn't know there was hearing and deafness. He studied lips and...
View ArticleWild Mumbai
"Every night for the past eleven years, Rajesh Sanap and Zeeshan Mirza have spent the post-dinner hours combing the woods behind their homes. Like restive sprites, the young men skirt ponds, bash...
View Article