Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together
"According to a recent survey, if you're a democrat, theres a 60 percent chance that you view the Republican Party as a threat to the United States, and a 40 percent chance that you regard it as...
View ArticleWhy We Should Take World Octopus Day Seriously
In 2011 author and naturalist Sy Montgomery wrote "Deep Intellect,"for Orion magazine, her piece investigated the inner life of the octopus. "Since its publication this feature remains the most-read...
View ArticleCrochet Jam: Radical Social Justice Through Folk Art Traditions
"Through my community-art event, Crochet Jam, I do not dictate the creativity process. Participants maintain their agency. There is no need to please me. I have no authority over anyone. I am just the...
View ArticleRethinking the Bucket List
How would you live every day as if it were your last? Go skydiving? Attempt to ride a bull for 2.7 seconds? Kathleen Taylor has spent over 20 years as a counselor and community engagement facilitator...
View ArticleJudith Blackstone on Trauma & The Unbound Body
As a professional dancer in the wake of a devastating back injury Judith Blackstone found herself lying on the ground in a state of prayerful grief, and desperation. It was then that, by releasing her...
View ArticleStories to Tend the Soul of the World
"Dr. Sharon Blackie is a renowned writer and teacher whose work weaves together psychology, mythology, and ecology to reveal how our cultural myths have led us to the individual and collective social...
View ArticleThe View From Here
Barb Abelhauser worked in an office for 14 years. Then one day she quit, and decided to become a bridgetender on the Ortega River Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida. She planned to work there for a year....
View ArticleBruce Lee's Never-Before-Seen Affirmations
"Although Bruce Lee is best known for his legendary legacy in martial arts and film, he was also one of the most underappreciated philosophers of the twentieth century, instrumental in introducing...
View ArticleGabriel Meyer: Stretching Identity
"It's simple. The deepest stuff is the simplest stuff. You don't have to be complicated to be deep. You have to be simple to be deep. That's when you really connect. There are no intermediates in the...
View Article8 Questions to Help Navigate Election Stress
"How are you doing? For Americans facing the COVID-19 lockdown and economic instability through the spring and summer, that became a difficult question to ask--and to answer. Things were already pretty...
View ArticleHow to Build a More Inclusive Dinner Table
How we eat, and who we eat with matters much more than we realize. For generations Muslims and Jews have often had to eat at separate tables, simply for lack of foods that are both Halal and Kosher....
View ArticleLife in the Time of Cholera: Lessons on a Pandemic
"As sirens fill the streets of London, George Prochnik recalls a revolutionary poets account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris. While watching history repeat itself in devastating...
View ArticleShelter for the Heart and Mind
"How can we keep walking forward, and even find renewal along the way, in this year of things blown apart? How can we hold to our sense of what is whole and true and undamaged, even in the face of...
View ArticleAn Evolutionary Transition is Coming-- Are You Ready?
"Through the evolution of human consciousness, cultural evolution has the potential to move from being a largely unconscious process pushed forward by our biological conditioning to a fully conscious...
View ArticleThomas Merton and the Language of Life
"By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive...
View ArticleClimate in the Boardroom
"How does one witness to businesspeople about climate change? Climate change is a problem for the collective and the long term, whereas business often requires a ruthless focus on the individual and...
View ArticleI Am One of Everybody
"This bright red coat warms me in winter not only because of what it's made from but also because of what its covered with: hundreds of signatures, all scribbled in black or silver ink. Last time I...
View ArticleLast Child in the Woods
"Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also...
View ArticleCreating Magic from Fragments
For all of us who have ever gathered a collections of fragments, scraps and bits; formed them into little beings and spent precious magical moments with these friends we've formed. This bittersweet...
View ArticleVoting as an Expression of Love and Gratefulness
"Though we typically think of voting in purely political terms, we can think about every choice we make as a vote and every moment in our lives as an election. We vote with our bodies, energy, money,...
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