Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
"Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeing rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it...
View ArticleBarrio De Paz: Peace Town
"Everything in society tells us to distrust others. I think it's the other way around. We need to profoundly trust in those around us, in their potential and in who they are," the grandmotherly Nelsa...
View ArticleThe Reverence Movement
Growing up the youngest of 10 siblings in a Watts, Los Angeles housing project, and a member of the famed Crips gang, Aqeela Sherrills witnessed from the inside the pain and devastation of the countrys...
View ArticleA Meditation on Grief
"Grief is one of the hearts natural responses to loss. When we grieve we allow ourselves to feel the truth of our pain, the measure of betrayal or tragedy in our life. By our willingness to mourn, we...
View ArticleThis Land Was Made
"The soil of this land has been altered--altared--by blood, sweat, and tears falling from black and brown bodies. Even when I am not aware of this, I am aware of this. How many ways can we read the...
View ArticleDiscovering Poetry En Route to Life
"Poetry, my father quoted it frequently, my grandmother collected it in scrapbooks --cards from friends, I memorized snatches of it in school. Poetry really came to me as a young father when my family...
View ArticleThe Gift of Ecological Humility
"In my early 20s, I apprenticed myself to the The Queen Mothers of Kroboland in Ghana with the hope of understanding more about my cultural heritage. Early one morning, I arrived at the compound of...
View ArticleOur Memories of Water
"I began asking friends if they had any memorable experiences with water. I was surprised by the blank looks I got. Like almost everyone else, ordinarily my relationship with water was...
View ArticleBe A Blessing
"There is a question rolling around even in the most secular of corners: What do religious people and traditions have to teach as we do the work ahead of repairing, renewing, and remaking our...
View ArticleOne Thousand Cranes
Cranes are revered in Japan as mystical creatures and are said to live for a thousand years. A thousand paper cranes are often given to wish for the recovery of a seriously ill person. In this moving...
View ArticleMary Oliver & The Witchery of Living
"Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass? Will the owl bite off its own wings? Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing? Will the rivers run...
View ArticleThe Caribou Guardians
High on a forested mountain in northern British Columbia, in the traditional territory of the West Moberly Dunne-za First Nations (WMFN) and Saulteau First Nations (SFN), Starr Gauthier is on patrol...
View ArticleClaire Dunn: Nature's Apprentice
Claire Dunn is a guide to the wilds inside and out, and her passion is nature-based human development. Since quitting her job campaigning for the Wilderness Society over a decade ago, she has travelled...
View ArticleThe World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane
In July of 2020, beloved ServiceSpace friends Kozo Hattori, and Sue Cochrane, came together for a virtual conversation in the presence of community. Both were navigating stark realities with cancer....
View ArticleJames O'Dea: Conscious Activism
From award-winning author James O'Dea comes a handbook for Sacred Activism, where spiritual insight and radical action meet. O'Dea shares the arc of his own development as both an activist and mystic....
View ArticleRough Initiations
"To heal from our traumas, from soul loss, we must restore the conditions which offer something alluring and compelling to coax the soul back home. In other words, what reconstitutes the psyche after...
View ArticleBloom
Neighbors and plants can surely help us bloom, especially in the hard times. Stuck in her apartment, a lonely woman waits for time to pass until one day she hears a knock at the door. On her doorstep,...
View ArticleA Few Words on the Soul
"We have a soul at times. No one's got it non-stop, for keeps." In an article in the New York Times, Edward Hirsch called Wislawa Szymborska "a philosophically inflected poet who investigates large...
View ArticleSpeaking River, Speaking Rain
"Are languages then just a collection of words, syntax, and semantics? I'd like to sometimes see them as seeds and sometimes as fields - alive as the minds, tongues, throats, bodies and air they pass...
View ArticleAll You Need Is Love?
"'Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?' That's the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book 'Humankind', and it's one that anyone involved in youth...
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