Eldering in the Age of Consumption
"In modern Western society, we want to preserve everything and we want to live forever. We wage war on old age and write songs about being forever young. Because death is seen as no more, no less than...
View ArticleJoining Our Wildernesses
Liz Tichenor was ordained as a priest at 27. Just a few months before her ordination, Tichenor lost her mother to suicide. A year and a half later, her infant son, just 40 days old, died from a likely...
View ArticleA Conversation with Americ Azavedo: The Truth Demands to Be Live
For ten semesters, Americ Azevedo's seminar, 'Time, Money, and Love in the Age of Technology,' cultivated in students an awareness of the larger issues that form a context for their lives. He was well...
View ArticleThe Nature of Plastics
"All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the...
View ArticleOh For Crying Out Loud
"Death has been visiting my life a lot in this past year. During those times, I have frequently heard Mary Elizabeth Frye's well-known poem, 'Do No Stand At My Grave and Weep.' This morning as I was...
View ArticleBlowing Open the Dusty Windows of Perception
"Certain places -- like where springwater falls over a slickrock ledge, sculpting the land of canyons, or where steam bubbles from dark cauldrons in Yellowstone while bison hunker nearby --have a power...
View ArticleThe Defiant Tenderness of Surrender
"There are so many courageous people just making breakfast in the morning, going to work, taking care of their families, trying to do online teaching. Holy God. I mean, I just wish there was a cosmic...
View ArticleAll Cats Are Black
"My biggest regret is that I wasn't born beautiful-- there, I've said it."Jenny Jackson delivers these words with captivating candor in this poignant, short film by Green Renaissance. Lacking the...
View ArticleChanging the World One Map At A Time
Patrick Meier uses his various skills as a digital humanitarian and global-local activist to help silently transform the growth story of underdeveloped countries through technology. Over the past 15...
View ArticleGrace in Uncertainty
"Jerry Takigawa sent me a copy of a little book he designed and published: 'Grace In Uncertainty.' At the beginning, he quotes Andre Gide, "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But...
View ArticleShe Convinced a Community to Love a 'Bad Omen'
Leptoptilos dubius is the name of a gangly stork, "Once close to extinction, the bird has rebounded in biologist Purnima Devi Barman's home state of Assam in northeastern India. And that success,...
View ArticleHow to Be Resilient
One definition of resilience is: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. This past year, many of us have faced adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stresssuch as...
View ArticleParker Palmer Muses on the Season
"I will wax romantic about spring and its splendors in a moment, but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in...
View ArticleAwakened Awareness
"Awakened awareness practices focus on dis-identifying with the conceptual mind, specifically the false self or ego that we imagine ourselves to be. To call the ego a false self is not to disparage it...
View ArticleOnce I Took a Week Long Walk in the Sahara
"Tracing an ancient route across the Sahara Desert once caravanned by pilgrims on their journey to Mecca, Anna Badkhen contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence of...
View ArticleMy Mother Against Apartheid
"In 1955, six White women in Johannesburg said enough is enough when the government enacted a law to disenfranchise 'Coloured' (mixed-race) South Africans, rescinding their right to vote. Along with a...
View ArticleWaiting for the Thaw
"It's about this time in the long stretch of winter that I begin to ache for spring. By March, I tend become a bit dulled to the beauty of winter. Though my prayer and meditation keep my heart open to...
View ArticleThe Buy Nothing Project Gift Economies
Liesl Clark and her family traveled to Nepal on a "quest to find answers." They returned home with a new perspective on community and a better way of living. Clark saw how the Nepalese cared for each...
View ArticlePoetry Calls Us To Pause
"It is the simple topic, a commonality that I choose to explore, so when I walk down a street, open a can of soup, view a fading poster on the wall, or imagine what I might write in wet cement, I ask...
View ArticleThe World's Last Nomadic Peoples
"From Jeroen Toirkens comes 'Nomad' -- a fascinating and strikingly beautiful visual anthropology of the Northern Hemispheres last living nomadic peoples, from Greenland to Turkey. A decade in the...
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