Sarah Peyton: Connecting with the Music & Breath of Life
In a special Awakin Calls workshop held in 2022, longtime Nonviolent Communication trainer, Sarah Peyton explained resonance in the context of her cello. The cello is shaped like a human body, almost the same size, and, "We actually place musical instruments in our brain in the same area that holds people. So our body, our brain thinks of a cello as a person as well." When we play a cello and ther... posted on Jun 26 2023, 1,412 reads

Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
"Conjuring the movements of migrating salmon, cranes, and butterflies, cultural ecologist David Abram intuits the sensory exchange that guides them across the wider body of the Earth. In a series of drawings woven throughout the story, artist Katie Holten illuminates the deep intelligence that enables collective movement at all scales of life, even in the microscopic cells of our bodies."... posted on Jun 25 2023, 1,502 reads

Poetry is an Egg with a Horse Inside
"Our concerns as adults and as children are not so different. We want to be surprised, transformed, challenged, delighted, understood. For me, since an early age, poetry has been a place for all these things. Poetry is a rangy, uncontainable genre--it is a place for silliness and sadness, delight and despair, invention and ideas (and also, apparently, alliteration). Giving children poems that addr... posted on Jun 24 2023, 1,292 reads

On the Edge of Life & Death
The hospice community of Joseph's House in Washington, D.C. believes that no one should live or die alone. Perched on the very edge of life and death, it is a place of belonging where people are lovingly companioned all the way to the threshold of death. Grace and mystery abound in encounters between people across racial and socioeconomic differences where they meet and love each other. People are... posted on Jun 23 2023, 2,238 reads

Leave No Child Inside
"As a boy I pulled out dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I've since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after... posted on Jun 22 2023, 2,059 reads

In Praise of Fallibility, Everybodyism & Confusers of Certainty
Where universalism maintains only that "all humans will be saved, whatever their sect or non-sect," essayist Amy Leach's everybodyism espouses a more playful and radical redemption for "not just all the human rascals but also all the buffalo rascals and reptile rascals and paddlefish and turkeys and centipedes and wombats and warty pigs." While Leach's admiration for Earth and its inhabitants is s... posted on Jun 21 2023, 1,928 reads

Aluna: A Journey to Save the World
"In 1991, in the last edition of the original Beshara Magazine, we published an article by journalist Alan Ereira about an extraordinary people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north of Colombia. The descendants of a great civilisation which fled to the hills as the Spanish took over their lands, the Kogi had lived for 400 years in isolation, led by a class of priests called the m... posted on Jun 20 2023, 1,559 reads

Pilgrimage Up Longs Peak
"For as long as I can remember, I begged my father to take me back to Colorado to climb a mountain. Growing up in Tennessee, this dream was delayed many times, until only last year when my father (Jane's youngest son, Rarc) and I made the journey. Just before the trip, I came across this particular story printed on its own by type-writer. The story was both an inspiration and grounding force for m... posted on Jun 19 2023, 2,833 reads

David Whyte: On Seeking Language Large Enough
"It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality -- indeed, this drama of vitality -- is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theolo... posted on Jun 18 2023, 4,153 reads

The Practice of Tsundoku & Why You May Want to Adopt It
"Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let them linger on the shelf. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don't know. The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits..." Read on for more on the intriguing concept of the 'antilibrary, the benefits... posted on Jun 17 2023, 2,878 reads