of the practice has been the daily habit of reading what I had written on that day a year earlier; not only is it a remarkable tool of introspection and self-awareness, but it also illustrates that our memory “is never a precise duplicate of the original [but] a continuing act of creation” and how flawed our perception of time is — almost everything that occurred a year ago appears as having taken place either significantly further in the past (“a different lifetime,” I’d often marvel at this time-illusion) or significantly more recently (“this feels like just last month!”). Rather than a personal deficiency of those of us befalle... posted on Dec 12 2023 (19,771 reads)

outward, like ringworm, leaving the so-called "inner city" desolate, filthy, ugly, and dangerous.   MY WALKS IN THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS around my home have inevitably produced in my mind the awareness that I live in a diminished country. The country has been and is being reduced by the great centralizing process that is our national economy. As I walk, I am always reminded of the slow, patient building of soil in the woods. And I am reminded of the events and companions of my life—for my walks, after so long, are cultural events. But under the trees and in the fields I see also the gullies and scars, healed or healing or fresh, left by careless logging and bad farmin... posted on Mar 4 2014 (20,329 reads)

remember one evening, when my life was pretty different and I was overweight and deeply in debt and a smoker and had such a hard time changing things … I wasn’t feeling too good about my life. I felt horrible about myself, and wondered why I was stuck. I felt hopeless and helpless, and generally depressed about the state of things around me. Then I looked up at the sky, and saw the stars set in a deep blue-black canvas. And I thought, what a miracle life is. And I resolved to mentally list the things I had in my life that were good. My list of good things was something like this: - I had a wonderful wife - I had 5 amazing children (now 6) - I had... posted on Dec 14 2013 (83,437 reads)

Tippett, host: Most of us were born into a twentieth century which aspired to solve every problem. That never succeeded, in part because it's just not the way life works, for individuals or societies, even at the best of times. You solve one problem and new ones emerge. Even sustainability implies a confidence that balance can finally be achieved. Andrew Zolli is thought leader and curator of a new idea, "resilience thinking," which is galvanizing scientists, governments, and social innovators. Resilience asks how to support people and create systems that know how to recover, persist, and even to thrive in the face of change. In our age, disruption is around ... posted on Dec 5 2013 (22,771 reads)

150 years since Leo Tolstoy put pen to paper and began writing his epic War and Peace. While most people think of him as one of the 19th century's greatest novelists, few are aware that he was also one of its most radical social and political thinkers. During a long life from 1828 to 1910, Tolstoy gradually rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background and embraced a startlingly unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. Tracing his personal transformation offers some wise — and surprising — lessons for how we should approach the art of living today. Tolstoy was born into the Russian nobility. His family had an estate and owned hundreds o... posted on Dec 23 2013 (179,460 reads)

Garfield draws on decades of experience to explore how to create the conditions for a good death. Some years ago, I helped tend to a friend of mine who was dying of cancer. Near the end of his life, he had reached a place of equanimity around dying. But instead of honoring his wishes for a peaceful death, his doctors ordered aggressive chemotherapy treatment, which did nothing to halt his cancer. The treatments caused him immense suffering, rendering him unable to sleep, eat, or converse with family and friends as he was dying. Unfortunately, deaths like my friend’s are not that rare. Though more than 70 percent of Americans surveyed say they want to die in their o... posted on Jun 24 2014 (84,687 reads)

frightened for my dad. I am distressed about Melissa, worried about her 3-year-old son. We check in at the hospital, and dad is promptly whisked away to pre-op. Mom and I are shown to a waiting room. We try to choose a seat where we don’t have to watch a television blaring weather reports, pharmaceutical ads, and sports scores. Like passengers waiting for a bus, we sit with our bags in our laps, unsure how long we will be in this space. She begins to cry. There will be moments in life when his joys will unveil sorrow, and in their unveiling he will realize the fortune he enjoys. I push my bag to the floor and grab her hand. It has been years since I have held my mother&rsqu... posted on Sep 7 2014 (17,782 reads)

forget to realize the wealth we already have. Failing to acknowledge our true wealth we keep grasping for more, like hungry ghosts who are never satisfied while constantly eating! Thus, we go about despoiling the earth, corrupting relationships, and twisting societies into grotesque forms that promote needless suffering for ourselves, others, and the earth-at-large. Realizing true wealth leads to personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal fulfillment. Furthermore, the long term survival of life on earth depends upon true wealth realization. We need deep psychological and spiritual healing of individuals, groups, communities, nations and the earth at large. The bedrock of this hea... posted on Nov 24 2014 (21,220 reads)

Kitty Edwards, left, and Patti Pansa, right] In May 2013, Patti Pansa, a professional engineer and life coach, contacted me to assist her in her journey towards death. She had taken care of all the literal preparations for death: she had spoken to her family members about her wishes for end-of-life care; her last will and testament, advanced health care directives, and medical durable power of attorney were all signed and delivered to the appropriate people; a list of her important accounts with passwords sat in a folder next to her computer. But Patti wanted more. She wanted to leave a legacy for her family and friends. Perhaps most of all, she wanted to discover way... posted on Mar 4 2015 (48,940 reads)

if we measured wealth in terms of life, and how well we serve it? David Korten began his professional life as a professor at the Harvard Business School on a mission to lift struggling people in Third World nations out of poverty by sharing the secrets of U.S. business success. Yet, after a couple of decades in which he applied his organizational development strategies in places as far-flung as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, Korten underwent a change of heart. In 1995, he wrote the bestseller When Corporations Rule the World, followed by a series of books that helped birth the movement known as the New Economy, a call to replace transnational corporate domination w... posted on Mar 31 2015 (17,997 reads)

is how we mature… There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.” “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf asserted in the only surviving recording of her voice. But words also belong to us, as much as we belong to them - and out of that mutual belonging arises our most fundamental understanding of the world, as well as the inescapable misunderstandings that bedevil the grand sensemaking experiment we call life. This constant dialogue between reality and illusion, moderated by our use of language, is what poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Unde... posted on May 12 2015 (30,322 reads)

had the pleasure of getting to know the late Nicholas Hlobeczy over a period of several years. He had the gift of seeing things with fresh eyes, almost like a child. And yet he was a thoroughly trained photographer having studied with the legendary Minor White. They were close friends right to the end of Minor’s life. The interview that follows is a testament to a wisdom born of experience and a long quest. We met at Nick's home in Corvallis, Oregon. Richard Whittaker: In one of my notes I have a quote you gave from Robert Henri. "The object behind every true work of art is the attainment of a state of being." Nicholas Hlobeczy: It is as he says. I bel... posted on Apr 2 2016 (10,222 reads)

heart of what it means to live reverently.  So ... why does reverence matter? Paul Woodruff: Because It Is A Forgotten Virtue Power without reverence is aflame with arrogance, while service without reverence is smoldering toward rebellion. Politics without reverence is blind to the general good and deaf to advice from people who are powerless. (…) Because reverence fosters leadership and education. Most important, because reverence kindles warmth in friendship and family life. And because without reverence, things fall apart. People do not know how to respect each other and themselves. An army cannot tell the difference between what it is and a gang of bandits. Withou... posted on Apr 14 2016 (37,653 reads)

Michael Braungart, “you might well pity them both.”3 After reviewing the alternatives, though, writer and consultant Alan AtKisson concluded, “As a name for the future of our dreams, sustainability may be ‘the worst word, except for all the others.’” To stay useful, however, sustainability must mean more than merely surviving or trying to keep a degraded world from getting worse. Otherwise, why bother? Invoking nature’s capacity for sustaining life, as physicist and system theorist Fritjof Capra suggests, is critical. A sustainable community worth imagining is alive, in the most exuberant sense of that word—fresh, vital, evolving, div... posted on May 21 2016 (15,279 reads)

You made it to the finish line. :) Over these past years, all of you have been immersed in the study of virtue, in its many forms, across many different traditions. From Plato to Confucius, Nagarjuna to Darwin, Kant to Lao Tsu, your academic studies have spanned the Great Books from the West and timeless classics from the East. Today, on your commencement day, I want to say the world needs you, students of virtue, more than ever. Your formal education may have ended, but the lifelong work of applying these insights is just about to start. Today's society has no shortage of information for the head, but what we lack sorely is application of our hands and cultivation of... posted on May 31 2016 (48,898 reads)

Dienst, MD, is a rural family and emergency room physician from north central Washington who has been volunteering for humanitarian medical missions since 1982, when he was a young man in medical school. His first experience profoundly changed his life and he was “hooked,” he says, volunteering repeatedly for medical exchange programs in Veracruz, Mexico, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Most recently he served as the medical coordinator for Salaam Cultural Museum (SCM), a Seattle-based nonprofit conducting humanitarian and medical relief work with refugee populations in Jordan, Lebanon and Greece. After volunteering among Syrian refugees in Greece, Dienst and his fell... posted on Jan 6 2018 (9,118 reads)

Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics. All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics. Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of m... posted on Mar 3 2018 (17,547 reads)

going to be fine. And everything IS fine,” he says in a voice fuzzy with sleep. And after the space of a heartbeat adds gently, “You have to expand the definition of fine.” Six months later I can honestly say my definition of fine has greatly expanded. I know this because a couple of nights ago, drifting off to sleep, I had a thought that danced between insight and incoherence. And it went something like this: “Life is good. Practice knowing this, Pavi. Practice when life seems good. Practice when life seems uncertain. Practice when life seems anything but.” Far from being a cultivation of denial or passivity, I’m learning how much it is really about a... posted on Dec 31 1969 (2,634 reads)

every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then? “In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one’s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön. In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times(public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer ... posted on Mar 13 2018 (17,372 reads)

Havea on Bryan Stevenson The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One out of three black men aged 18 to 30 is in prison, on probation or parole. The US is the only country in the world that has life imprisonment without parole for minors. For every nine people who have been executed, one is later found to be innocent. Bryan Stevenson refers to these statistics when he speaks. It’s a reality that has driven him to devote almost 30 years to working with people on death row. At the time of our conversation, I am halfway through his book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The pages contain story after story of injustice and I am filled ... posted on Mar 27 2018 (7,624 reads)