due to climate impacts. Hotter, drier regimes increase forest fires and die-off, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere, causing more heat, more fires. All systems require negative feedback in order to survive, live, grow and evolve. So negative feedback is what we want here. It is the guide to course correction. That’s easy for us to say in places where climate change is not yet wreaking havoc. But what about the human toll in places where climate change is already making life very difficult? The momentum of climate change is enormous and so too are the lag times. The atmosphere doesn’t care what we think or say. We know that climate disruption will increase i... posted on Apr 13 2018 (13,540 reads)

is devoted to produce job-ready people. I said this is shameful thing to see job-ready people. We’re not slaves. We’re producing slaves to fit into somebody’s job. We are human beings. We want to explore ourselves. That’s what the education system should be—to know who I am and what I’m here for. But instead they make you feel small. That all we have to do, finish your school, then start sending job applications and find a job. Once you find a job your life is done. I said that’s not the way human beings are. Human beings are here for a purpose—to change the world according to their desire. Not to go on working and slaving for somebody w... posted on Jul 24 2018 (7,439 reads)

Earth “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.” So begins Pope Francis in his powerful and long-awaited encyclical on ecology. “The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.” Pope Francis chose to be called after a saint for whom love for all of God’s creation was central to his life, and all creatures were his brothers and sisters. Speaking in the voice of this saint “who loved and protects creation,” he calls for a moral response to prevent the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem,”—that we urgently need to recognize the consequences of, ... posted on Dec 16 2018 (7,854 reads)

I thought perfection would bring-- undoable though that request was, to myself. So I stumbled across non-violent communication when Marshall Rosenberg was still alive and still traveling and teaching. And I had the extraordinary experience of bringing something very difficult, very entrenched -- we had adopted a son, and I was having a really hard time hugging him. And it just seemed like I was going to be doomed to living with the shame and horror of my own limitations for the rest of my life, and letting down this beautiful soul who'd come to live in our family. And as I sat in a circle of people who were practicing non-violent communication with me, which is a modality o... posted on Jan 21 2019 (6,927 reads)

don’t really get to explore it. Have you been before? Many times. One of my close friends lives there. I also go every year for South by Southwest. Lucky you! I love it. It’s a beautiful city and it smells divine all the time. It smells like, petunias. Have you ever considered moving there? No! If it were up to me I would never leave Brooklyn. Really? What do you love about Brooklyn? I think it’s all about the community. It’s a place where work life and social life kind of become one. What do you mean by that? Well, I don’t draw a sharp line between work and life, if any line at all. The notion of work/life balance has always ... posted on Feb 17 2019 (8,658 reads)

this world. This story teaches us that we are made of the same elements that make up the natural world. In this story, we are born out of the ash tree. Thus, the ash tree is our kin and should be honored in the same way that we honor our human family. Today, our tribes still recognize our relationship with the ash tree by weaving our traditional baskets from its pulp. When we weave those baskets, we are reminding ourselves that we are woven from the same foundational elements that make up all life on this planet. When we go into ceremony, our origination stories begin in the stars. When we enter the lodge, we learn that our original instructions are contained in the essence of those sta... posted on Feb 19 2019 (9,725 reads)

Naked Voice by Chloe Goodchild, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2015 by Chloe Goodchild. Reprinted by permission of publisher. Since childhood and throughout my life, my voice has been my conscience and guide, providing me with an in-built “sonic laboratory” for self-inquiry. In 1990, following a transformative experience in India, I discovered my voice as my very own self. My singing voice became the messenger of this awakening. I called it my naked voice, for it arose from an unconditional source far deeper than my personality or ego could fathom. It touched a place of wisdom and oneness (nonduality) within me that opened vast new fields of... posted on Mar 18 2019 (7,930 reads)

Hesse from Sämtliche Werke, Band 10: Die Gedichte, copyright © 2002 by Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH, all rights reserved and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books. Nature: Source of Strength and Solace (commentary from Ludwig Max Fischer, Phd) Nature was Hesse’s first and foremost teacher: the garden, the forest, animals. An appreciation of, a devotion to, a never-tiring observation and contemplation of natural life inspired Hesse’s writing on every page. The young boy already fled the narrow streets of Calw to explore a less structured, less regimented, much freer playground for his limitless curiosit... posted on Jun 9 2019 (8,554 reads)

for your country. I mean when you’re a kid you don’t really think of it that way. It’s just like “Oh everyone’s doing it, this is fun.” We were always cautious about being watched and having our behaviour monitored in case of rebellion or disobedience to the regime. Even as children, we were often encouraged to not even think thoughts of doubt or disrespect to the regime—almost as if our thoughts were also being monitored. I’ve had a good life and I owe it to my mum, she was quite an independent woman. She was surrounded by a patriarchal environment, but she always protected us and looked after us. And usually in Iraq women aren’... posted on Jun 24 2019 (3,119 reads)

me, but it is far from uncommon. It belongs to the spectrum of experience which Diane Ackerman, one of the greatest science storytellers of our time, describes in Deep Play (public library) — a bewitchingly inquiry into those moods colored by “a combination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder,” which render us in a state of “waking trance.” Ackerman — who has previously written beautifully about the secret life of the senses, our poetic communion with the cosmos, and the darkest depths of the human experience — reclaims and subverts the phrase “deep play” from Jeremy Ben... posted on Sep 16 2019 (6,499 reads)

a cup of tea there in your hands. That cup came from Mother Earth. You are wearing warm clothes because it is cold; all these clothes came from Mother Earth. And your body is from Mother Earth. When this body leaves the soul, it goes back to its mother. What comes from Mother Earth goes back to Mother Earth. I don’t know where this idea of separating ourselves from Mother Earth came from. I don’t know the purpose of trying to separate humans from Mother Earth. The land is life. It is the Tree  of Life. If we tamper with the Tree of Life, there won’t be life on earth. We are incapable of taking care of land, land takes care of us. In many forms, in many ways... posted on Dec 8 2019 (5,818 reads)

very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides. Let me begin that way: with an invocation of your own best hopes, thrown like a handful of rice over this celebration. Congratulations, graduates. Congratulations, parents, on the best Mother's Day gift ever. Better than all those burnt-toast breakfasts: these, your children grown tall and competent, educated to within an inch of their lives. What can I say to people who know almost everything? There was a time when I surely knew, because I'd just graduated from college myself, after writing down th... posted on Nov 4 2020 (9,886 reads)

it. And what I’d love to know is, why is this so hard? Why is treating ourselves even reasonably kindly, consistently, the way we would of course treat other people, why is it so hard when it comes to treating ourselves with that kind of love and compassion? Tara Brach: Yes, it is so hard. And I think that the deepest truths are the ones that we forget the quickest. Which is, if we’ve turned against ourselves, we’re not going to be able to really be in love with our life and in love with the world. And yet we do this; it’s such a deep reflex. And from as much as I can understand, it starts in an existential way, that incarnating, there’s a sense of... posted on Jan 5 2021 (5,950 reads)

very humbling to know that with people you want to be close with, you still seem a little bit far away just because there's this context that you're not able to wrap your head around, and you're not opening yourself up to that. That's been my experience. That's what emerges for me Pat. Pat: I like that. Everybody has their own little universe now in COVID, and it's their apartment, their house, their pets, their nursing home or whatever their life situation may be. We all now are a constellation of multiple little universes. And this COVID thing has abruptly stopped our river of assumptions. I think of my daily routine before COVID. I l... posted on Mar 15 2021 (5,384 reads)

culture. I was deeply captivated by how the tribe’s spirituality braided with their land’s ecology and geography. I began seeing Mayalmit and her community’s protests in a different light now. They were not campaigning for the rivers and forests just as such. It was a fight for their identity, sacrality, themselves. In Lepcha folklore, the stormy tumultuous love between the rivers Rongyoung and Rangeet culminates in their uniting as Teesta (Teeth-Sutha), Sikkim’s life-giving river. Their genesis story is not an abstracted one, happening somewhere in an unearthly heaven. In their genesis, among many passed down versions of it, Itbumu ‘The great ... posted on Mar 7 2021 (5,620 reads)

become an instant cliche as the pandemic reveals the threadbare fabric of our culture: the truly essential people that make day-to-day life possible are often the ones in the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. As grateful as I am to have professional people in my life, I am utterly dependent on the people who grow, harvest, and distribute food. The people who stack grocery shelves and check us out. The people willing to shop for the elderly and immunocompromised. The people picking up our garbage, manning the water and sewer systems. And, of course, the health care workers. It doesn’t take a pandemic to tell us that our culture has its values and rewards upside down. B... posted on Apr 3 2021 (5,160 reads)

dawn, millions of Tamil women create intricate, geometric, ritual-art designs called 'kolam,' at the thresholds of their homes, as a tribute to Mother Earth and an offering to Goddess Lakshmi. A Tamil word that means beauty, form, play, disguise or ritual design-- a kolam is anchored in the Hindu belief that householders have a karmic obligation to "feed a thousand souls." By creating the kolam with rice flour, a woman provides food for birds, rodents, ants and other tiny life forms -- greeting each day with 'a ritual of generosity', that blesses both the household, and the greater community. Kolams are a deliberately transient form of art. They are created ane... posted on May 20 2021 (14,882 reads)

we carry with us. This unmet need haunts us, sometimes driving us into addictions or other self-destructive patterns. Conversely, if our need for love is met, we feel nourished in the depths of our being. Love calls to us in many different ways. Yet while most people seek for love in the tangle of human relationships, the mystic is drawn deeper under the surface—in Rumi’s words, “return to the root of the root of your own being.” And here we begin to discover one of life’s greatest secrets: how love is at the source of all that exists, is the source of all that exists. Love is not just a feeling between people, but a substance, an energy, a divine... posted on Dec 30 2021 (6,090 reads)

So we looked at a tiny, tiny fraction. And what we found [laughs] was that every tree was connected to every other tree by these two sister species of this one species alone. Can you imagine if we’d mapped all 100? It would’ve been like, incredible. Tippett:[laughs] Right. Right. Simard:So every tree is linked to every other tree. All the little trees — the seedlings, the saplings are all linked into the networks that these old trees had established through their lifetime, and that the biggest, oldest trees were the hubs of the network. They were the nuclei. They were what everything else was linked into. And they were linked to each other, these other, smalle... posted on Jun 1 2022 (3,875 reads)

is some medical news that nobody, absolutely nobody, is prepared to hear. I certainly wasn't. It was three years ago that I got a call in my office with the test results of a recent scan. I was 35 and finally living the life I wanted. I married my high school sweetheart and had finally gotten pregnant after years of infertility. And then suddenly we had a Zach, a perfect one-year-old boy/dinosaur, depending on his mood. And having a Zach suited me perfectly. I had gotten the first job I applied for in academia, land of a thousand crushed dreams. And there I was, working at my dream job with my littl... posted on Nov 7 2022 (7,352 reads)