people have stood at the gates of hope — through world wars and environmental crises and personal loss — with more dignity, wisdom, and optimism than Joanna Macy during her six decades as a Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, and pioneering philosopher of ecology. Macy is also the world’s greatest translator-enchantress of Rainer Maria Rilke, in whose poetry she found refuge upon the sudden and devastating death of the love of her life after fifty-six years of marriage. Indeed, our mortality, as well as our quintessential resistance to it, is a subject Rilke unravels frequently and with deeply comforting insight in Macy’s&nbs... posted on Sep 1 2020 (6,269 reads)

later, I began teaching a weekly class in storytelling techniques. With Reverend Sure’s endorsement, the class began with nearly fifty students. After the initial enthusiasm, the class settled into a committed group of ten or twelve storytellers who met once a month. We called ourselves The Buddhist Storytelling Circle.  The Storytelling Circle evolved into a solid collective of storytelling performers. For several years, we told a wide range of Jataka tales, wisdom stories, parables, and international folktales at Buddhist temples and interfaith gatherings. Twice we hosted Buddhist Storytelling Festivals. In 2004, Reverend Sure and I presented a work... posted on Sep 3 2020 (4,748 reads)

in the images of the First Peoples, spirals engraved on stone, or the animals, bison and bulls, even a rhinoceros, painted on the cave walls in Southern France. Our rational world may have banished magic from our consciousness, but it is still very present in the Earth and Her ways. It speaks of the hidden mysteries of life, the power of sacred place, or the healing properties of plants. This is traditionally the domain of the priest or shaman, but is also our common heritage, part of the wisdom of the early days. And when we speak to the Earth with reverence and thanksgiving, when our stories are true, then the magic within the world can come alive, and can nourish life, clear the wat... posted on Sep 20 2020 (6,882 reads)

is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist monk late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy — echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical nature of love: “Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.” That in love and in life, freedo... posted on Apr 4 2021 (7,302 reads)

and overwhelmed by their assumptions, judgments, and advice—a common and alienating experience. As a result, we often privatize these vital questions in our lives: at the very moment when we need all the help we can get, we find ourselves cut off from both our inner resources and the support of a community. For people who have experienced this dilemma, I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a “Clearness Committee.” If that name sounds like it is from the sixties, it is—the 1660’s! From their beginnings over three hundred years ... posted on Jul 1 2021 (7,401 reads)

or sexual orientation. We have fallen out of alignment with the deepest truths within us. How are we to awaken again to the sacredness at the heart of all life, the sacredness that is also at the heart of our own being? The Celtic spiritual tradition is one that has long emphasized an awareness of the sacred essence of all things. This tradition is in fact part of our Western Christian inheritance, although it has been largely forgotten and at times suppressed. It is this lost stream of wisdom that I will be drawing on in these pages to help us remember. It is a way of seeing, a path of awareness, that can be traced through the centuries, forever unfolding, evolving, emerging again a... posted on Jul 14 2021 (4,935 reads)

All three are excerpted from my poetry book, ‘Early Music’ (Many Rivers Press). The first poem, Turas d’Anam, means ‘journey of your soul’ in the Irish language. This piece is an invitation to grant permission to yourself. To experience a deeper sense of meaning in this life. It reimagines set backs, or conscious retreat, as a strengthening tool. This poem is an invitation to realise the restorative power of rest…and the often agonizing wisdom of hindsight. Turas d'Anam Often times the step backward lets the soul catch up. So that all our happy hindsight’s harmonise and wisdom builds. Sha... posted on Dec 16 2021 (7,130 reads)

the wow, which is just an experience beyond the confines in our mind of who we are and an expansive experience of growing into new possibilities and perspectives and encountering new energies of aliveness inside of ourselves. Mark: Oh, wow. You actually answered one of the questions I was going to pose later, which is when these poems come through, are you cognizing what is spilling out onto the page, or do you go back to it and like myself and other readers, are you extracting gems of wisdom from it much later after its initial commitment to paper? Chelan: Good question. Mark: I think you already sort of answered that. Sorry to interrupt. Chelan: Oh, well, y... posted on Apr 1 2023 (4,210 reads)

will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines. […] If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork. To be sure, Watts doesn’t dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered — like, for instance, what takes place during the “incubation” stage of unconscious processing in the creative process — it is our ally rathe... posted on Sep 19 2023 (4,029 reads)

that pain of a broken system. It's true that the system is rigged and broken. And, on the other hand, it's actually fundamentally not true. It indeed obscures a more fundamental truth, which is that the economy is functioning as it was designed to do. That is, the economy was designed to be extractive and exploitative. The question is, how could we reimagine an economy whose purpose was different? The animating energy behind everything that I'm doing is trying to pull from many different wisdom traditions. And it is flawed. So anything that I share, I beg your forgiveness and your grace, and I invite you to say, "Oh, that doesn't make sense." Or, "Here is a growth edge." Because of co... posted on Apr 16 2024 (1,510 reads)

by Anna Wolf for Dumbo Feather KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Maria Popova has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What she really delivers to hundreds of thousands of people each day is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She doesn’t merely curate, she cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the scholarly and the experiential. We meet Maria Popova at 30, and explore her gleanings, thus far, on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually. MARIA POPOVA: You know,... posted on Jul 15 2015 (11,443 reads)

the outer world. Not that the outer world is bad. Not at all. But it needs to have this other kind of understanding and emphasis which requires people of some more developed understanding to lead it. Why it sometimes gets lost and forgotten is one aspect of the age old question of what's the origin of the fall of humanity. Every tradition speaks of the loss of something, whether in the western tradition’s faith and virtue or sometimes in the eastern traditions of understanding and wisdom. Preeta: I am curious, as we are talking about the money, I'm curious about your views about the gift economy. There’s movement from some groups and people to push away from a tran... posted on Jul 4 2015 (8,488 reads)

emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminousletter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.” Anger, indeed, is one of the emotions we judge most harshly — in others, as well as in ourselves — and yet understanding anger is central to mapping out the landscape of our interior lives. Aristotle, in planting the civilizational seed for practical wisdom, recognized this when he asked not whether anger is “good” or “bad” but how it shall be used: directed at whom, manifested how, for how long and to what end. This und... posted on Feb 8 2016 (42,785 reads)

upon it: In a good image, something previously unformulated (in the most literal sense) comes into the realm of the expressed. Without precisely this image, we feel, the world’s store of truth would be diminished; and conversely, when a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands. […] Thinking within the fields of image, the mind crosses also into the knowledge the unconscious holds — into the shape-shifting wisdom of dream. Poetic concentration allows us to bring the dream-mind’s compression, displacement, wit, depth, and surprise into our waking minds. It is within dreamlife we first learn to read... posted on Sep 6 2016 (10,853 reads)

TIPPETT, HOST: “Belonging creates and undoes us both.” This is the wisdom of Pádraig Ó Tuama, an extraordinary healer in our world of fracture. He leads the Corrymeela community of Northern Ireland, a place that has offered literal refuge and seeds of new life in and since the violent fracture that defined that country until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. But Pádraig and Corrymeela extend a quiet, generative force far beyond their northern coast. They’ve learned what they know the hard way, yet they carry it with an infectious, calming joy. “Over cups of tea, and over the experience of bringing people together,” as Padraig d... posted on May 6 2017 (9,597 reads)

what”, how simple and direct that sounds. Yet I remember as a teen how I used to suffer unnecessarily because I did not know how to be grateful for all I had. I clung to the ego, and craved for more. Not until a loss happened at the end of my high school years, did I realize how impermanent everything is, that all is always changing and can be gone in just a second. Yet, how beautiful it is to know that we have the choice to be grateful, to cultivate compassion, to discover our innate wisdom, and to become a light in this world. As Kozo puts it, “Love always serves. That is the only reaction love has is service. When somebody slaps you across the face, love looks and goes, &l... posted on Aug 13 2017 (11,192 reads)

an awareness of sacred time( kairos). In these pregnant voids we come to understand the limit of our comprehension. We gain a tacit knowledge that our modes of experiencing time and the world are nothing more than the mechanisms, categories, and paradigms created by our limited minds. Like monarch butterflies confined on their migrations to low altitudes, our wings will not carry us into the vast regions of outer space. The proper name for the experience of unknowing is not mysticism but wisdom. When Socrates was told that the Oracle of Delphi said he was the wisest man in Greece, he replied that  it could only  mean he knew what he did not know. Wisdom comes from the certai... posted on Nov 8 2018 (7,643 reads)

The fallacy of that approach is embarrassingly obvious now and viewed from my current perspective it’s easy to see how I sabotaged getting my assignments completed. This unhelpful approach began to shift as I observed the effects of procrastination and preferred approaching tasks without panic. In the process of turning over thoughts along with turning over dirt, I’ve become aware of the impact of doing things a bit at a time, and how much is accomplished this way. This wisdom, lost to me in earlier years, is found in long ago tales like ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ from Aesop’s Fables, which reveals the potential of a slow and steady effort. In F... posted on Dec 2 2017 (10,873 reads)

Simon: This program is brought to you by SoundsTrue.com. At SoundsTrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At SoundsTrue.com, we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey, offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Dan Millman. Dan Millman is an author and lecturer whose semiautobiographical book Way of the Peaceful Warrior first ignited public imagination almost 40 years ago. Dan Millman has authored 17 books, which together have be... posted on Jul 13 2018 (13,323 reads)

I was in my 40s and at rock bottom emotionally. There was one person in my life who seemed to have her stuff together. She was teaching yoga at the YMCA, and she introduced me to a Swar yogi, with whom I spent several years learning about changing people's personal conditions through the use of sound, meditation, and diet. I ended up in a space where nothing could harm me because I would just say, "Okay, I can deal with that." Now I realize that physical process took me to the wisdom of amor fati: whatever comes at you, love it, embrace it, and move from there. Ameeta: Can you talk to us a little bit more about what amor fati is? I’m not sure all our listeners unde... posted on May 10 2018 (11,475 reads)