following is a transcript of an interview between Krista Tippett and Maira Kalman syndicated from On Being. Krista Tippett, host:“The subject of my work,” Maira Kalman says, is “the normal, daily things that people fall in love with.” She is a visual storyteller, and to be in conversation with her is a little like wandering into one of the cartoons you might see in The New Yorker and which she might have drawn. Millions of us have been prompted to smile and think by Maira Kalman’s work in a museum or the recent illustrated revision of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or a New York Times blog or her lovel... posted on Feb 14 2019 (6,418 reads)

left her career as a nurse practitioner she went on to become an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Her ministry was in the sub-arctic region of northern Manitoba where she served three villages of the Cree people. She had gone there newly married to a Roman Catholic priest who had given up his orders and had been received as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Woven into the fabric of all this, besides her nursing credentials, Sullivan earned two Masters degrees and even did some work toward an MFA. Her education thus spans medicine, theology, cultural anthropology and art. Besides having done university teaching, she is the coauthor, with Sam Gill, of the Dictionary of Native... posted on Mar 17 2016 (13,130 reads)

Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life. “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” “In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty... posted on Apr 23 2018 (13,817 reads)

with refugee communities both here in the United States as well as in some of the most ravaged pockets of our world.  For many years she directed programs for refugees and immigrants, including the resettlement of the Lost Boys of Sudan at Catholic Charities in San Jose. She describes her leap into the refugee universe in her breathtaking book, This Flowing Towards Me:  A Story of God Arriving in Strangers. The heart of the Scripture come glowingly to life in the words, works, and the world of Sister Marilyn. She and her team have grappled with the question of what it means to welcome the stranger, to see the Divine in the displaced, and to walk beside and witness th... posted on May 6 2021 (3,424 reads)

has now become the largest plant-based environmental advocacy organization in the world. This came out of an experience Milo had when he was young, growing up in rural Ohio, where a teacher brought in a baby piglet for dissection. That baby piglet was not fully dead and he saw it recklessly thrown against the floor in standard factory farming practices to kill it. He wanted to press charges around that treatment of the animal.  Seeing that the legal system would not support him and that work, he resolved to do something, and that became Mercy for Animals. Over the last 20 years, that organization has become an important group to assist in the move away from factory farming and the wo... posted on Dec 5 2019 (4,778 reads)

they? DG: Emotions are the brains way of making us pay attention to and act quickly on something that the brains radar for threat thinks is extremely important. Or the brains circuitry for motivation thinks is extremely important. So, our worst emotions, the ones that make us do things we might regret later, like anger or panic are signs that the brain’s radar for threat, which is called the amygdala has detected something that it thinks is going to harm us in some way. This design worked very well when the brain was being designed by nature, in human prehistory when we lived on the savanna, the jungle, and really sucks now that we live in a complex social reality. So, we have t... posted on Jun 28 2021 (5,314 reads)

do Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Sheryl Sandberg have in common? According to a new book by Stewart D. Friedman, founding director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project and a practice professor of management, each has developed the skills to integrate their life and work successfully. In Leading the Life You Want, Friedman profiles six people who he says embody these necessary skills – being real, being whole, and being innovative – and helps readers to begin to apply these skills and strategies in their own lives. Recently, Jeffrey Klein, executive director of the Wharton Leadership Program, sat down with Friedman to discuss why the phrase “work-life... posted on Dec 23 2014 (24,773 reads)

of the first chapter in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (Jossey-Bass, 2007) by Parker J. Palmer. We Teach Who We Are I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know. But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I am so powerless to do anything about it that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then... posted on Oct 3 2016 (31,708 reads)

state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy wh... posted on Oct 23 2016 (18,875 reads)

the impact of unwanted effects rather than the planned results that didn't materialize. Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader must face a burned out and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of basking in a soaring stock price after a merger, leaders must scramble frantically to get people to work together peaceably, let alone effectively. In the search to understand so much failure, a lot of blame gets assigned. One healthcare executive recently commented that: "We're under... posted on Apr 11 2018 (13,684 reads)

following is the transcript of the Awakin Call with Barbara McAfee, hosted by Aryae Coopersmith, and moderated by Mia Tagano Aryae: Welcome, everyone. My name is Aryae, and I'll be hosting today's Awakin Call. Thanks for joining us from wherever you are in the world. The intention behind these calls is to plant seeds of awareness and transformation within ourselves and our communities through conversations with individuals whose journeys and work inspire us. Awakin Call is an initiative of ServiceSpace — a distributed, global, all volunteer community committed to the principle that, by changing ourselves, we change the world. Behind each of these calls is an en... posted on Apr 28 2023 (2,453 reads)

just spin your wheels and dig yourself a bigger hole. So what they came to was, "Whatever comes at you, embrace it," no matter how awful it is. Just say, "Okay. I see. Here's my move." It came up when I asked Joseph Campbell, the great researcher of heroes and myths, what he personally believed after all his decades of research. He gave me a poem by Robinson Jeffers that expressed that feeling that no matter how awful it is, you love it, you embrace it, you work with it. (FYI: That poem is Natural Music.) He also showed me a clipping about a policeman in Honolulu (where Campbell was living then) who was called to a potential suicide on a bridge. When ... posted on May 10 2018 (11,478 reads)

Davis is president and CEO of PATH, an international nonprofit whose goal is to help communities break longstanding cycles of poor health. The cross-sectoral skills he has accumulated during his earlier work in other organizations, he says, are crucial when it comes to adapting innovations to the places that need them most. In an interview with Wharton management professor Michael Useem during the World Economic Forum in Davos, he talks about his approach to leadership, the importance of strategic partnerships, the effort to eradicate malaria in northern Africa and how to avoid the ‘I’m-going-to-give-back-later [to society]‘ trap. An edited transcript of the conver... posted on Oct 26 2013 (13,775 reads)

they come back, right, and they’re like the healing process of a disturbed forest. But foresters viewed them as unnecessary competitors and had launched an all-out war on trying to get rid of these deciduous trees. And that war is still going on to this very day, creating policies and practices that support that. And what I wanted to know was whether they really were competitors with Douglas fir and cedar or if they had a more sophisticated relationship. So I did this preliminary work, and I discovered — I knew that Douglas fir and paper birch shared these mycorrhizal fungi, these species in common, and actually, potentially linked them together. And I was building on ea... posted on Jun 1 2022 (3,825 reads)

Eckhart says, the soul grows by subtraction, not addition) that subtraction shifted my view of the world, and at an important age, 12 or 13 years old. So, and of course in creativity, in giving birth of any kind, I think there is very often a union and a oneing. I wrote a book called Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet and I think when we're in creative states that the spirit pours through us. And I think there, too, people have deep experiences of union, also in working for social justice, eco justice, racial justice, the struggle. I know one Catholic sister used to tell me her best prayers were being towed away in a paddy wagon, being arrested at nuclear ... posted on Sep 8 2022 (3,023 reads)

is the transcript of an Awakin Call with Mayuka Yamazaki, moderated by Pavi Mehta and hosted by Cynthia Li. Pavi Mehta: It is my pleasure now to introduce our guest. In many ways Mayuka Yamazaki's life is a study in contrast: Her credentials in the business world are impressive: She sits on the board of three public companies, has worked as a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and is backed by a decade of experience working as an executive with Harvard Business School at their Japan Research Center. During her time with them, she co-authored 30 Harvard Business School case studies about Japanese companies, business leaders, and societal issues. Mayuka is also... posted on May 3 2023 (2,319 reads)

Certainly. We visited the studio and as we talked, whatever anxiousness I'd brought to our meeting simply evaporated. And soon, I found myself being drawn out, unusual when I show up in the role of interviewer. Before long I was telling Stephen about my own experiences with clay and ceramics from years past. By the time we sat down to speak for the record, our conversation had come around to the legendary potters Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach. I asked De Staebler if he liked Hamada's work...  Stephen De Staebler: His work doesn't do much for me, but I like some things he said. He kind of teamed up with Leach and they made quite an impact on Western potters. I think tha... posted on Aug 9 2015 (9,001 reads)

Today, my guest is Diane Musho Hamilton. Diane is an exceptionally gifted mediator, group facilitator, and a contemporary spiritual teacher. She's been a practitioner of meditation for almost 30 years. Diane began her studies at Naropa University in 1983 with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and then became a Zen student of Genpo Roshi in 1997. Diane facilitates Big Mind, Big Heart—a process developed by Genpo Roshi to help elicit the insights of Zen in Western audiences. She has also worked with Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute since 2004. With Sounds True, Diane Musho Hamilton is a featured presenter in our Year of Mindfulness series, a digital membership program that bri... posted on Oct 29 2017 (14,879 reads)

in a lot of global development efforts throughout her lifetime. Currently, she lives mostly in India, in rural India, where she is the woman behind a skateboard park, that’s in a village; the park has been upending notions of caste and gender, and empowering a community economically. She's been also involved in development efforts in West Africa. And I think interestingly about Ulrike, beyond this, she has been so involved in kind of the whole advent of collective intelligence and networks and decentralized and  distributed power, long before the internet arose. She herself is a connector, an enabler of people. She's traveled to, you know, hundreds of countries interviewi... posted on May 18 2019 (3,547 reads)

that I should take anything. I felt that the first responsibility was to give something. So I brought a little toy car that was actually given to me out of playfulness, I believe by my mother, in my Christmas stocking. And I left it. When I came back later, it was gone, and it just tickled me to no end. I really kept trying to imagine the curator, this child, maintaining and following this. And there's so many more pieces around this, from how it brought others there--or, I attended a workshop in July and was given a little stone with the word courage on it, and I wanted to leave that there. Yeah, there are neighborhood treasures for us if we develop the eyesight to find them. A... posted on Apr 7 2019 (7,406 reads)