Lessons Learned from Writing Love Letters to Strangers
"I began leaving love letters all over New York City for strangers to find nearly two years ago. Though the idea sounds romantic, it was really a way to forget about my own feelings of sadness and loneliness for a while and focus on others in the big city who may have been feeling as let down as me. Every morning since that first love letter, I've pinned my cursive to writing and mailing love lett... posted on Oct 31 2012, 28,421 reads

Jacob Needleman: Probing Higher Intelligence
Renowned writer and philosopher, Jacob Needleman, talks about his life: "I began to feel, without knowing how to say it, that when I was looking at a grasshopper or a frog, I was looking at a great idea. The ideas were like living beings! And the living beings were ideas! And so I wanted to go into this field. I wanted to be a philosopher." Further on in this interview, he says, "No matter how man... posted on Oct 29 2012, 3,350 reads

One Hat, One Heart
Seeds of Light is the humanitarian service arm of CoreLight, an international non-profit organization practicing "love-in-action." One Hat One Heart is a project that provides handmade, warm winter hats to orphans and vulnerable children in Mpumalanga, South Africa. These hats are the medium through which joy and open-heartedness are being expressed. This short video on their work demonstrates wha... posted on Oct 27 2012, 2,665 reads

Detroit's Good Food Cure
"What happens when the Motor City transforms itself into the capital of grow-your-own food? There are more than 1,200 community gardens in Detroit--more per square mile and more per capita than in any other American city. The number of community gardens is just a fraction of the number of kitchen gardens that families grow in yards and side lots. Locals are learning more about nutrition and feelin... posted on Oct 25 2012, 10,552 reads

Barbara Kingsolver On How to Be Hopeful
"The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, "We already did. We have made the world new." The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run ... posted on Oct 24 2012, 31,319 reads

What Tomorrow Brings
There has never been a school for girls in the village of Deh Subz, Afghanistan. Afghan-American Razia Jan set out to change that. In 2009, despite pressure to educate boys and threats to ruin the school, the Zabuli Education Center opened a school to educate 200 girls. Razia's hope is to make life a little easier, even for a few hours a day, for the girls who have to work so hard at such a young ... posted on Oct 15 2012, 3,158 reads

Peace Artist: 6000 Miles of Art & Humanity
It all began with gratitude...And maybe some sneakers and paint. He goes by the name Peace Artist, and he spent the past year running 6,000 miles from Seattle, Washington to Savannah, Georgia. He ran until given shelter and fasted until given food. He carried no money with him, only art supplies, with which to create original works of art that he gifted along the way. He never asked for anything o... posted on Oct 12 2012, 37,793 reads

A Lifetime of Favors
Woody Davis was the kind of neighbor every community wishes they had. Throughout his lifetime in the small town of Corbett, Oregon, Woody used his jack-of-all-trades skills doing favors for people -- "thousands of good deeds." He took care of their needs on his own initiative, without ever asking anything for himself. Diagnosed with ALS, Woody faced what he bravely called "dying slowly". But the t... posted on Oct 07 2012, 4,729 reads

Students Step Up the Kindness
How amazing would it be to start the first day of school receiving random acts of kindness from your fellow students? Last year, a hundred students at Kansas State huddled early in the morning to see just how they could pool their time, money and creativity to surprise (and perhaps shock!) their fellow students with unexpected generosity. From a welcome applause to paying for meals to wowing a dri... posted on Oct 02 2012, 3,228 reads

The Habit of Starting
"The biggest reason people fail at creating and sticking to new habits is that they don't keep doing it. That seems obvious: if you don't keep doing a habit, it won't really become a habit. So what's the solution to this obvious problem? Find a way to keep doing it. When you look at it this way, the key to forming a habit is not how much you do of the habit each day (exercise for 30 minutes, write... posted on Oct 01 2012, 22,772 reads