can forget Maria at the opening of The Sound of Music, when she goes to the mountains, twirling in a grand circle of life and joy? "I go to the hills, when my heart is lonely--I know I will hear, what I've heard before, my heart will be blessed with the sound of music, and I'll sing once more." A lonely heart, fear, stress over the political state of the world, ill health, job worries, all these can create anxiety that can drag down our spirits. When the unexpected happens, we always have our inner core strength; we can cultivate that from our connection to the earth, to God, and our relationships with people as well as animals and plants. John Muir says, “... posted on Aug 12 2017 (15,679 reads)

Kolbert and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard each had big books in 2015. Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction—takes an unflinching look at the history of extinction and the different ways that human beings are negatively impacting life on the planet. Ricard’s Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World explores global challenges, such as climate change, and argues that compassion and altruism are the keys to creating a better future. Together these books—filled with grief and hope—feel like two sides of a coin, each necess... posted on Jun 19 2017 (15,764 reads)

Brother David, I’d like to bring up a question that has been on my mind for some time. It has to do with what we call the heart. The heart is a great symbol in spiritual life and in Christianity especially. But the fact is that I don’t know what the heart is. When people talk about the heart they seem to do so in a number of ways. In a general sense, it seems to refer to the feelings; at other times, to love and devotion. It also refers to courage and faithfulness (as when a fighter is said to have heart). And sometimes it refers to one’s basic attitude toward life (as when we say, he had a change of heart). Probably there are other meanings, and probably they ar... posted on Jul 17 2017 (10,855 reads)

by Frank McKenna We long to find more joy in our daily pursuits even though life has taught us it’s not so easy. New discoveries in neuroscience offer insight into how we can develop a brighter state of heart and mind. The First Step on the path to finding happiness is to open the mind to alternative ways of thinking about life. While much of our focus in the West has been toward comfort and the acquisition of worldly goods, in Eastern countries your status as a human being traditionally comes first. So instead of being greeted by “What are you up to these days?” or “How’s it going with your to-do list?” you may be asked in Muslim cou... posted on Aug 29 2017 (19,869 reads)

conversation with wildlife educator Steve Karlin In 1980, Steve Karlin, a former National Parks Service ranger, founded Wildlife Associates, dedicated to educating people about animals and the environment. Now situated on 120 acres on the coast of northern California, Wildlife Associates provides a home for more than fifty wild animals who are no longer equipped to survive in the wild, and brings educational programs to about 100,000 students in the San Francisco Bay Area each year. Recently, filmmakers Anne Veh and Rajesh Krishnan made a film, Teach Me to Be Wild, about Wildlife Associates and Steve Karlin. During groundwork for the film, filmmaker and photographer Phil Borges ... posted on Oct 24 2017 (10,753 reads)

one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, “involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.” Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belie... posted on Jan 8 2018 (11,043 reads)

by David Hockney A choral serenade to the building blocks of language starring Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Amis, Doris Lessing, John Updike, and more titans of literature. In the final years of his life, the English poet, novelist, essayist, and social justice advocate Sir Stephen Spender undertook a playful and poignant labor of love — he asked artist David Hockney to draw each letter of the alphabet, then invited twenty-nine of the greatest writers in the English language to each contribute a short original text for one of the letters. The result was the 1991 out-of-print treasure Hockney’s Alphabet (public library) &m... posted on Dec 16 2017 (6,946 reads)

Brown and her husband, Dr. Rob Ramey, are among these researchers. For the last twelve years, Laura and Rob have spent long periods among the desert elephants of the Northern Kunene region of Namibia, monitoring their movements, feeding patterns, and family relationships. …. “I always feel I am going to visit some of my relatives.” Laura says. “We’ve come to know these individual elephants and we’ve watched them through the different stages of their life. It’s just like getting to know a person, because you see how they change and develop. Family is the most important thing to them, especially to the females. And seeing the way they confron... posted on Mar 25 2018 (16,581 reads)

of mystery. The tale was so unlikely that later my friends joked that perhaps I’d dreamed it.      The red napkin, tablecloth, and candlesticks all belonged to Mrs. Cybulski (not her real name), a widow who had lived down the street as long as I’d been in the neighborhood, about twenty years.      Except to water her yard, she didn’t go out much. And when she did, she stayed near the house, as if the tether fastening her to life had retracted, pulling her toward an eternal home.      One day, I noticed a full-size dumpster in front of her bungalow. I assumed it was for yard debris or trash from som... posted on Apr 1 2018 (1,119 reads)

the need to move slowly through this time of year.  If we rush through the change in seasons in nature and in our lives, we will find ourselves missing that edge between winter and spring with its important lessons to teach. What is the natural purpose and symbolism in this time of thawing?  It is in that place between despair and hope that we find the beauty of the thaw. It is where Creative Life, or God if you will, is especially potent in us.  Here is the pregnant place of life where we may come alive in the emptiness of our longing for what we have lost and what we have not yet opened ourselves to receive.  The thaw is a fertile place of possibility.  In seas... posted on Mar 25 2021 (12,815 reads)

Day of Happiness. This event grew out of a United Nations resolution - affirming happiness as a fundamental human goal - and suggesting that we should approach economic growth in a way that promotes well-being for everyone. Social systems and institutions have a role to play in our happiness, and that’s evident in this year’s World Happiness Report. Researchers ranked countries by their average happiness levels and found, for example, that GDP, life expectancy, freedom, and corruption make a difference. In the ranking, Finland, Norway, and Denmark came out on top. The United States dropped four spots to number 18. That’s the big pic... posted on Aug 8 2018 (23,333 reads)

it’s almost always because they have some type of unresolved trauma that is being held in the body. And so the key, what we found really works for people, is to help identify the source of trauma, to help them find ways to release it for themselves that are safe and comfortable and helps them to expand their body experience. We’ve been very successful [in helping] those people move out of pain, or at least to a place where it’s manageable and they can live a good life. TS: Help me understand how physical pain relates to past trauma. That’s not obvious to me. PL: Well first, I want to add one other thing: pain in itself becomes traumatic. ... posted on May 26 2018 (21,614 reads)

is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” wrote Alice James — William and Henry James’s brilliant sister — as she modeled how to live fully while dying. “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rilke wrote a generation later in contemplating the supreme existential art of befriending our finitude — that ultimate assent to what Emily Dickinson had termed “the drift called ‘the infinite.'” More than a century after James, Rilke,... posted on Jun 10 2018 (10,250 reads)

has been suggested that the linear theory of time is related to the experience of time in the Northern (and Southern) hemispheres, where it is marked by seasonal changes: life begins in the spring, matures in the summer, and dies in the fall, to begin a new cycle the following spring. Bali, however, lies in the region of tropical rain forests near the Equator where there are no reasons to synchronize the growth schedules of all livings things. Instead, the processes of growth and decay proceed at different rates all over the forest, all the time. A flower is on a short, rapid growth cycle; a tree, a much longer one; a rock, longer still. The cycles mesh in this world, the Middle World, to... posted on Jul 3 2018 (6,868 reads)

most regretful people on earth,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in contemplating the artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life, “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.” That is what Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926), another great poet with a philosophical bent and uncommon existential insight, explored a century earlier in the third letter collected in his indispensable Letters to a Young Poet (public library) — the wellspring of wisdom on art and life, which Rilke bequ... posted on Jul 8 2018 (11,445 reads)

occur in life. Challenges arise for all of us. The beauty of it all is that these struggles are something which, if attended to, can deeply connect us. Think for a moment about whatever may currently be bringing some difficulty in your life. Perhaps these challenges are manifesting in any or all of the physical, relational, survival or emotional realms. Your experience is perhaps not very easy, but I do have good news for you! You aren’t alone. Some of us have moments in time when everything may seem to be on track, but that is a pretty rare occurrence for most everyone. The universality of this “affliction” hit me while driving recently on Highway 1 ... posted on Sep 6 2018 (9,858 reads)

about in your columns. She happens to be my mother. I highly recommend coming to tea at her home and meeting her.  Will you come? Thursdays are Salon- "cultural exchange through conversation"  and tea is at 4 daily. Sincerely, Anna Rainville The email was forwarded to a few ServiceSpace volunteers, among them Anne Veh, who responded with, "Betty Peck was my kindergarten teacher! She is one of those mentors that I think of so often in my life. I would love to join a group for tea, and an interview. My heart is bursting. I would love to be of service." And so it happened that within the span of a couple of weeks a dozen Se... posted on Sep 29 2018 (9,673 reads)

This Indian Nun Witnessed a Woman’s Murder, She Saved Thousands More from Domestic Violence As India honors the first anniversary of the Delhi gang rape that rocked the nation, YES! talks with Sister Lucy Kurien—whose life was changed forever when she saw a young woman set on fire. If you sit in the slums on the outskirts of Pune in the evening, you will hear shouting and yelling from all sorts of places, Sister Lucy Kurien says of her home in South India. Much of the fighting is fueled by alcohol, and sometimes it explodes into bruises, scars, and broken bones. "The women don’t even retaliate." It's a sound the Catholic nun from Kerala has ... posted on Oct 22 2018 (6,819 reads)

alchemical journey into the heart of things was just an old story our fathers, groping in the thicket of their own obliviousness, told their children to get them to sit still. Now, we had fire—we had the tale of an uneasy tryst between a man, a woman, and an apple to help us understand our unflattering origins. Thanks to science, to true knowledge, we had the account of an inexplicable explosion at the beginning of time, the explosion that began this feverish rush of madness we call life. In the grand scheme of things, there was no room for Obatala and his golden rope. There was no room for my people. There was no room for me. I must have understood my teachers supremely well ... posted on Dec 27 2018 (6,240 reads)

revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. He knows, from the inside, the web of Wall Street and Silicon Valley; think tanks, foundations, and convenings from TED to the Aspen Institute; and book and speaking circuits and media that confer power. I had interviewed Anand before and wanted to draw out the generative aspect of a confrontational and thought-provoking message he’s now bringing about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win” and the moral compromises in cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us. What follows ... posted on Feb 22 2019 (4,854 reads)