Simple Was Satisfying
Susan Bauer-Wu
The cultivation of mindfulness is key to waking up and fully experiencing simple pleasures. Simple pleasures are small things that don’t cost much, if anything at all. Some examples (among my pe...
Fullness On The Other Side Of Emptiness
Mirabai Starr
In many mystical traditions, across the spectrum of the world’s religions, we find a paradoxical teaching that says the most reliable means for knowing God is by unknowing. Christian mysticism u...
The Weighing
Jane Hirshfield
The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally...
The Laughter Thief
Soren Gordhamer
I read recently that the average 4-year-old laughs about 300 times a day. The average 40-year-old? Only four. So why do so many of us lose our laughter as we grow older? Yes, adulthood comes wit...
Vows Of Active Hope
Joanna Macy
On the last afternoon of a two-week intensive workshop, Joanna Macy was out walking and met a young monk from the retreat centre hosting the event. "Well," he said, "I expect now on you...
Imagination Is Not Day-Dreaming
Phoebe Tickell
Imagination is a superpower. Every single change in society started in somebody’s imagination — or in a small group’s collective imagination — from women getting the vote, to t...
Love Itself Was Gone
Leonard Cohen
The light came through the window Straight from the sun above And so inside my little room There plunged the rays of love In streams of light I clearly saw The dust you seldom see Out of which...
No Fingerprint On The Infinite
Andrea Gibson
Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off of me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite. ...
When Solutions Are Technologies Of Avoidance
Bayo Akomolafe
When things don't go according to plan, when the laboratory explodes into splinters of glass, smoke, and worthy intentions, it is very usual to subject the errant event to an analysis of what went...
Wisdom Of Rocks
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Let us linger on the wisdom of rocks—not as inert masses but as carriers of time, witnesses to cycles far beyond human comprehension. The rocks are not “wise” in the human sense of d...
Remember Ourselves As A Murmuration
Zach Bush
The murmuration of birds is one of my favorite phenomena in nature—an occurrence where Starlings flock together with up to hundreds of thousands at once to create complex patterns in motion. ...
Letting The Hero Die
Paul Weinfield
Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that, the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with b...
The Willing Gift
Author Unknown
The sun was soft that morning, and the breeze carried the smell of wet earth. Birds flew low over the fields as Acharya Vinoba Bhave walked barefoot along a dusty village path. He walked slowly&mda...