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...
Why DIY Devotion Doesn't Work
Sumit Nagar
We are not seekers anymore—we are shoppers, not always really shopping, perhaps just window shopping. In an age where attention spans have shrunk, just enough to handle the brevity ...
Dark Side Of Empathy
Michael Ventura
Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that und...
There Is Faith In Humor
Pope Francis
Life inevitably has its sadnesses, which are part of every path of hope and every path toward conversion. But it is important to avoid wallowing in melancholy at all costs, not to let it embitter the ...
Circles And Dots
Ameeta Kaul
The teacher drew a large circle on a paper pasted to a board. Then he turned to his students and said, This is the great circle of being. Nobody and nothing is outside it. The students listene...
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...
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...
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...
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...