Reading Archives (2015)

Why Are We Running Out of Time?

Jacob Needleman

Technology itself is not the cause of our problem of time. Its influence on our lives is a result, not a cause -- the result of an unseen accelerating process taking place in ourselves, in our inner b...

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110K reads, 2 comments

No Better Place to Meet Yourself

Moussa Ag Assarid

Moussa Ag Assarid (MAA): I don’t know my age. I was born in the Sahara desert, with no papers. I was born in a nomadic camp of Touaregs, between Timbuktu and Gao, in the north of Mali. ...

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69K reads, 23 comments

Can Beauty Save the World?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Dostoyevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a ...

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19K reads, 6 comments

The Trick is to Keep Seeing

Pema Chodron

(The Tibetan word shenpa) is usually translated “attachment,” but a more descriptive translation might be “hooked.” When shenpa hooks us, we’re likely to get stuck. We co...

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34K reads, 3 comments

Every Seed Carries a Secret

Angela Fischer

Every seed carries a secret. We will never come to fully know this secret, because it belongs to the mystery of creation. Yet we can learn again what hundreds of generations did before us, namely t...

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26K reads, 5 comments

I Awaken Before Dawn

Helen Moore

I awaken before dawn, go into the kitchen and fix a cup of tea. I light the candle and sit in its glow on the meditation cushion. Taking my cup in both hands, I lift it to my Lord and give thanks. ...

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15K reads, 8 comments

Time is a Season

David Whyte

Most traditional human cultures have seen the hours of the days in the same way as they have encountered the seasons of the year: not as clear lines drawn across our experience, but as an advancing qu...

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19K reads, 9 comments

Organic Gift

Parker Palmer

Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side - had made her one of my heroes. So i...

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23K reads, 23 comments

Be with the Magic

Steve Karlin

When animals look out of their eyes they don’t see what we see. Some of them see ultraviolet light, some of them can see very clearly for hundreds of yards, some of them can’t see further ...

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15K reads, 7 comments

Death is Life's Door

Paul Fleischman

(Note from the Editors: 'Sitting' here refers to seated meditation) Sitting enabled me to see, and compelled me to acknowledge, the role that death had already played, and still continues t...

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24K reads, 12 comments

Lessening the Power of Negative Emotions

The Dalai Lama

I profoundly believe that real spiritual change comes about not by merely praying or wishing that all negative aspects of our minds disappear and all positive aspects blossom. It is only by our concer...

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29K reads, 10 comments

We Are What We Choose to Be

Dawna Markova

On rare and precious moments, someone will tell me about when he used to play the saxophone or when she used to dream about opening a halfway house for abused women or when he thought he could mentor ...

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30K reads, 8 comments

Humility Really Cannot be Considered a Virtue

Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Ego and pride are closely related, almost synonymous effects born of the same cause, ignorance of the relationship of the individualized sense of I with the world. (...) Although, graced by free will,...

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15K reads, 9 comments

Compassion: an Objective Form of Empathy

Jeff Weiner

As the Dalai Lama explains, if you are walking along a trail and come along a person who is being crushed by a boulder, an empathetic reaction would result in you feeling the same sense of crushing su...

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26K reads, 8 comments

Awareness is Profound Interest

J. Krishnamurti

The man who wants to improve himself can never be aware, because improvement implies condemnation and the achievement of a result; whereas in awareness there is observation without condemnation, witho...

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33K reads, 13 comments

The Gift of New Eyes

Rachel Naomi Remen

Many years ago, I had just given a talk on the messages, both positive and negative, that we convey to our patients without our awareness; sometimes with words but often with just our tone of voice, o...

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29K reads, 5 comments

Love Like Water

Mark Nepo

Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open. Like water, the miracle of love is that ...

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35K reads, 11 comments

The Power of Art

John F. Kennedy

Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who ...

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20K reads, 6 comments

True Splendor of Science

Alan Watts

The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it ma...

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33K reads, 4 comments

Choosing Suffering over Safety

Bonnie Rose

“Can you walk, sweetheart?” I say these words to our dog Stella who is dying. It’s time for breakfast and if she walks from our bed to the kitchen, maybe that will be a sign. Maybe s...

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22K reads, 14 comments