Reading Archive (Community Building)
Unattainable Goal of Peace
Aung San Suu Kyi
[Nobel Lecture, June 16, 2012] The peace of our world is indivisible. As long as negative forces are getting the better of positive forces anywhere, we are all at risk. It may be questioned whether a...
We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For
Hopi Elders
You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered… Where are you living? Wha...
The Energy of Being Real
Mark Nepo
"Mana" is a term originally used in a Polynesian and Melanesian cultures to describe an extraordinary power or force residing in a person or an object, a sort of spiritual electricity that charges any...
Lessons From An Accident
Grace Dammann
For the last forty years, I have been a somewhat compulsive caregiver. However, I found an appropriate niche in medical school, and have happily practiced medicine for the last twenty-five years. For ...
Habits Of The Heart
Parker Palmer
“Habits of the heart” (a phrase coined by Alexis de Tocqueville) are deeply ingrained ways of seeing, being, and responding to life that involve our minds, our emotions, our self-images, o...
Pilgrimage to Nonviolence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violen...
A Circle of Trust
Parker Palmer
Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In t...
Do You Remember Your Song?
Alan Cohen
When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recog...
Communication As Mutual Entrainment
Ursula LeGuin
Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watc...
Where We Are Is Our Temple
Jack Kornfield
Expanding our spiritual practice is actually a process of expanding our heart, of widening our circle of insight and compassion to gradually include the whole of our life. Being on earth here in human...
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
Alice Walker
I am the youngest of eight siblings. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty, environmental...
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...
Love Is Not An Emotion
Barbara Frederickson
Love, defined as micro moments of positivity resonance, may thus be the most generative and consequential of all positive emotions. By virtue of being a single state, distributed across and reverberat...
Song Of The Birds
David G. Haskell
For millennia, the language of birds has called us to cross divides. In the Qur’an, Solomon received a bounty and blessing when he was given the language of birds. Job exhorts us to hear the wis...
In Eyes Of God, We're All Minorities
Barbara Brown Taylor
Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity school, told a reporter shortly before his death in 2008, "In the eyes of God, we are all minorities. That’s a rude awakening for many, who...