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...
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. ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...