Reading Archives (2018)
My Word Of The Year
Nancy Gibbs
My word of the year is listen. It’s one of those words whose meaning is in its music. Listen is a quiet word, that half swallowed L and diffident I and softly hissing S. It defies the clamoro...
Who Is My Neighbor?
Ivan Illich
Some thirty years ago, I went into sermons from the early third century into the nineteenth century dealing with this story of the Samaritan, and I found out that most preachers, when they comment on ...
How Observation Changes Relationships
Vimala Thakar
When we sit in silence what do we do? We sit and observe the voluntary and involuntary activities of the body and mind. Slowly the voluntary activities come to an end, but the involuntary activities...
Three Stages Of Perceiving Impermanence
Shinzen Young
Impermanence is just appreciating the normal changing-ness of each experience at deeper levels of poignancy. One way to think about this is in terms of three aspects of impermanence: the trivial, the ...
The New And Ancient Story Of Interbeing
Charles Eisenstein
Why does the sun shine? A random result of coalescing gases igniting nuclear fusion? Or is it in order to give its light and warmth to Life? Why does the rain fall? Is it the senseless product of blin...
Preparing For The Extraordinary: An Essential Practice
Alan Briskin
Preparing for the extraordinary is one of the [...] essential practices of collective wisdom. It requires clear intention and mindful preparation for achieving a greater felt sense of connection...
The Root Of The Root Of Your Self
Rumi
Don’t go away, come near. Don’t be faithless, be faithful. Find the antidote in the venom. Come to the root of the root of yourself. Molded of clay, yet kneaded from the substance o...
Uniform Corn-Rows In High-Tech Isolation
Robin Wall Kimmerer
I live in the lush green farm country of upstate New York, in a town that likely has more cows than people. Most everyone I know grows something: apples, hops, grapes, potatoes, berries, and lots of c...
Attention Is Inseparable From Interrogation
Michel de Salzmann
Our attention is much more than we generally think. It is much more than a simple mental or cerebral mechanism. It concerns our whole being. If its potentialities are far from being fully actualized i...
No Rush, No Dawdle: The Secret Of Proper Timing
Tom Maxwell
The present is truly the only place we exist. What we call the past is a construct of memory, the recollection of which constitutes a present experience. According to author Alan Watts, the futur...
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...
Intentions And Effects
Gary Zukav
Have you ever wondered why things happen the way they do in your life? Have you ever considered that the creation of your experiences, like the creation of everything else, is governed by the law of c...
You Must Shout From The Heart
Ken Wilber
The alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: Those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain ter...
​Perspective
Aaron Zehah
A poor man lived with his wife and six children in a very small one-room house. They were always getting in each other's way and there was so little space they could hardly breathe!Finally the man...
The World Mirrors The Soul And The Soul Mirrors The World
Alan Watts
If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed, and let your thoughts run on, let your mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions and without raising any kind o...
The Work Of Love Is To Love
Mark Nepo
My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or bee...
The Question Of Being
Adyashanti
Above the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi were written the words, “Know yourself.” Jesus came along and added a sense of urgency and consequence to the ancient idea when he said, “I...
Sense Of Self Is An Essential Skill Of Mind
Paul Fleischman
Many articles in the Western press have confused the Buddha’s idea of “anatta,” the absence of an eternal soul, with the idea that meditation should rid you of your ordinary sense of...
Bedrock On Which We All Stand
J. Krishnamurti
Do you realize, sir, that you are the world and the world is you? The world is not separate from you and me. There is a common thread of relationship weaving us all together. Deep down we are all tota...
Fueled By Love
Timber Hawkeye
When a parent sees their child is about to be attacked by someone, it doesn't matter how peaceful and calm they normally are, most parents would still resort to violence (or much wo...