Reading Archives (2020)
Four Stages Of Groundedness
John J. Prendergast
The ground is both a metaphor and a felt sense. As a metaphor, it means to be in touch with reality. As a felt sense, it refers to feeling our center of gravity low in the belly and experiencing a dee...
An Unusual Gift From My Grandfather
Rachel Naomi Remen
Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought, dolls and books and stuffed animals. My dolls and stuffed animals...
The Moment We Encounter True Happiness
Ilie Cioara
The moment we encounter true Happiness, we are in fact outside time and space. The “ego” – with its intrinsic duality – has completely disappeared. In that moment, the Sacre...
A 13-Year-Old In A Museum
Nancy Collier
On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art with a friend and her daughter, meandering through the museum’s exhibits, I was struck by how often my friend’s 13-year-old daughter asked us ...
Parliament Of Subconscious Minds
John Yates
You may object to the idea that your sense of being a self is a mere construct. After all, it feels very real. How can we reconcile this powerful sense of self with the idea that we're just a coll...
Time Confetti And The Broken Promise Of Leisure
Ashley Whillans
It’s true: we have more time for leisure than we did fifty years ago. But leisure has never been less relaxing, mostly because of the disintermediating effects of our screens. Technology saves u...
Half A Pomegranate
Brian Conroy
Early one morning, the Buddha and his disciples set off on an alms round. He announced that on that day all of the offerings they received would be given to the poor. The community sat beneat...
The Three Narratives
Joanna Macy
When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we can see them more clearly and choose which one we want to get b...
How Caterpillar Turns Into A Butterfly
Norie Huddle
If you kneel down on the ground and look at a caterpillar very carefully, you'd probably think he's a pretty nice furry fellow with a rather boring life. And you would be right. BU...
The Game Is To Be Where You Are
Ram Dass
When I was born I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane, it was this body, my spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism which is my pre-frontal lobe and all the brain that helps with coordinati...
Now I Become Myself
May Sarton
Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,...
We're Voting With Our Attention
Leah Pearlman
At the base of the brainstem there is a bundle of neurons called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS acts as a kind of bouncer for the brain. Our senses take in waaaaay too information for ...
Substituting One Cruelty For Another
Anthony de Mello
Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They're not coming from love, they're coming from negative feelings. They're coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injust...
A Route Back To Wonder
Fabiana Fondevila
“What is a sunset without clouds? A circle that crosses a straight line,” says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, creator of an original form of activism and o...
Learning How To Think
William Deresiewicz
Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s colleg...
Movie Of Me, Now Playing 24 Hours A Day
Krishna Das
What keeps us away from the gentle rain of grace? It's our endless obsession, all day long, with I, me, mine. We wake up in the morning and start writing "the movie of Me": What am I goi...
The Broken Piano In 1975
Marti Leimbach
My favourite piece of music is Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, an hour-long piece improvised, as all of Jarrett’s concerts are, on a solo piano in front of a live audience. You know the...
Glory And Terror Of It
Irina Tweedie
The realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but mysteriously forms an integral part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity, in the v...
The Wisdom Of Uncertainty
Jack Kornfield
One day Ajahn Chah held up a beautiful Chinese tea cup, “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.&...
The Central Commitment Of The Creative Life
Mary Oliver
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always -- these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of th...