For the past couple of months, we’ve been participating in Essex Farm’s innovative CSA experiment. Curious about its origins, we’ve been reading The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love, ex-journalist/city girl Kristin Kimball’s tale of her unexpected transformation into a farmer and partner of Mark Kimball, whose vision drove Essex from the start. He is a man after our own hearts (and hers, after some wild adventures)…
Read MoreJapanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has taken Japan and Europe by storm. And it seems, it is in the US as well. What sets Ms. Kondo off from other decluterring experts is her underlying philosophy that dictates the work of “tidying”. An…
Read MoreRecently, it feels like no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to erase the ominous “f” word, spelled out across my interior blackboard in capital letters: F A I L U R E. My insomniac “fail” rumination was interrupted at dawn when a photograph flew over my e-transom, jolting me out of my…
Read MoreWhen we launched our new Friends with Benefits subscription programs, a number of people asked if we chose $18 as amount for a yearly subscription because 18 is a lucky number. “No, we didn’t.” we said, Tell us more!”.
Read MoreBirds have been much on my mind since revisiting Anne Lamotts’ inspirational book, Bird by Bird, on Improvised Life, especially now that the New Year has come and gone, scattering in its wake a litter of broken resolutions. How is it possible that so many thoughtfully-strategized good intentions have fled my newly-reordered spiritual house already, and the year yet a month old?
Read MoreIn this quiet, yet curiously fast-moving 7-minute video portrait, Chudrun explains what led her away from a life of celebrity, drugs and materialism at the host of BBC’s Top Gear to one of reflection, compassion and ritual as a Buddhist nun. Her leap onto what might seem an opposite path and the willingness to change is at the very heart of improvising.
Read MoreThe science of Idiotism was introduced to the Western world more than 90 years ago, in 1922, by the famous philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. At first, according to his students, it seemed to be simply an amusing mealtime entertainment, resulting in a cosmic degree of drunkenness. But soon it became “perhaps his strangest and most innovative method of…
Read MoreAs a spring snow storm sweeps through the midwest, it seems fitting to post these wondrous snow paintings by artist Simon Beck along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France. He creates the beautiful geometric patterns, some as large as 3 soccer fields, by plodding through the snow in snowshoes for hours at a time. How long the…
Read MoreCara de Silva sent alerted us to Smithsonian’s wonderful Jane Goodall Reveals Her Lifelong Fascination With…Plants?. Here is a particularly illuminating chunk, about a tree (which has come to be one of the most commented on subjects by our readers). If you don’t have time to read it all at once, it’s worth bookmarking: Just…
Read MoreThe practice of making a retreat – taking oneself OUT of everyday life to withdraw and reflect – has been around for eons. It is part of many spiritual traditions, and to our thinking, should be a requirement for everyone (and paid for by insurance – ha) , so filled as our lives are with…
Read More(Video link here.) Yesterday, we posted a thought-provoking sign we’d seen that we were mulling: “The work you do while procastinating is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life”. Curious that at the same time, Brain Pickings was posting about procastination also, in a completely different way. Their post featured a…
Read MoreIf you look closely at this image, you’ll discover that it is composed of the Buddhist Prayer for Peace, each letter cut from the Methodist Hymnal. It is the work of artist Meg Hitchcock, who letter-by-letter, cuts up sacred texts and reformulates them into others, creating a compelling and transcendent fusion.
Read MoreWe’ve been looking for an excuse to post Koko’s Earth Control, a beautiful, dark 1928 cartoon by Max & Dave Fleischer about the end of the world, since we stumbled on it right after the recent apocalypse predicted by millionaire evangelist Harold Camping didn’t happen. We figured it was a moot point. But according to Yahoo…
Read MoreCherry, apple blossoms and dogwood will soon be making their appearance, so Spring is a fine time to practice ikebana, the minimalist art of flower arranging that originated in Japan. As with wabi-sabi, although it looks simple, it has complex philosophical, even spiritual underpinnings. Ikebana” is from the Japanese ikeru (生ける?, “to place, to arrange,…
Read MoreWe had no idea we could laugh at will until we read The Laughing Guru in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Madan Kataria promotes Laughter Yoga, which he says can be a cure for all sorts of physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. We have a few of those, so we thought…
Read MoreWe love David Galbraith’s post about his search for EXACTLY where the World Wide Web got started. He spoke to visionary computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who wrote the original proposal and early coding for “the global hypertext product that would allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext document”. If you enlarge…
Read MoreMy friend Steve Hamm is a Senior Writer at Business Week who blogs about innovation, globalization and leadership in his blog Globespotting. He recently had the good fortune to interview the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader whose words and practice resonate globally, especially in the West. Steve asked the Dalai Lama a number of…
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