Inspiration: Essays & Musings

Interbeing – Clouds In Each Paper
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the...

Homo Empathicus: the Evolution of Empathy
This illustrated talk by Jeremy Rifkin explains some of the neuroscience of empathy:

Sustaining the long note
From filmmaker Michael More: "This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. In those cases, we were...

Burnt Flower Soup
Twice a month the peaceCENTER used to have an evening potluck/staff meeting/re-centering and Narjis would bring a crockpot of homemade soup, often made with produce from her community garden. "What is it this time?" I asked her, greedily. "Burnt flower soup -- an old...

Tube or telescope?
These two quotations seem to go together somehow. Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, using the analogy of a rolled up newspaper, a tube, to explain the limitations of our vision. And then Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Astrophysicist, whose world is expanded by looking...

Essay: Small Things With Great Love
by Susan Ives There's a meme going around that says, “Of all the things I learned in elementary school, avoiding cooties was the last one I expected to use.” Are cooties still a thing? The kids from the old neighborhood – all of us in our 60s now – gave that a thumbs...

Thich Nhat Hanh: See the Universe in a Sunflower
"I live in Plum Village, in the Dordogne region of southwest France, an area known for its sunflowers. But people who come to Plum Village in April do not see any sunflowers. They hear people saying that there are many sunflowers around, but they cannot see them...

Bryan Stevenson: How to Save the World
Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won acclaim...

Hoping for interreligious dialogue to become way of life
BELIEF by Rajam Ramamurthy, M.D. As a 3-year-old girl in India, I received letters from my father, who was studying mining engineering in the U.S. In one, he described how newspapers were sold in the 1940s by being piled in a corner. He said nobody took one without...

VIDEO: Compassion Action SA Lab with Ben O’Dell
San Antonio Faith-Based Initiative's casaLAB event on Jan. 29, 2019, featured Ben O'Dell, Faith Liaison with the Department of Health & Human Services in D.C. The casaLABs - Compassion Action San Antonio Labs - explore proven ways to become more compassionate...

Busy, Busy, Busy
It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about? Henry David Thoreau Not causing harm requires staying awake. Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain...

Diderot: The Danger of Setting Oneself Against the Law
At Half Price Books the other day I picked up a copy of five short pieces by Denis Diderot, the 18th Century French philosopher of the Enlightenment: This is Not a Story and other stories, a new translation by P.N. Furbank. (Oxford University Press, 1991) The last...

Blame it on the Cupcakes
In Karen Armstrong's book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she quotes Confucius, who said that the family is the first school of compassion. I've been thinking lately about how that applied to my family. Three things that I learned when I was three — and my...

Civil Discourse
One question that always, always, always arises when we are out and about talking about compassion concerns the anger in public discourse. How can we re-learn how to discuss important and controversial issues without resorting to shouting and name calling? Christopher...

Love Your Neighbor: Funny & Profound 1952 Video
This clever, Academy Award-winning 1952 Canadian short had me laughing out loud. Then thinking. When the flower first appeared I thought the flower was a dandelion and the neighbors might start arguing over whether it should be pulled or remain — a battle we sometimes...