A favorite image in many Buddhist traditions is of the bodhisattva who ferries people from the world of delusion, across the sea of suffering, to a home of wisdom and compassion. The word “bodhisattva” means awakened being, or in today’s language, a “woke” person. To be awake is to be aware of the multiple layers of narrative that run through…
Carried out to its utmost limit, Satyagraha is independent of pecuniary or other material assistance; certainly, even in its elementary form, of physical force or violence. Indeed, violence is the negation of this great spiritual face, which can only be cultivated or wielded by those who will entirely eschew violence. It is a force that may be used by individuals…
This is part of a series on solitude by Jennifer Stitt, a historian of modern American thought, culture, and politics working on her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This piece on walking and solitude is the second of five short essays that will be published monthly. Read the first installment, “Listening to Silence, Hearing the Unspeakable” here. Six years…
Where would you find yourself if your need to be right and your addiction to certainty dissolved into a willingness to listen? Who would you be, then? And who would we be together—as a country, as a planet—if each one of us actually knew what listening was and how to do it because we had, over the course of our lives, been deeply listened to?
A sense of beauty is a rigorous, perhaps even objective, foundation for environmental ethics. Our human aesthetic judgment integrates many strands of experience: intellect, emotion, bodily senses, and all we know from our interactions with others, both human and non-human others. From this integration, we understand the good. Of course, an aesthetic sense is subject to the whims of desire,…
Around the world, citizens are arising with new energy for transformation. The Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements were two recent manifestations of this. People are demanding that they participate and lead in their own governance and development. It is time to move beyond the control of corporatocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, patriarchy, and militarism. Citizens are capable of governing…
If we look at the political and social conditions on this planet, all indicators point out that the days ahead will be difficult ones. We are experiencing what Isaac Asimov called “the angry planet.” However, I believe it is not only an angry planet, but a sick and suffering planet. Since the beginning of the Renaissance period, Western civilization has…
During the winter season a few years ago, 108 inches of snow fell in Boston, breaking the record for the most seasonal snowfall in recorded history. And this snow, it did not melt. We watched it drift into six-foot banks in our backyard, burying our dwarf Japanese maple entirely. Day after day dawned frigid, stinging our cheeks as soon as…