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https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/video/musical-performance

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Give yourself permission to rest and receive lullabies for your heart.

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This is a link to Plum Village, the meditation and retreat community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. Here is the tangerine meditation we mentioned today. It's beautifully simple but allows us to see how we are modes of expression of the universe, of the Great Mystery of Being.

https://plumvillage.org/articles/tangerine-of-mindfulness/

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This is a story that Siddhartha Gautama, popularly known as the Buddha, told the first time to children when he had just founded a Great Way, the Path of Awareness. Please enjoy an excerpt of it from the book Old Path White Cloud.

Drawing by Sr. Trang Tuyet Hoa

Siddhartha quietly gestured for the children to sit back up and he said,
"You are all intelligent children and I am sure you will be able to understand and practice the things I will share with you. The Great Path I have discovered is deep and subtle, but anyone willing to apply his or her heart and mind can understand and follow it.

"When you children peel a tangerine, you can eat it with awareness or
without awareness. What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating the tangerine. You fully experience its lovely fragrance and sweet taste. When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling the tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in your mouth, you know that you are removing a slice and putting it in your mouth; when you experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine, you are aware that you are experiencing the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine. The tangerine Nandabala offered me had nine sections. I ate each morsel in awareness and saw how precious and wonderful it was. I did not forget the tangerine, and thus the tangerine became something very real to me. If the tangerine is real, the person eating it is real. That is what it means to eat a tangerine in awareness.

"Children, what does it mean to eat a tangerine without awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you do not know that you are eating the tangerine. You do not experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine. When you peel the tangerine, you do not know that you are peeling the tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in your mouth, you do not know that you are removing a slice and putting it in your mouth; when you smell the fragrance or taste the tangerine, you do not know that you are smelling the fragrance and tasting the tangerine. Eating a tangerine in such a way, you cannot appreciate its precious and wonderful nature. If you are not aware that you are eating the tangerine, the tangerine is not real. If the tangerine is not real, the person eating it is not real either. Children, that is eating a tangerine without awareness.
"Children, eating the tangerine in mindfulness means that while eating the tangerine you are truly in touch with it. Your mind is not chasing after
thoughts of yesterday or tomorrow, but is dwelling fully in the present
moment. The tangerine is truly present. Living in mindful awareness means to live in the present moment, your mind and body dwelling in the very here and now.

"A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that
others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain that nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things that have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another. Children, our daily life is just like a tangerine. Just as a tangerine is comprised of sections, each day is comprised of twenty-four hours. One hour is like one section of tangerine. Living all twenty-four hours of a day is like eating all the sections of a tangerine. The path I have found is the path of living each hour of the day in awareness, mind and body always dwelling in the present moment. The opposite is to live in forgetfulness. If we live in forgetfulness, we do not know that we are alive. We do not fully experience life because our mind and body are not dwelling in the here and now."

Gautama looked at Sujata and said her name.
"Yes, Teacher?" Sujata joined her palms.
"Do you a think a person who lives in awareness will make many errors
or few?"
"Respected Teacher, a person who lives in awareness will make few
errors. My mother always tells me that a girl should pay attention to how she walks, stands, speaks, laughs, and works, in order to avoid thoughts, words, and actions that might cause sorrow to herself or others."
"Just so, Sujata. A person who lives in awareness knows what she is
thinking, saying, and doing. Such a person can avoid thoughts, words, and actions that cause suffering for herself and others.

"Children, living in awareness means to live in the present moment. One
is aware of what is taking place within one's self and in one's surroundings. One is in direct contact with life. If one continues to live in such a way, one will be able to deeply understand one's self and one's surroundings. Understanding leads to tolerance and love. When all beings understand one another, they will accept and love one another. Then there will not be much suffering in the world. What do you think, Svasti? Can people love if they are unable to understand?"

"Respected Teacher, without understanding love is most difficult. It
reminds me of something that happened to my sister Bhima. One night she cried all night long until my sister Bala lost her patience and spanked Bhima. That only made Bhima cry more. I picked Bhima up and sensed that she was feverish. I was sure her head ached from the fever. I called Bala and told her to place her hand on Bhima's forehead. When she did that, she understood at once why Bhima was crying. Her eyes softened and she took Bhima into her arms and sang to her with love. Bhima stopped crying even though she still had a fever. Respected Teacher, I think that was because Bala understood why Bhima was upset. And so I think that without understanding, love is not possible."

"Just so, Svasti! Love is possible only when there is understanding. And only with love can there be acceptance. Practice living in awareness, children, and you will deepen your understanding. You will be able to understand yourselves, other people, and all things. And you will have hearts of love. That is the wonderful path I have discovered."
Svasti joined his palms. "Respected Teacher, could we call this path the
'Path of Awareness'?"
Siddhartha smiled, "Surely. We can call it the Path of Awareness. I like
that very much. The Path of Awareness leads to perfect Awakening."
Sujata joined her palms to ask permission to speak. "You are the awakened one, the one who shows how to live in awareness. Can we call you 'the Awakened One'?"
Siddhartha nodded. "That would please me very much."
Sujata's eyes shone. She continued, "'Awaken' in Magadhi is pronounced
'budh.' A person who is awakened would be called 'Buddha' in Magadhi.
We can call you 'Buddha.'"
Siddhartha nodded. All the children were delighted.

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Looking Deeply / Tangerine of Mindfulness | Plum Village

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Show more quotes This is a story that Siddhartha Gautama, popularly known as the Buddha, told the first time to children when he had just founded a Great Way, the Path of Awareness. Please enjoy an excerpt of it from the book Old Path White Cloud.

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Books -The Comfort Crisis, I Wish I Were Here

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Beautiful piece on memories and food, as we get ready to celebrate with food during this July 4th weekend

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Beautiful piece on memories and food, as we get ready to celebrate with food during this July 4th weekend

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Gina Rae La Cerva revisits her grandfather's recipes, tracing the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration.

The truth didn't come out until after my grandpa had passed. It had been a family rumor among some of the cousins but unknown to most of us. Despite his meticulous record keeping about his own life and the boxes of memoirs he left behind, there was never any mention of it. I think he obscured the truth even from himself. On most days he was successful, even if it gnawed at the back of his neck. Even if it made him angry at times. I wonder if he ever uttered the Italian phrase acqua in bocca, which directly translates as "water in the mouth" but means "to keep a secret."

We called my grandfather Papa.

One night toward the end of his life, I Skyped with him. Even in his nineties, he still carried the poverties of his childhood. He was the second youngest child of eight, raised in a poor Italian family in New Orleans, and had lost his mother by the age of two. I'd heard stories that Papa used to steal bananas from the docks to prevent himself from starving. One of his earliest food memories was of his grandfather taking all the kids to the French Market, where it was customary to taste ingredients before purchasing. A grape, an olive, a slice of peach, a bit of cheese, a wedge of mandarin, or a bite of watermelon. The vendors knew the family and would give a small special treat, a lagniappe, with every food sale. This gift was traditional, but because the merchants knew the children were without a mother, they were often overgenerous.

Papa's father had been successful in the pasta machinery and macaroni production trades, then had a grocery store in the French Quarter. But when the Great Depression hit, he became a foreman in a sugar refinery and then eventually joined the family's illegal winemaking business, which led to at least two stints in jail. When Papa was twelve, they relocated to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the five of them lived in a four-room cold-water flat. In the kitchen there was a tub for weekly Saturday baths. It had a metal lid and was perfectly positioned between the stove and the sink, so it served as a food-prep area when not in use. The toilet was in the tenement hallway and shared by everyone on that floor. Papa's father died shortly after the move. They mourned him by wearing black for a full year.

Despite the many childhood hardships and upheavals, Papa went on to live a life that reminded me of a James Bond character. He was a spy in World War II, spoke five languages fluently, rode a motorcycle down the California coast, taught ballroom dancing for Arthur Murray studios in New York City and Australia, and even danced on TV during a regular weekly program. Only later did I find out about the numerous nervous breakdowns he'd suffered throughout his life.

Papa loved to cook and eat. He would send frequent emails detailing where he got his ingredients, praising the local farmers, the family grocers, the German-owned bakery, even the chef at the local Chinese restaurant who had "a Bronx sense of humor." To others, this record keeping of his life's details in emails and memoirs might seem obsessive, but for Papa they were a genuine form of gratitude. I don't think his childhood hunger ever fully left him.

Even a month before he died, he was still cooking himself delicious meals. "Am again sharing meals the only way I can these days," he wrote in an email above a picture of his dinner. There was often a caption to the photo describing the ingredients, as well as any memories it evoked. In one email he reminded us of what his grandmother whispered every time she kissed him goodbye: " Sciaddu miu "-Sicilian for "my breath." Such words of love are never an error.

He died among his memories-left the living as a man who had become his stories.

If you can't find your origins in food, you can sometimes find them in a name.

For many centuries, surnames identified people by their place, status, work, or parents. The name La Cerva translates as "of the doe." It was of noble status in Spain and meant we had been the "keepers of the game" who managed the royal lands of King Alfonso V of Aragon. Then in 1436, the king sent Raniero de la Cierva to Sicily to help fight a war. He established residence in Palermo, and a long line of descendants have remained there ever since. There is still at least one town, somewhere, named after us.

One of my great-great-grandmothers had the last name "Sempreviva," forever alive, which was given to her because she was a nameless foundling. She had been abandoned with her twin sister on a covenant doorstep. The twin died, but my great-great-grandmother fought to live. The nuns named her "Michelina" in honor of St. Michael, the warrior archangel.

The tradition of naming children to honor parents and parental siblings was a firm rule in our large family. "Rose" was an especially prevalent name, an abbreviated version of "Rosalia," the patron saint of Palermo. Saint Rosalia, "the little saint," was the deeply religious daughter of a Norman noble family in the twelfth century. In her later years, she retreated to a cave on Mount Pellegrino above the town and lived as a hermit until she died, alone, in her mid-thirties.

Almost five hundred years later, in 1624, a plague besieged Palermo. About a year into quarantine, the ghostly Saint Rosalia visited a sick woman. Then, according to legend, she appeared to a hunter. "I will show you where my bones are. You must bring them back and carry them in a procession around the city, circling it three times," she told him. The hunter climbed up the mountain and brought back the bones he found in the cave. After the procession of her remains, the plague disappeared.

It is traditional on September 4 to solemnly walk barefoot from Palermo up to Rosalia's cave on Mount Pellegrino. But first, in the summer, there are two days of feasting and ceremony in celebration. Pasta with wild fennel, sardines, pine nuts, and raisins. Little snails steamed with parsley and garlic. Boiled octopus and mussels. Pickled lupini beans, corn on the cob in their husks. Fincione, bread dough covered with onions, tomato sauce, anchovies, oregano, bread crumbs, and caciocavallo cheese. Snacks of pumpkin seeds, chickpeas, fava beans, and almonds-all roasted and lightly salted. Mountains of watermelons and prickly pear fruit on ice. Nougat with sesame seed; bomboloni, Sicilian doughnuts; and iris, fried dough stuffed with ricotta cream.

Sicily's culinary culture is based on migration and conquest. For millennia, the island lay at a global crossroads, which meant that its cuisine relied heavily on ingredients and flavor pairings brought from elsewhere. Saffron, capers, pistachios, and agrodolce sauce-a sweet, sticky, sour sauce made by reducing honey or sugar with vinegar and sometimes adding spicy fruits, herbs, or scallions.

The first arrivals after the volcanic island rose out of the sea were the indigenous Sicani, Elymians, and Sicels. Then came the Phoenicians (from what is now called Lebanon), followed by more people from Carthage (what is now called Tunisia), who themselves had mixed with a few North African Berbers. These invaders were followed by the Greeks and Romans. The Jews came next, not as invaders but as migrants, although no one is sure exactly when they arrived, as they did not announce themselves as loudly as those on a colonizing mission. They were followed by the Muslims who overthrew the Byzantine rulers, only to be challenged by the Berbers they'd once fought alongside. At some point even the Vikings arrived, along with the Vandals and the Ostrogoths (Germanic tribes). There were invasions of Normans, Swabians, the Angevins of France, the Aragonese, and the Austrians-and finally, those migrants who could simply be called mainland Italians.

I think of all those bodies full of bacteria, and their genetic recipes migrating from one person to the next. Across the country. The world. Across generations and time. My carnagione, my skin tone, darkens deeply with the summer sun. My wavy hair finds its curl in humid places. I inherited these traits from some Sicilian ancestor, lost to history but alive in my story today.

My family once owned a mountain home near Monreale. Perhaps it was on a clifftop overlooking the sea. Was it there that my great-great-grandmother first learned to make granita? This granulated sherbet was brought to the island by the Arab cultures and was popular among the Sicilian merchant class. The snow on volcanic Mount Etna was harvested, stored in stone grottoes, and then flavored with syrups made from rosewater, elderberry, lemon juice, or jasmine blossoms (these heavenly scented flowers were also brought by the Arabs). My great-great-grandmother took the granita tradition to New Orleans when she emigrated there in 1907. She used shaved ice, which was as close to snow as possible, and added fruit juices, herbs, or liquors. Her favorite flavoring was Coca-Cola, to which she was addicted, since it contained some cocaine in those days.

Although she was illiterate, my great-great-grandmother sure could talk. She spoke in Sicilian and broken English, usually a mix of both. I imagine she cast many protection spells, praying to the saints and laughing with the sinners, depending on the kind of help she needed. But it was through food that she spoke most eloquently. She blessed her family with every meal set down upon the table.

"So weird to be living through the end times," I half-jokingly said to my oldest friend the other night after we had been discussing the impending collapse of some vital global system, like the Amazon, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Arctic. Or how we'd just hit 500,000 dead in the United States from COVID.

"It's always been the end-times," he replied.

"Truly. Imagine living through the Plague in the Middle Ages," I said. "It killed more than a quarter of Europe's population."

I've known this friend since before we were born, when we were both in our mothers' wombs. I like to think we said hello through the ether at some prenatal yoga class or birthing group potluck. It was the early '80s, and Santa Fe was full of coastal hippies-Jews and Italians from Brooklyn and Westchester, Santa Barbara and San Francisco-who came to the desert, following one whim or another: a cult, a woman, a landscape. They sought a sense of freedom, outside the acculturation of the places where they had been raised. They migrated to new landscapes to see how they might adapt-from wet forests to dry deserts. They became creatures of the sun, leaving their damp shadows behind.

In nature, migration is a universal and general adaptation. In periods of sudden change-such as a fire, a flood, or famine-migration allows mobile species to escape the immediate danger and inhabit new areas. Other creatures, like birds and caribou, and even some humans, such as the Florida retiree, migrate with the rhythms of the seasons. These regular movements define their lives. They live in a constant dance, adapting daily to the weather, the food, the feeling of the morning.

Over the millennia, these seasonal migrations have shifted in location and timing, due in part to climate change and evolutions, but the form has remained the same. Migration is a feature of life that is so ordinary, so at home with the changeability of the world, it is impossible to imagine our planet without it.

There are many plants in Northern New Mexico, where I live, that feel deeply familiar to my heritage. There is a long history of Sicilians gathering wild plants-borage, chicory, fennel, endive, and purslane-for salads, stews, or spiritual comfort. Bundles of wild rosemary were burned to ward off the evil eye. Chile peppers migrated around the world and back again, eventually becoming a necessary ingredient in both Italian and New Mexican cuisine.

In Sicilian food, pine nuts from the stone pine tree are common, often paired with raisins and some sort of salty fish. New Mexico has a related species-the piñon pine. Last fall I gathered nuts from the squat trees that dot the hills above town. They were luscious, buttery, and sweet. These tiny morsels sustained the Indigenous people of this region, the Tewa and Tano, for many lifetimes. They ate them raw, ground into a flour or a butter, and used them in soups. Harvesting and eating piñon nuts remains an important social and ceremonial tradition in the fall. This delicacy sustains the squirrels, birds, and rodents too.

They were part of my childhood as well, a way to connect to the land where I lived. I couldn't believe the earth could gift such sustenance. Today, these nuts feel so precious. The piñon trees mast and offer their bounty only once every three to five years. The future of these trees is uncertain. Many are already dying back because of climate change. As I gather, my hands sticky with sap, I am full of gratitude, guilt, and a gnawing grief.

Other plants, like grapes, were brought here during Spanish colonialism. Franciscan monks followed the conquistadors to bring Christianity to the Indigenous people. They were required to buy their sacramental wine directly from Spain, as it was illegal to grow Spanish grapes outside the country. But around 1629, some bold monks smuggled vines into New Mexico. The variety was known as "mission grapes." In 1868, Italian Jesuit priests settled in New Mexico and brought their winemaking techniques to the region. In less than twenty years, New Mexico was producing almost a million gallons of wine annually.

Some plants made the reverse trip. In Sicily, opuntia cacti commonly known as prickly pear, were first brought to the island by the Spanish, who took them from the Americas during the colonial period. It was fashionable at the time for the Sicilian upper class to have extensive gardens filled with rare and exotic plants. The prickly pear was bred to bloom twice a year, which doubled the fruiting season of these tasty treats. In a procedure known as scozzolatura, a practice that continues to this day, the first cactus flowers in late spring are cut off and the fruits that result, the bastardoni, are the most highly prized because they are bigger and juicier. At some point, a few cacti escaped the confines of the aristocratic gardens and made a home on the windswept hillsides. Clusters of green pads studded with bright magenta fruits now grow freely over much of the island. Plant migrants assisted by human desire.

When I was a kid, the fruits reminded me of gemstones. Such a deep juicy color in a land of tawny browns. I still love gathering them today. I can never manage to wait until I get home and clean them before eating one or two, so I associate them with the sensation of having hairlike, splintery needles in my lips. Somewhere down the lines of the past, my noble ancestors lived in a huge palazzo, a long, rectangular mansion with an interior courtyard. I imagine it overflowing with opuntia so genteel that it's climbed up the sides of the stone walls to mingle with the fuchsia bougainvillea.

Sicilians love feast days and celebrations. Perhaps because their history is one of such upheaval, it is ever more vital to make time for joy and sustenance. The volcano at the heart of Sicily, Mount Etna, is both a continual threat to the island's existence and the means by which it has grown. In 1669, an eruption began that lasted 122 days-explosive outbursts from flank and central vents, molten rocks flung miles into the air, lava flows overtopping city walls, plumes of ash settled over life in suffocating layers. The lava flows remained hot enough to boil water for many months; it reportedly took eight years for them to cool completely.

The pleasure of food allows us to feel the abundance of being alive in this ever-dying world.

To live so close to a volcano-this is to know the meaning of the Italian phrase, meno male, which is a way of thanking God; because truly it could always have been worse.

When I gather wild foods in New Mexico, I connect not only to these roots but also to the history of conquests and migrations and disaster and feasting on this land. I wonder how long this place will be habitable. The drought here is worsening. Millions of years ago much of it was under a shallow sea. You can still find fossilized shells in the rocks. How will it change in the next hundred years, as climate chaos forces all things-animal and plant, human and nonhuman-to move and find new ways to thrive?

Migration might not save us this time. Of all the species that have ever existed, 99.9 percent have gone extinct. It's likely not a question of if humans will disappear but when. Some extinctions are quick: species survive a few millennia before their particular branch of the tree of life terminates. Other extinctions are so quiet they seem like something else-an evolution from one thing to another.

On the scale of millennia-the age of the rocks beneath our feet-humans have been a tiny blip. And yet our devouring activities have been so frenzied that our existence will be seen in the archaeological record as a thin layer of devastation, as though an asteroid had hit. We've changed the earth so fast and so extensively, in such a short amount of time, that we've become the most dominant natural force on the planet. We've burned it all up. Is there any use in arguing over whether it's capitalism or the fossil fuel companies, or the eight billion people, or the rich, the patriarchy, the aliens, or the devil causing all our problems? We've been on this path to extinction a long time.

The pleasure of food allows us to feel the abundance of being alive in this ever-dying world. It allows us to look outside of the memories we faithfully reconstruct in order to keep the world static, beyond our desire to be remembered as individuals. Each recipe has its own life history: a shift in relationships between people, place, and plants; upheavals of what was known and had to be relearned; reconfigurations of what it means to feel at home. It is a migration of our perceptions from one landscape to another. It is a story of the senses.

Feasting allows the loneliness and terror of existence to be forgotten, at least momentarily. Such pleasure brings us into that raw, mad, deep love of life. How easily we leave behind our stories of movement and desperation-of making a new home in a foreign land-when our stomachs are full. How many generations thought, "Well, surely this must be the end of the world? Might as well eat!"

Adjust and adapt. That was his adage. His prayer. His affirmation.

As a resident of coastal Florida, Papa experienced a number of hurricanes. He once sent us a photo of himself in the bathtub with a colander on his head in preparation for an impending storm, a sly grin on his face that made me wonder if this was a game or a genuine precaution.

In some ways, Papa would have excelled in this time of pandemic and quarantine. Adjust and adapt. He always kept a full pantry, fridge, and freezer. He had an "eat-soon shelf" so that he would not let food go to waste, and since he already ate most of his meals alone, he had a reserve of leftover portions in the freezer.

In other ways, Papa would have hated this forced solitary retreat. Most of his socializing took place in small moments with strangers-the Vietnamese man who cut his toenails at the mall, the women who took the tickets at the movie theater. He used to keep boxes of cookies in his car so that he could give them to the service workers he encountered.

This time of isolation would have stolen those little, important joys from his life. He wanted to feed everyone, to bring some cheer to those he encountered. Perhaps it was a relic of childhood. Maybe such rituals reminded him of the fig-and-date cookies, called cuccidati, that his big Italian family made for Christmas. Or the tradition on the feast day of Saint Joseph, in which Italian households in New Orleans set out elaborate altars to feed the poor.

I wonder if he ever truly adapted to an adulthood of solitary meals after a childhood of noisy family feasts. Family reunions were like dinner-dances, attended by hundreds of relatives. He recalled that at one such birthday celebration, before the troubled times, all the mothers and grandmothers, aunts and godmothers, helped to cook. They scoured washtubs and placed them atop charcoal braziers to serve tomato-sauced pasta crowded with meatballs and Italian sausages. Another tub overflowed with a Sicilian mixed salad. The one next to it was filled with ice and fresh oysters. The uncles helped shuck, topping each one with a squeeze of lemon juice or splash of hot Tabasco. There were mounds of bread and biscotti and candied almonds. For dessert, cannoli and sfogliatelle surrounded the centerpiece: a huge cassata cake-a delicious marriage of sponge-cake layers, ice cream, and ricotta, flavored with chopped semisweet chocolate, lots of candied citron and orange peel, glacé cherries, and blanched pistachio nuts. It was enough food to satisfy the many family, friends, and neighbors, with leftovers to bring down the driveway to feed "the ever-present poor."

Papa grew up in direct contact with the vendors and farmers and fishermen who provided his sustenance. Food was medicine to him, and every day of good health was a blessing. In his old age, the sad, familiar question When will I eat again? no longer tore at him. When he shopped, money was no longer a worry. He marveled at the abundance, at times overwhelmed by such a variety of choices. Occasionally, he would offer to pay for the groceries of someone in line ahead of him, especially if he saw they were putting something back or struggling to find enough money.

He wrote to me that while he cooked, he often wondered: "Who planted, cultivated, harvested, packaged, and shipped these ingredients to my market? How many strangers helped get this all from wherever it started to my condo kitchen and dining table? My appreciation and gratitude should be expressed to each of them! It saddens me that I can thank only God and the market workers, but I never get too sad to lose my appetite ... or my abundant weight!"

In the last years of his life, he emailed photos of his meals to us, almost daily, as if a prayer that we should eat well too. Separate but together. I wish I had cared enough when he was still alive to understand his loneliness. Despite his many friends and connections with strangers, feeling lonely was a consistent theme that ran throughout his memoirs. It seems to me that, as humans, we were never meant to eat alone. I have eaten most meals alone during this pandemic, and I understand now how it is both easier and harder to be so solitary.

Papa wrapped himself up in his traumas, and that made it harder to reach him. He was so critical. It was impossible to ask him questions, for doing so would derail his story, which had to be told in his right way. He needed to be the center of attention. He was desperate to be remembered. He was a man who urgently wanted to share himself with the world but was never quite sure how. His mouth was full of secrets.

I've tried to make it a practice this year, when I sit down to a meal alone, to imagine all the people and creatures who've had a hand in the food I am eating, to think of the magic and great miracle of life up close. It makes me feel a little bit less lonely. It helps to quiet my rage.

Faith. Hope. Charity. These were the words, linked together, that gave my grandfather happiness throughout his long and blessed life. They gave him happiness for nearly ninety-one bittersweet years. He adjusted, adapted, and laughed through every crisis. Sharing the gift of food in whatever way he could.

The thing I am craving most in this period of isolation is dinner parties. I adore dinner parties. I love to feed people. And because I tend to be an outgoing introvert, I find escaping to the kitchen mid-meal to finish preparing the next course provides a moment of respite. I gather myself over the elk ragù, then pop into the dining room with a steaming bowl of new flavors.

Sicilian food is a hybrid cuisine that celebrates whatever ingredients you have on hand or can be gathered from the hills and plucked from the water. Papa used to say that no true Italian's garden is complete without tomatoes, figs, lemons, and cucuzza squash, "as sweet as it can be long." He loved red beans from birth. He ate them with rice on Mondays, cooked with the ham bone from Sunday's dinner, which is still a tradition in New Orleans. In Brooklyn, he ate them in pasta fazool. In adulthood, he would add ham, but only when he could afford the meat. In his Florida retirement, ditalini was a favorite pasta cut. "Like many other Italian favorites, including pizza and polenta," he wrote me, "this one started as a peasant dish, being composed of inexpensive ingredients." His food was a reflection of his own migration, from one landscape to another, adjusting and adapting to the new layers of himself that were revealed by foreign lands.

When the world opens up again, I will throw a dinner party in honor of my ancestors and the foods they ate, the rise and fall of their successes, the mark of survival in their recipes. We will sit outside under the lace vine, with the scent of apricots and woodsmoke in the air, bouquets of wildflowers, poppies, lupines, lilacs, and irises spilling down the center of the table. It will be set with painted porcelain plates and mismatched crystal goblets, which I've collected from thrift stores, yard sales, and free boxes over the years. There will be candles in the nooks of the adobe walls that encircle the yard. Here we shall eat together. A family. Migrants in a new land. Refugees from the calamities of tragedy all around us.

I will cook:

Pinto beans and red chile rice.

Ravioli with prickly pear, piñon nuts, and freshly made ricotta.

Anise bread baked in an horno, an outdoor mud-beehive oven, like the old Italian furnos.

A goat roasted underground, spiced with green chiles and garlic, served with a rose-hip wine sauce.

Roasted wild duck stuffed with dandelion greens, to mimic the Sicilian quail stuffed with chicory. Roasted rabbit with wild raspberries instead of pomegranates. River trout, filled with mint and the wild oregano that grows from the cracks between my flagstone patio, then steamed on a bed of salted pine tips to recall the taste of the sea.

And for dessert, rosewater custard and honeysuckle granita topped with elderberry flower syrup.

Our thirst will be quenched by wild amaro, an herbal liquor made from local desert grapes and infused with drought-tolerant plants.

These recipes are transformed by time and space. A tradition migrating from place to person, from person to place. These recipes are a life story. They are secrets in the mouth.

Before we sit down to feast, I will raise a glass and speak the toast I heard throughout my childhood: Per cento anni. "For a hundred years may you live your bliss."

Here's to the joy of eating in the company of others. Such joy will come again soon. I am writing it into existence. Magari -may it be so.

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The Life Story of a Recipe - Gina Rae La Cerva

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Gina Rae La Cerva revisits her grandfather's recipes, tracing the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration.

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The Spiritual Life Committee is excited to bring in Cole Arthur Riley to lead a retreat on Contemplative Activism. Join us we learn how to adopt spiritual practices that suspend between the contemplative and pursuit of justice. In our activism, spiritual contemplation can feel more like a precursor to the work of justice, instead of a core part of it. Together, we will explore the gift of a contemplative spirituality that is marked by liberating habits of storytelling, emotion, and embodiment.
Click to Register
Retreat Details

The cost is $50 (scholarships are available). Please register by Friday, June 4. Like our previous online retreats, we will gather via Zoom at scheduled times. Cole will speak and guide us in prayer, a reflection, and an embodied activity during each of these sessions, as well as give suggestions and prompts for our own solitude and contemplation in between each session. Our themes will be as follows:

Friday, 6 pm | The Liberation of the Self
Exploring how insight into our interior lives can be an active justice practice, as we talk about selfhood, story, and memory.

Saturday, 9 am | Liberating Emotion
Examining how emotional truth-telling informs contemplation and activism-specifically emotions such as lament and anger.

Saturday, 1 pm | Contemplation & The Body
Discussing how contemplative habits can and should guide us into deeper connections with our bodies, including the cost of justice-work on our bodies, and contemplation as a healing force.
Saturday, 5 pm | Closing Prayer Service
Gathering in the graces and sharing our intentions.

About Cole Arthur Riley

Cole Arthur Riley is a writer, liturgist, and speaker who is seeking a deeply contemplative life marked by embodiment and emotion. She is the founder and writer of Black Liturgies-a project seeking to integrate concepts of dignity, lament, rage, justice, rest, and liberation with the practice of written prayer. She also serves as the content and spiritual formation manager for Chesterton House, a Christian studies center at Cornell University.

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Contemplative Activism Retreat with Cole Arthur Riley - East Liberty Presbyterian Church

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The Spiritual Life Committee is excited to bring in Cole Arthur Riley to lead a retreat on Contemplative Activism. Join us we learn how to adopt spiritual practices that suspend between the contemplative and pursuit of justice. In our activism, spiritual contemplation can feel more like a precursor to the work of justice, instead of a core part of it.

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Just found out about this and seems to be an interesting read, perhaps inspiration for a walking meditation retreat!

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"None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze."

"By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake - for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait - a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life."

More quotes...

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"None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery.

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Loving-Kindness Practice Instructions

based on a teaching by Steven Smith

Loving-kindness, or metta, as it in called in the Pali language, is unconditional, inclusive love, a love with wisdom. It has no conditions; it does not depend on whether one "deserves" it or not; it is not restricted to friends and family; it extends out from personal categories to include all living beings. There are no expectations of anything in return. This is the ideal, pure love, which everyone has in potential. We begin with loving ourselves, for unless we have a measure of this unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves, it is difficult to extend it to others. Then we include others who are special to us, and, ultimately, all living things. Gradually, both the visualization and the meditation phrases blend into the actual experience, the feeling of loving kindness.

This is a meditation of care, concern, tenderness, loving kindness, friendship--a feeling of warmth for oneself and others. The practice is the softening of the mind and heart, an opening to deeper and deeper levels of the feeling of kindness, of pure love. Loving kindness is without any desire to possess another. It is not a sentimental feeling of goodwill, not an obligation, but comes from a selfless place. It does not depend on relationships, on how the other person feels about us. The process is first one of softening, breaking down barriers that we feel inwardly toward ourselves, and then those that we feel toward others.

Take a very comfortable posture. One of the aims in this meditation is to feel good, so make your posture relaxed and comfortable. Begin to focus around the solar plexus, your chest area, your "heart center." Breathe in and out from that area, as if you are breathing from the heart center and as if all experience is happening from there. Anchor your mindfulness only on the sensations at your heart center.

Breathing in and out from the heart center, begin by generating this kind feeling toward yourself. Feel any areas of mental blockage or numbness, self-judgment, self-hatred. Then drop beneath that to the place where we care for ourselves, where we want strength and health and safety for ourselves.

Continuing to breathe in and out, use either these traditional phrases or ones you choose yourself. Say or think them several times.
May I be free from inner and outer harm and danger. May I be safe and protected. May I be free of mental suffering or distress. May I be happy. May I be free of physical pain and suffering. May I be healthy and strong. May I be able to live in this world happily, peacefully, joyfully, with ease.
Next, move to a person who most invites the feeling of pure unconditional loving kindness, the love that does not depend on getting anything back. The first person is usually someone we consider a mentor, a benefactor, an elder. It might be a parent, grandparent, teacher, someone toward whom it takes no effort to feel respect and reverence, someone who immediately elicits the feeling of care. Repeat the phrases for this person: "May she be safe and protected..."

After feeling strong unconditional love for the benefactor, move to a person you regard as a dear friend and repeat the phrases again, breathing in and out of your heart center.

Now move to a neutral person, someone for whom you feel neither strong like nor dislike. As you repeat the phrases, allow yourself to feel tenderness, loving care for their welfare.

Now move to someone you have difficulty with--hostile feelings, resentments. Repeat the phrases for this person. If you have difficulty doing this, you can say before the phrases, "To the best of my ability I wish that you be...." If you begin to feel ill will toward this person, return to the benefactor and let the loving kindness arise again. Then return to this person.

Let the phrases spread through your whole body, mind, and heart.

After the difficult person, radiate loving kindness out to all beings. Stay in touch with the ember of warm, tender loving-kindness at the center of your being, and begin to visualize or engender a felt sense of all living beings. The traditional phrases are these:

May all beings be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously...
May all living beings be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously... May all breathing beings be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously... May all individuals be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously... May all beings in existence be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously...
Allow the phrases to be simply a conduit for the force of loving-kindness. Empower your imagination through the five phrases to touch the hearts of all forms of life in the universe, unconditionally and inclusively. Stay with all beings until you feel a personal sense of the profound interconnectedness of all creatures, all life.

Then you can move on to specific categories of beings, such as:
All females of all species, or the feminine principle of the universe within us all. All males of all species, or the masculine principle of the universe within us all. All awakened ones. All seekers. All celestial beings. All animals and other beings in difficult places.
The two pairs and the triad above are three more ways of including every being in the universe.

Here is an alternative way to practice this meditation:

Begin with yourself. Calm the mind/heart and find the center of your being. Generate warm, gentle, loving feelings for yourself:
May I be safe from harm. May I be happy just as I am. May I be peaceful with whatever is happening. May I be healthy and strong. May I care for myself in this ever-changing world graciously, joyously.
From yourself, move out spaciously into your immediate surroundings. Include every living being within this circle:
May all beings in the air, on land, and in the water be safe, happy, healthy, and free from suffering.
Stay within your reach. As you feel your immediate surround fill with the power of loving kindness, move on, expanding the surround in concentric circles until you envelop the entire planet.

Expand your loving kindness until you are able to visualize Earth, spinning within the vast, mysterious universe. If you like, continue expanding the sense of your loving kindness, filling the endless emptiness of the universe.
May all living beings everywhere, on all planes of existence, known and unknown, be happy, be peaceful, be free from suffering.
Steven Smith has been a guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society, the Kyaswa Retreat Center in Burma, Vipassana Hawai'i, and founder of the MettaDana health and education project in Burma. As an advisor for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, he developed and taught meditation programs to national environmental leaders, business executives, lawyers, and philanthropists.

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based on a teaching by Steven Smith Loving-kindness, or metta, as it in called in the Pali language, is unconditional, inclusive love, a love with wisdom. It has no conditions; it does not depend on whether one "deserves" it or not; it is not restricted to friends and family; it extends out from personal categories to include all living beings.

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*BREATH : A beautiful message!*
I noticed a child monk—he couldn't have been more than ten years old—teaching a group of five-year-olds. He had a great aura about him, the poise and confidence of an adult.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I took their first class today,” he said, then asked me, “What did you learn on your first day of school?”
“I started to learn the alphabet and numbers"I said. "What did they learn?”
“The first thing I teach them is how to breathe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the only thing that stays with you from the moment you are born until the moment you die is your breath. All your friends, your family, the country you live in, all of that can change. The one thing that stays with you is your breath.”
This ten-year-old monk added, “When you get stressed—what changes? Your breath. When you get angry—what changes? Your breath. We experience change of breath with every emotion change. When you learn to navigate and manage your breath, you can navigate through any situation in life."
Inhale the beauty....
Exhale with Gratitude.

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Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now

Description

From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest--a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she's been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron's Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways--how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them--embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey--of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

About the Author

SUZANNE SIMARD was born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia and was educated at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry.

Praise For...

"Galvanizing . . . As Simard elucidates her revolutionary experiments, replete with
gorgeous descriptions and moments of fear and wonder, a vision of the forest as an 'intelligent, perceptive and responsive,' comes into focus . . . A masterwork of planetary significance." - Booklist (starred review)

"Simard artfully blends science with memoir in her eye-opening debut on the 'startling secrets' of trees . . . As moving as it is educational, this groundbreaking work entrances."- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Simard tells the fascinating story that led Richard Powers to base a character on her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory . . . intimate . . . absorbing . . . engaging . . . the science is solid, and the author's overarching theme of stewardship is clear, understandable, and necessary."- Kirkus

"This book promises to change our understanding about what is really going on in the forest, and other pressing mysteries about the real world."--Michael Pollan

"It completely overturned my view of nature."--Kristin Ohlson, New York Times bestselling author

"I can think of no one better suited to bring humanity into the process of science."--J. C. Cahill, professor of plant ecology at the University of Alberta

"What Simard is revealing here has implications and potential on the scale of mapping the human genome. Simard is one of this planet's most insightful and eloquent translators."--John Vaillant, bestselling author of The Tiger, Jaguar's Children, and The Golden Spruce

"The stories Simard tells, and the insights she draws from them, will inspire readers and change the way they think about the world around them."--Catherine Gehring, professor of biology at Northern Arizona University

"This book will have profound implications for our human relationships with the natural world. The insights presented by Dr. Simard point toward a complete paradigm shift in the ways we humans interact with forests, trees, and other species."--Nancy Jean Turner, professor of ethnobotany at the University of Victoria, author of The Earth's Blanket

Product Details

ISBN: 9780525656098
ISBN-10: 052565609X
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: May 4th, 2021
Pages: 368
Language: English

Categories

Related Editions (all)

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Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Hardcover)

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From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest--a moving, deeply personal journey of discoverySuzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she's been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

– Albert Einstein, 1921 –

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Here is the author that Edith recommended today

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Here is the author that Edith recommended today

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"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

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"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore." ― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

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Quote Steve shared today, related to Rumi's poem, that offers a spiritual connection to right where we are, at Duquesne.

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Quote Steve shared today, related to Rumi's poem, that offers a spiritual connection to right where we are, at Duquesne.

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O Holy Spirit, I wish to be like a feather before you, so that your breath may carry me wherever it pleases and I may never offer it any resistance. (Francis Libermann)

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Although late to the party, in my opinion the answer is in the rule 38, '' do not ask yourself which kind of love you should seek, spiritual or materiAlthough late to the party, in my opinion the answer is in the rule 38, '' do not ask yourself which kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western..Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, definitions''. ...more (less)

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Although late to the party, in my opinion the answer is in the rule 38, '' do not ask yourself which kind of love you should seek, spiritual or materiAlthough late to the party, in my opinion the answer is in the rule 38, '' do not ask yourself which kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western..Divisions only lead to more divisions.

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Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit
Todesfuge
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
er Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete

er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Copyright © 2020 by Pierre Joris. From Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris. Used with the permission of the translator.

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Death Fugue - Black milk of morning we drink you evenings

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Lovely book recommendation shared by Janine today

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Lovely book recommendation shared by Janine today

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Hello, yes it is appropriate, but I don't know if it is for a 14-year-old, as she approaches some deeper themes about motherhood and life decisions. Hello, yes it is appropriate, but I don't know if it is for a 14-year-old, as she approaches some deeper themes about motherhood and life decisions. ...more (less)

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Hello, yes it is appropriate, but I don't know if it is for a 14-year-old, as she approaches some deeper themes about motherhood and life decisions. Hello, yes it is appropriate, but I don't know if it is for a 14-year-old, as she approaches some deeper themes about motherhood and life decisions.

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The Guest House by Rumi, poem shared by Will today

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The Guest House by Rumi, poem shared by Will today

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The Guest House
~ Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

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Wonderful event coming up next month (May) shared by Janine

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Wonderful event coming up next month (May) shared by Janine

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What important lessons does nature have to teach us?

How do we connect with the healing power of the natural world?

How do we love the Earth, draw inspiration from its beauty and protect it in times of crisis?

In response to these timely questions Mark Coleman of Awake in the Wild and Eric Forbis of Wisdom for Life are bringing you this inspiring conference on nature and our relationship to it.

Practical Skills and Practices You Can Use Now

Learn and implement powerful, practical tools and practices to deepen your relationship with the natural world and experience its healing, nourishing powers

Discover the latest science on how nature can improve your health and well-being

Develop mindfulness and contemplative practices that allow you to draw on nature's calm and peace

Awaken to profound life teachings in the natural world

Get clarity on how to engage and take action during this ecological crisis

Learn powerful nature-based leadership practices

Explore how the natural world inspires our innate creative nature

Be part of a vibrant community of like-minded people who care deeply about the Earth

Summit Presenters
30+ Leading Experts to Guide You

Learn from renowned authors, scientists, mindfulness and meditation teachers, artists, environmentalists, activists, indigenous elders and more...

Summit Schedule
Free Access to Each Session for 48 Hours

Watch all 30+ sessions from your computer, phone or tablet. Bring the Summit with you anywhere

Day 1: Health and Well-Being: The Healing Power of Nature

Day 2: Spirituality and Self-Discovery in Nature

Day 3: Lessons on Becoming a Better Leader

Day 4: Awake in the Wild: Contemplative Practice in Nature

Day 5: Ancient Roots, Contemporary Wisdom

Day 6: The Art and Poetry of Nature

Day 7: We Protect What We Love

3-Day Weekend Pass to Stream award-winning film Love Thy Nature
Narrated by Liam Neeson

Awakening the Dreamer Online Course
From Pachamama Alliance

Intuiting Our Interconnection
A chapter from Mark Coleman's bookAwake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery

Mindful Listening Practice in Nature
A talk by Mark Coleman

Nature Listening Meditation
by Mark Coleman

By signing up, you agree to join The Nature Summit, Awake in the Wild and Wisdom for Life email communities. You'll receive relevant content and offers. You can easily unsubscribe at any time.

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The Nature Summit - Free Online Summit. May 11-17

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In response to these timely questions Mark Coleman of Awake in the Wild and Eric Forbis of Wisdom for Life are bringing you this inspiring conference on nature and our relationship to it.

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This is the poem that was shared last Friday.

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(Aham Brahmasmi means that ' the core of my being is the ultimate reality, the root and ground of the universe, the source of all that exists. I am the infinite reality.')

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Finding Courage in Contemplative Education‬

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"Absolutely. You know we might have an idea about something, but then when you begin to express it from a creative place it's almost like you have to feel into it. If I want to write a poem about sadness it's not just about my ideas about sadness. At some point as I'm writing I need to stop and feel into what does sadness feel like? And then I might even think about a very specific situation in my life that brings up sadness. And then what arises from that place as a poem is coming from a non-conceptual place. Non-conceptual knowing and yet I've expressed something and I might even express it in words like with a poem. So, what we're trying to do in contemplative education is to bring both of those together. So, it's not in spite of conceptual knowing -- concepts are great, thinking is great -- but that there are other ways of knowing that are equally important and maybe if we bring them all together then there's a richness of knowing that begins to emerge."
Special Guest: Charlotte Rotterdam.

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charlotte rotterdam: finding courage in contemplative education

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‎Mindful U at Naropa University: Charlotte Rotterdam: Finding Courage in Contemplative Education on Apple Podcasts

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‎"Absolutely. You know we might have an idea about something, but then when you begin to express it from a creative place it's almost like you have to feel into it. If I want to write a poem about sadness it's not just about my ideas about sadness.

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Wonderful piece and great ideas here for contemplative remote learning: Bird Language and Contemplative Education in the Anthropocene 

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Wonderful piece and great ideas here for contemplative remote learning: Bird Language and Contemplative Education in the Anthropocene 

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THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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How trees talk to each other | Suzanne Simard

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Some wonderful recordings of silence in the woods in Washington state

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Welcome to One Square Inch

A Sanctuary for Silence at Olympic National Park

"Silence is not the absence of something,
but the presence of everything."

-Gordon Hempton, Founder
One Square Inch of Silence

One Square Inch of Silence is very possibly the quietest place in the United States. It is an independent research project located in the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park, which is one of the most pristine, untouched, and ecologically diverse environments in the United States. If nothing is done to preserve and protect this quiet place from human noise intrusions, natural quiet may be non-existent in our world in the next 10 years. Silence is a part of our human nature, which can no longer be heard by most people. Close your eyes and listen for only a few seconds to the world you live in, and you will hear this lack of true quiet, of silence. Refrigerators, air conditioning systems, and airplanes are a few of the things that have become part of the ambient sound and prevent us from listening to the natural sounds of our environment. It is our birthright to listen, quietly and undisturbed, to the natural environment and take whatever meanings we may from it. By listening to natural silence, we feel connected to the land, to our evolutionary past, and to ourselves. One Square Inch of Silence is in danger, unprotected by policies of the National Park Service, or supported by adequate laws. Our hope is that by listening to natural silence, it will help people to become true listeners to their environment, and help us protect one of the most important and endangered resources on the planet, silence.

If you want the world to be quieter and save places in nature from noise pollution please join Quiet Park International.

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A Sanctuary for Silence at Olympic National Park "Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything." -Gordon Hempton, Founder One Square Inch of Silence One Square Inch of Silence is very possibly the quietest place in the United States.

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This was the poem shared today by Ozum

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Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

David Whyte from
Where Many Rivers Meet

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Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now. David Whyte from Where Many Rivers Meet

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A friend of mine is now offering a monthly membership to her yoga classes and general wellness activities. I'm posting bc its very affordable (which can be rare) and she posts her recorded yoga classes as well as a bunch of other wellness activities too-check her out!

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Radical Wellbeing Membership - Hala Khouri

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This is fr the author of Making Winter, Emma Mitchell

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If you had to choose one virtue worth cultivating while tucked away in a room without a door, patience is certainly a contender.

It's easy to think of Julian of Norwich as a patient person. Born in 1343, she is one of the most treasured anchoresses of her time - a role that kept her closed off from the world for decades until her death.

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress and mystic of the Middle Ages. For much of her life she lived in a single room that was anchored against the wall of a church - the Church of Saint Julian in Norwich, England. Historians and scholars estimate that she lived for 75 years and spent more than half that time in the anchor-hold.

There were no doors in an anchoress' cell, but one window looked out into the village square and another window looked into the church. Though they lived as hermits, anchoresses were the centre of village life in many ways. There are accounts of anchoresses and anchorites (their male counterpart) acting as a modern day post office and providing spiritual counselling through their window.

Anchoresses and anchorites followed the liturgy of the hours. They prayed at specific times of day and took a vow of stability, which meant they would not leave their cell until they died.

Julian of Norwich is best known for a book called Revelations of Divine Love, which is the first book written by a woman in English. The book describes a series of visions that she had while sick and her encounters with God and Jesus. The book also contains what is perhaps her most celebrated message: that "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)

"She was in some ways very similar to us looking out into the world through Zoom or Google Meet or whatever, and then looking into the church for her spiritual life," said writer and spiritual adviser, Kaya Oakes, in an interview with Tapestry host, Mary Hynes.

While our own isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic is motivated more from public health than a desire to sit alone with our thoughts, Julian's experience with seclusion can offer insight and wisdom for people today.

God is calling her to understand that there's something beyond that suffering and that there's a capacity for loving other people at a distance and caring for one another. - Kaya Oakes

"Where she's really resonating with a lot of people right now is in the idea that she went into the anchor-hold and she went into her spiritual journey thinking that all she was going to encounter was suffering and that all that would come out of this isolation was suffering," said Oakes.

"And what she found instead is that suffering is part of the experience, but that's not what God is calling her to. God is calling her to understand that there's something beyond that suffering and that there's a capacity for loving other people at a distance and caring for one another," she said.

As a spiritual director, Oakes guides people through struggles brought on or exacerbated by the pandemic. With no certain end in sight, she says it can be difficult to lean into one Julian's best-known prayers which reads: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)

"I think when you read it out of context, it can sound kind of like 'live, laugh, love', you know? Like any kind of spiritual cliché," said Oakes of the prayer.

"On the other hand, in context, she's saying that all shall be well after we move through collective suffering and individual suffering."

Being still in suffering

Sitting with the hard stuff is part of Paul Dafydd Jones' definition of what it means to be patient. Jones explores the concept of patience in his forthcoming book, Patience: A Theological Exploration. Part 1: From Creation to Christ.

We need to practice a good deal of discernment and cultivate some wisdom as to when is the right time to be patient and when we ought to be impatient. - Paul Dafydd Jones

"Patience with respect to the pandemic is obviously a good thing. We need to wait it out. We need to be diligent. We need to persist with mask-wearing, physical distancing, all that stuff," Dafydd Jones said to Tapestry host Mary Hynes.

"But patience vis-à-vis the crisis of global heating? Patience vis-à-vis right wing extremism? That would be a bad idea. So we need to practice a good deal of discernment and cultivate some wisdom as to when is the right time to be patient and when we ought to be impatient," he said.

Dafydd Jones is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He says the riots led by white nationalists in 2017 in that city are an instance when patience needed to make way for action.

"There were activists of color, groups of radical Christians, who realized that standing back was not the way to go and needed to stand up and articulate an impatience against injustice. And very simply, the activists were right. When fascism rears its head, one shouldn't step aside. There needs to be straightforward opposition," said Dafydd Jones.

The opposition to white nationalism in Charlottesville, like many protest movements, was an attempt by the activists to correct a world they felt was damaged or flawed. This disappointment with the world is another way our 21st-century experience dovetails with 14th-century Julian of Norwich, who also was frustrated with the state of the world around her.

"She has to come to terms with what it means to be a finite, sinful human being. She has to come to terms with a world that does not conform to her wishes, that is far less satisfying than the kind of future with God she hopes to have. And I think she does that by trying to sort of attune herself with what I would call the slow pace of God's saving purposes," Dafydd Jones said.

"There's a patience with the fact that the bliss that she wants is not yet... And so her exercise of patience is sort of learning how to set the tempo of her life according to the slow rhythm of salvation. And for her, this is all tied up with a relationship with the dying Christ.".

Dafydd Jones says there are plenty of modern day examples of long-standing patience in service of a better world. He cites the work of conservationists who, for example, commit to the repopulation of a species or maintain a wilderness trail.

Dafydd Jones also points to grassroots activists.

"The person who faithfully fills out forms, who readies circulars to go out week after week after week. That's sticking with it. That's waiting on a future that is not yet. And that I think that can tell us as much about patience as the life of a contemplative or a recluse," said Dafydd Jones.

Today's mystical experience

COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have brought the reality of a reclusive life a lot closer to home for many people. While 21st-century solitude may not lead to the religious mystical experiences Julian of Norwich wrote about, Oakes says simple acts - like growing a potted plant or culturing our own sourdough - can offer a profound connection with the greater mysteries of life.

"You slow down and look at things and sort of think, 'how is this happening? Why is this happening?' And that's really what a mystical experience is. It's also an encounter with anything that stops you in your tracks, and that, these days, includes art and music," said Oakes.

Oakes continues to contemplate the world through her own experiences with nature and is inspired by Julian of Norwich, whose words resonate beyond the idea that "all shall be well."

"Another thing she says that I like as much as [all shall be well] is, 'thou shalt not be overcome.' In other words, death is not the end of the story. We can continue to have relationship with one another after someone's passed. But I think it's just that sense of not being overcome, not giving into despair is really important right now."
Written and produced by Kim Kaschor.

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When to be still, when to be stirred: what mystics can teach us about patience during COVID-19 | CBC Radio

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Decades in a room with no way out was a choice for anchoresses like Julian of Norwich during the Middle Ages, but it doesn't mean it was easy. Writers Paul Dafydd Jones and Kaya Oakes explore what it means to be patient in the time of a pandemic and what mystics like Julian of Norwich have to teach us.

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Why we are drawn to nature

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Hanif Sadr I lost my parents when I was so young, like at the age of like, six and seven. And I was raised by my grandparents. So, my grandparents are from Northern Iran, but they used to live in Tehran, the capital of Iran. Normally Iranian people are, they used to leave a semi-nomadic life, which means they had two different lands, one close to the seashores, and one up in the mountains to live.

And they would change these places for the colder time of the year and the hot summers, they would go up in the mountains. So, my grandparents were the only one still in the family that they wanted to continue that tradition. So they would like kind of pack everything up and they would drive six or seven hours exactly about the whole month of August, up in the mountains and stay in the farm.

By that time the farm didn't even had electricity and we would go there and stay for a month there me and my sister. So, spending a whole month in nature and being away from the city and spending time with the villagers, with the kids from the village and spending hours in the nature of being active on like hunting and the gathering and like, you know, collecting ingredients.

I think it was really a healing process for me and my sister.

Dacher Keltner I'm Dacher Keltner and this is The Science of Happiness. When we think about happiness and health, our Western view tends to look inwards as if happiness is found within our minds and bodies, but very often, happiness also involves looking outwards at our relationships with other people, the communities that surround us and our environment.

This is ground truth about happiness and the indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica in North America. And even for writers like Thoreau, Carson, and Emerson, that happiness is found in our relationship to the environment. Hanif Sadr is an Iranian immigrant who moved to California almost a decade ago to study engineering.

When he arrived in the San Francisco Bay area, Hanif found that many of the foods he had foraged for in Northern Iran as a child are found here in Northern California. Hanif now uses those wild ingredients to make traditional Iranian food at Komaaj, his San Francisco restaurant. And he joins us today to talk about what keeps bringing him back to foraging.

And if thanks for joining us today.

Han if Sadr Thank you so much. It's my pleasure.

Dacher Keltner I'm really curious about your first experiences of foraging that now have led you to abandon engineering and develop this restaurant. What got you foraging?

Hanif Sadr In Iran, you know, when we used to forage, we didn't know, even the word exists.

And as a kids, uh, what we used to do every day was to, you know, go around in a farm that we have with other villagers kids and their habits actually was to just, you know, spend, I don't know, eight, ten hours in nature every day from the hunting insects to picking berries and finding like leaves that you can just chew on.

Dacher Keltner We know from research on a lot of indigenous peoples that, you know, when you go foraging as a child and then as an adult with your community, you are learning a way of life. Right? You're learning about spirituality or your relationship to land, values, patterns in nature. What do you think it taught you as a young kid? Thinking about it now?

Hanif Sadr I wasn't aware of it for sure. I wasn't really understanding how that period of time really affected me and my sister and helped us to be, you know, to feel calmness and to make a connection with the moment, and don't think about what happened in the past. So I really think that probably even my grandparents, they were educated, my grandfather was a doctor, but I don't think they were like doing that for the specific reason that like, know healing us or like yeah. But it was what naturally happened for us. So yeah, there are some moments when I feel a lot of pressure. I just go back for a second to the farm and to those days and thinking about the moment of like, you know, swimming in the river, or like picking the fruit or like running all over the hills.

Dacher Keltner Yeah. There's this longstanding research tradition of discovering how nature heals. And as you were saying, Hanif, I have to say we just, we literally just published a study from our lab with Virginia stern that, you know, if you just go out and walk and look for, and kind of forage in your daily, walks out in nature and parks and so forth and look for some awe it heals anxiety.

So it's good to hear you talk about that. What got you back to foraging?

Hanif Sadr I found a job as an outdoor school teacher.

Dacher Keltner Wow.

Hanif Sadr When I was like taking kids to hikes, I started seeing all the familiar ingredients.

Dacher Keltner Like what?

Hanif Sadr Like the blackberries and Persian hogweed and like sour plums, and wild mint and wild, like sorrel, all these things that I knew from my childhood, from our farm, they were all there in a matter of that summer of 2013. You know, I had to take the kids to the hike up in the park every week. And you know, every time I was finding the ingredients that I had known before from our farm in Northern Iran. So I started foraging those just as a hobby. So yeah, that's very started here.

Dacher Keltner I grew up part of my time near the UCLA campus, where my mom got her Ph.D. and there were eucalyptus trees and I, and they had, they have such a great fragrance and then I moved away from them and I didn't, you know, I didn't think about it. And then when I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, there are all these eucalyptus trees, and the fragrance kind of brought me back to childhood. And what was it like for you to find the hogweed and the sour plums and the mint and so forth that, you know, you found in Northern California, but was from your childhood in Iran?

Hanif Sadr Blackberries or less, even sometimes plums are more, very common ingredients. Right. But when I found the Persian hogweed was really a turning point for me. I couldn't even believe that the plant is right in front of me the first time I was like, oh, really, it's here?!

And I think it was really, even that moment and that plan really helped me to, to connect more with the nature here and to feel more home. Like, as you said, like when I, when I smelled it, I touched and I was like, Oh yeah, exactly tastes the same. It smells the same. It was really opened up like the whole idea of like, you know, accepting this nature of Bay Area as my new home.

So yeah, finding the Persian hogweed on the hills of Berkeley was really a turning point for me.

Dacher Keltner We know that tastes now are part of a region of your brain called the insular cortex, where our early memories are in part stored. How do you think about, like, taste and scent taking you back home? What's that like for you?

Hanif Sadr I think taste and smell both works almost the same for me. I make as an example of a specific stew, and then at some point when I eat that recipe, dish, sometimes it's like, it's like a sudden, a quick trip back to Northern Iran in my mind. So then I feel like, okay, this, this is right. And we can serve it.

And it's not just about like, yeah, that was like exactly how my, what my grandma used to make. It's just more about like how it feels like, you know, the, the whole flavor combination in your mouth, it reminds you of some specific time and place and you feel like, okay, if the flavor here works because of this time and place that we are in now, means the recipes working.

And it means, like, definitely the flavor is a bit different from what I had in Northern Iran because that flavor comes from the ingredients from that place and was cooked in that specific timeframe. But the same experience happens. It's a bit, I guess, connected to your emotions. When everything clicks, then the flavor works.

It connects you to the past, but it's still it's its own flavor profile. And from the present moment. I'm so inspired by a chef in Copenhagen, his name is René Redzepi. He's been talking about the sense of time and place in food or about what you cook. When I heard it, it really made a lot of sense to me.

And one of the only activities that nowadays that I do that really helped me to try to connect to the moment is when I wander around the heels and try to find new ingredients. Or even just, just a casual work on my way back, I can pick up a couple of like, you know, blackberries and, and eat it right away.

I think it really helps me to stay sane and then really connect to the moment. I mean, it's an activity that doesn't need a lot of exercise to help you be in the moment it's already will lead you to be in the moment.

Dacher Keltner There's this early science on the benefits of being outdoors in nature. And then there's a lot of really exciting work in South Korea and Japan now that is showing that specific tastes and fragrances, you know, from flowers or trees calm the heart reduces cortisol the stress hormone.

And so that really maps onto what you're talking about and what I sense of, you know, just finding peace out there. It's really striking. Yeah, it is. It is.

Well, Hanif, I wanted to thank you for all your amazing work and thanks for really educating us about the power of foraging.

Hanif Sadr It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me to your amazing program. I'm so happy to chat with you

Dacher Keltner Since this episode is about foraging, a friendly reminder that you can't just do it anywhere. State and local governments have their own rules, like here in California, where we produce the show, it's prohibited on state-owned lands. So please do your research first.

David Strayer There's a good reason we're drawn to activities like foraging. We've done it for thousands of years. We were essentially hunter and gatherers and our brains are essentially the same for the last hundred thousand years. We've created all this technology, but our brains haven't changed.

Hanif Sadr That's psychologist, David Strayer, our senior producer Shuka Kalantari spoke with him about what getting out into nature can do for our brains and how that can make us more creative. More after this break.

Shuka Kalantari Hi, I'm Shuka Kalantari, senior producer of the Science of Happiness. After listening to Dacher's interview with Hanif Sadr, I wondered why does being out in nature makes us feel so good.

David Strayer We were really tied to nature until, you know, just hundreds of years ago, really. And our modern existence is really quite radically different from that.

Shuka Kalantari I spoke with David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah. To get a better understanding of what's happening to our brains when we spend time in nature and how that affects creativity.

David Strayer Our brains he's really evolved to be involved in things like gathering and foraging. And that involves kind of being more connected to nature. You have to look and pay attention to the foliage, the trees, what you're trying to basically forage for, and to kind of be in the moment.

Shuka Kalantari In one of your TED talks, you discussed how the average North American spends about 10 hours a day on some form of a screen and about 30 minutes outdoors. Can you just reflect on that a bit and how that affects kind of our sense of being?

David Strayer When you rest, your mind wanders, you walk out on a hike, just even a short hike in a park. If you do it long enough, you, uh, oftentimes see these big rebounds where people actually start to think more clearly and more crisply. Now, what happens in the brain? We're starting to try and measure that, but we're just starting to scratch the surface.

Shuka Kalantari So what are we saying is we scratched the surface?

David Strayer So let's start with what happens when you're, you know, attentively looking at a screen or paying attention. You're probably concentrating and using one of the attentional networks in the brain, the executive attentional networks that rely heavily on the prefrontal cortex.

Shuka Kalantari Strayer says this part of the brain is really important for things like problem-solving decision-making and planning.

David Strayer And what we're seeing is that you can overtax those parts of the brain. You use up the mental reserves, that power, that prefrontal cortex.

Shuka Kalantari But when we're in nature, other parts of our brain get activated, which gives the prefrontal cortex a break.

David Strayer And what happens is your prefrontal cortex has a chance to rejuvenate and rejuvenate by doing things like replacing the glucose and glycogen energy reserves so that when you come back after having taken a walk or kind of rested for a little bit, you just have more mental energy to be able to allocate when you're trying to attack a problem.

Shuka Kalantari So essentially a lot of the same benefits as mindful meditation.

David Strayer It seems that there's a lot of overlap and some of the brain imaging studies have found that very similar kinds of patterns occur. So one of the things that's a little different about some kinds of meditation is you're still kind of trying to concentrate on one thought versus when you're in nature a lot of times you can watch the waves come in. You can watch a river flow by, the leaves, rustling in the trees. They capture your attention when something's moving, but as a gentle capture and you just can kind of just be kind of drawn into that gentle movement. And so the brain starts to just relax and just kind of be kind of effectively soothed by that soft fascination, allowing the cognitive control networks to replenish.

Shuka Kalantari It takes the brain some time to fully relax though. Professor Strayer calls it "The Three-Day Syndrome."

David Strayer The first day, you're still kind of wound up by going out and getting your, unpacking your car and getting all your gear, and so forth. The next day, you start to kind of recalibrate a little bit and some kind of like magic thing happens by the third day. It's probably a continual process, but it kind of totally clicks in. And my experience was that I'm part of nature. I'm not separate from it.

Shuka Kalantari Strayer wanted to see how others experienced this extended time in nature as well, and how that affected their creativity. He and his team got 56 adults to go out into the wilderness on backpacking trips.

They all took a creativity test right beforehand. Then, again, a few days into the trip. The backpackers scored 50% higher on the creativity test after spending four days in nature, disconnected from technology.

David Strayer We do see boosts in creative reasoning. That's goes hand in hand with a lot of people who talk about, wow, I hit a wall and I just had to get up from my computer for a little bit. I went for a little bit of a walk and then boom, the solution kind of came to mind. Things kind of crystallized in an interesting way. I saw things from a new frame and that's kind of in line with what we know is important for creative thinking.

If you go back to kind of more of a, in-nature, immersed in it, interacting with it. And connecting to it, that kind of probably speaks more to our evolutionary history and the way our brains are really wired.

Dacher Keltner Thanks, Shuka. In our next episode, comedian, Chris Duffy also gets out into nature to try practice called the hour walk, but instead of walking, he swims.

Chris Duffy Okay. Diving in now.

Oh, baby, that feels cold.

Dacher Keltner I'm Dacher Keltner. Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. The Science of Happiness is a co-production of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and PRX, our senior producers Shuka Kalantari production assistance from Jennie Cataldo and Ben Manilla of BMP audio. Our associate producer is Haley Gray. Our executive producer is Jane Park. Our editor-in-chief is Jason Marsh.

Do you feel like you're at a crossroads in life searching for a new purpose? We'd love to hear from you. Email us athappinesspod@berkeley.edu. Or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

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Hanif Sadr I lost my parents when I was so young, like at the age of like, six and seven. And I was raised by my grandparents. So, my grandparents are from Northern Iran, but they used to live in Tehran, the capital of Iran.

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Shared by Dr Inci Sayrak (Ozum)

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Plotinus - The Descent of the Soul into Bodies (Ennead 4.8.1)

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These were shared by Kim Tucker in Philosophy!

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Plotinus - On the Good or the One (Ennead 6.9)

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Good blog. This one is talking about our fear of a future that most likely will never happen

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Good blog. This one is talking about our fear of a future that most likely will never happen

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https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/27/seneca-anxiety/

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“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)
I found this online - related to the idea of the conflict between wanting to be true to yourself but feeling that you need to conform. I see "what is good and acceptable and perfect" as our unique presence as part of the greater spirit we all belong to.

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The word "NOW"
from Middle English nou, from Old English nu "at the present time, at this moment, immediately; now that," also used as an interjection and as an introductory word; from Proto-Germanic *nu (source also of Old Norse nu, Dutch nu, Old Frisian nu, German nun, Gothic nu "now"), from PIE *nu "now" (source also of Sanskrit and Avestan nu, Old Persian nuram, Hittite nuwa, Greek nu, nun, Latin nunc, Old Church Slavonic nyne, Lithuanian nū, Old Irish nu-). Perhaps originally "newly, recently," and related to the root of new.

NEW

Middle English neue, from Old English neowe, niowe, earlier niwe "made or established for the first time, fresh, recently made or grown; novel, unheard-of, different from the old; untried, inexperienced, unused," from Proto-Germanic *neuja- (source also of Old Saxon niuwi, Old Frisian nie, Middle Dutch nieuwe, Dutch nieuw, Old High German niuwl, German neu, Danish and Swedish ny, Gothic niujis "new").

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tropical and subtropical coniferous forests

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House in silent snow

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My family and I share a deep connection and love for the Himalayas (and nature in general). This is a bird's eye view of the inner Himalayas taken while flying to Leh Ladakh.

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I glanced at her and took my glasses off
they were still singing. They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased.
Her voice belled forth, and the sunlight bent.
I felt the ceiling arch, and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched.
"I am your own way of looking at things," she said.
"When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation."
And I took her hand.

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This article is a more in-depth overview of contemplative pedagogy

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This article is a more in-depth overview of contemplative pedagogy

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Nice brief overview of the benefits of bringing contemplative practices into the classroom

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Nice brief overview of the benefits of bringing contemplative practices into the classroom

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Introduction

Contemplative Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning with the goal of encouraging deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and heightened awareness. Learners are encouraged to engage deeply with course material through contemplation and introspection (examining their thoughts and feelings as related to the classroom content and their learning experiences). In their foundational text Contemplative Practices in Higher Education , Barbezat and Bush note that as students "find more of themselves in their courses," they will make meaningful and lasting connections to their learning.

Regardless of discipline and educational context, contemplative techniques can complement more traditional classroom activities to transform the way students come to learn about and understand the world. Many of the activities that instructors already use in the classroom-writing, close reading, reflection-may be intentionally (re)designed to draw more on contemplative practices and principles.

On this page:

The CTL is here to help!

For additional support with incorporating contemplative pedagogy into your course, email CTLFaculty@columbia.edu to schedule your 1-1 consultation .

Why Use Contemplative Pedagogy?

Instructors and learners alike deal with a multitude of distractions, demands on their time, anxieties about teaching and learning, and the pressure to multitask. There are a variety of teaching and learning challenges that one may encounter which can be addressed by contemplative pedagogical practices, including: student distraction or anxiety, superficial learning, rigid thinking, inability to see how course material relates to students' daily lives, and students who are motivated by grades, rather than by learning.

The integration of contemplative practices encourages instructors and learners to focus on the present moment, to fully engage in teaching and learning, and to achieve focus and attention in the classroom. As Barbezat and Bush note, "Professors find that not only are students better able to be present in the moment with the subject matter and each other, but they are better able to hold on to what they are learning over time and integrate it into meaningful patterns." Contemplative practices can help students tap into their emotional reaction to course materials and to confront difficult course topics, allowing them to engage more openly and holistically with the course material and their peers in the class.

Contemplative methods expand the traditional focus of teaching and learning to include:

1. Focus and attention building: Learning is enhanced as students are attentive to what and how they are learning.

2. Deeper understanding of and connection to course materials: Learning becomes more meaningful and relevant as students reflect upon course material and make connections to their experiences.

3. Compassion and connection to others: Learners develop empathy and interpersonal connection.

4. Self-inquiry, personal meaning, and creativity: Learners engage in a process of self-inquiry to deepen their relationship to their learning, tap into their creativity and insight, and develop more awareness about their own learning processes.

Instructors can build in opportunities for students to develop deeper understandings of course material by giving them time to reflect on what they are learning, how they are learning (i.e., their learning process), and by making connections between their own experiences and course material.

Practices

There is a spectrum of contemplative practices available, as illustrated by the Tree of Contemplative Practices from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Each branch represents a different category of practices that align with the root intentions of contemplative practice (awareness and connection). Below are several examples of practices that have been described in the contemplative pedagogy literature. Note: these practices can be integrated into classrooms across disciplines and institutional contexts.
Click on the toggles below to learn more about practices for mindfulness meditation, beholding, contemplative reading, and contemplative writing.

Mindfulness Meditation

Though there are various definitions of mindfulness, a common definition used in higher education is "the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment nonjudgmentally." It is helpful to remember that mindfulness is both a process (the practice of mindfulness) and an outcome ( awareness). Research shows that practices such as meditation can lead to improvements in memory, concentration, and increased capacity for attention and awareness, which can help students engage more fully with course materials as they disengage from distractions and interruptions. Meditation is often paired with other contemplative practices. For more information and examples see Barbezat and Bush
Addresses Common Teaching & Learning Challenges:

"My students are distracted and unfocused in class."

"How can I help create a supportive class climate?"

"My students are anxious about their performance in class."

Purpose:

Focus and attention building

Compassion and connection to others

Time: Varies; as little as 3-5 minutes
Implementation:

1. Sit in silence (eyes closed or soft focus)

2. Focus on the breath

3. Observe thoughts, but don't engage or judge them; allow them to flow

4. Select an object of concentration (e.g. breath, question, idea, guided visualization)

Examples: Breath awareness; contemplation on a question or concept; transition between activities or at start of class; reflection before or after difficult topics, before presentations, or before quizzes or exams.

Beholding

Beholding is a process by which we intimately explore and internalize images and objects through sustained attention. This is counter to the notion of quickly walking by artwork in a museum or the "analytical dissection of a work of art." For more information and examples see Barbezat and Bush (2014, pp. 148-157) and Haynes (2010).
Addresses Common Teaching & Learning Challenges:

"My students have been learning in superficial ways."

"How do I help my students take notice of nuance/detail in the material presented?"

"I want to help my students develop new perspectives on a topic."

"How can I stimulate my students' creativity and imagination?"

Purpose: Deeper understanding and connection to course-related images and objects; self-inquiry, personal meaning, and creativity in relation to images and objects

Time: Varies; at least 10-15 minutes

Implementation: From Joel Upton

1. Select an object or image to observe

2. Gather basic information about the work

3. Analyze form, shape, and color with full attention

4. Explore content, iconography, and symbolism

5. Identify contradictions and conflicting elements

6. Behold the work

Contemplative Reading

Contemplative reading of textual material can lead to deeper understanding; increase student engagement with, and comprehension of, the subject of the text; and greater personal connection to course materials. This practice is frequently paired with contemplative writing. For more information and examples see Barbezat and Bush, Bach and Alexander, and Corrigan.
Addresses Common Teaching & Learning Challenges:

My students struggle to understand difficult texts.

My students do not remember what they read.

Students complain that they don't see the relevance of course readings.

Purpose: Focus and attention building; Deeper understanding of and connection to course materials

Time: Varies

Implementation: Immersive, attentive, slow, done in community / in dialogue with text and others

Example: Reading aloud, in-class or as homework; use of digital media in conjunction with traditional texts; slow reading, rereading, annotating, performing, or memorizing passages.

Contemplative Writing

Contemplative writing encourages students to engage with the process of writing, rather than focusing on the final product. Contemplative writing allows students to connect more deeply to course material, express those connections, and reflect upon their learning. For more information and examples see Barbezat and Bush and Bach and Alexander.
Addresses Common Teaching & Learning Challenges:

How can I help my students overcome writer's block and procrastination?

My students are very grade-motivated, rather than learning-motivated.

I want my students to reflect on how class experiences relate to their everyday lives.

Purpose: Deeper understanding of and connection to course materials; self-inquiry, personal meaning, and creativity

Time: Varies; generally ranges from 5-20 minutes

Implementation: Varies depending on technique.
Examples:

Mindful writing: Use a few moments of reflection/contemplation before, during, or after writing to clarify and refine thoughts.

Freewriting: Write continuously (without stopping to fix grammar, spelling, etc.) for a predetermined amount of time (10-15 minutes). Prompts can be based on a specific question, more general (e.g., "when I read the text, I thought...") or by asking students to incorporate a specific word.

Journaling: students write about their experience (usually a paragraph or two) from a first-person perspective. Students sometimes benefit from more structured experience; for example, using their journal to address a specific prompt.

How Do I Get Started?

Consider the following to guide your planning and implementation of contemplative practices :

Planning - to do outside of the classroom:

Familiarize yourself with contemplative pedagogical practices; consider researching the historical and cultural context of a practice, or experiencing the practice yourself prior to implementing in class. This will allow you to guide your learners through the practice, and help them process the experience.

Start small: Make small tweaks to your pedagogical approach that are are intentional and aligned with desired learning. Introducing small changes can be more manageable than making large-scale changes to your courses, and many of these small changes can take place in the moments before class starts, in the first and last few minutes of class, and as a transition between class activities. For instance, open a class session with a mindfulness exercise (free writing, breathing) to focus student attention and prepare them for learning, or use contemplative writing at the end of class to encourage students to reflect on what they learned that day.

Have a clear pedagogical purpose for the practice, so that you can lead the session toward the goal and properly assess its impact.

Plan the structure of the practice selected, but allow for flexibility and improvisation so you can be responsive to students in the moment.

Time the activity appropriately (e.g., start-of-class, mid-class, end-of-class).

Implementation - to do inside the classroom:

Be intentional and transparent with students so that they understand the purpose of the practice and how it relates to their learning.

Articulate the purpose to your students so they are open to participating in the practice.

Contextualize it in the course so that students understand how it is affecting their learning.

Provide an opportunity for students to opt out during any practice (and complete an alternative activity) so students feel safe in exploring it.

Allow students time after the exercise to reflect on and write about their experience. If appropriate, give students an opportunity to discuss their experiences with each other.

Note: Many contemplative practices have cultural and religious foundations, and it's important to acknowledge these. Instructors who wish to adopt contemplative practices in the classroom should do so with a mindset toward openness and inclusion. Practices which draw upon evidence-based practices and the science of teaching and learning rather than religious practice can help students achieve high levels of attention, focus, and insight without causing alienation, exclusion, or discomfort. Whenever possible, instructors should strive to understand the origins of the practices they are incorporating into their courses, and should provide an appropriate amount of context about the history of the practice for students.

References

Bach, D. J., & Alexander, J. (2015). Contemplative Approaches to Reading and Writing: Cultivating Choice, Connectedness, and Wholeheartedness in the Critical Humanities. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 2(1).

Barbezat, D. P., & Bush, M. (2014). Contemplative practices in higher education: Powerful methods to transform teaching and learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Corrigan, P. T. (2013). Attending to the Act of Reading: Critical Reading, Contemplative Reading, and Active Reading. Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, 63(2012), 146.

Haynes, D. (2010). Contemplative Practice: Views from the Religion Classroom and Artist's Studio. In Arthur, R. J. (ed). Working Bibliography of Teaching and Learning Publications and Presentations related to the Work of the Wabash Center by Wabash Center Participants and Grant Recipients. Teaching Theology & Religion, 15(1), 72-83.

Lang, James. (2016). Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jossey-Bass.

Shapiro, S. L., Brown, K. W., & Astin, J. A. (2008). Toward the integration of meditation into higher education: A review of research. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Retrieved from http://www.contemplativemind.org/admin/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/MedandHigherEd.pdf

Additional Reading

The following articles are recommended as foundational to an understanding of contemplative pedagogy:

Hart, T. (2004). Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. Journal of transformative education, 2(1), 28-46.

Zajonc, A. (2013). Contemplative pedagogy: A quiet revolution in higher education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2013(134), 83-94.

Resources

Columbia Resources

Columbia offers some wellness resources for students, faculty and staff to receive counseling support and additional opportunities to explore mindfulness practices.

Office of Work/Life Mindfulness Programs are available for staff and faculty interested in developing their skills with meditation. Programs are offered each semester at CUMC.

Columbia Health - Alice Health Promotions provides mental health and wellness programs to students, faculty and staff.

CUMC Center for Student Wellness provides health and wellness programs and resources for students to maximize personal and professional development.

Higher Education Resources

Many universities are exploring and integrating contemplative pedagogy into their research and curricula. Below is a list of centers and organizations that engage in this work, publish and maintain resources to help you explore contemplative pedagogy.

The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society is an organization dedicated to promoting the use of contemplative pedagogy in higher education. This site has a large collection of resources, publications, and programs that are focused on contemplative pedagogy. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry is a peer-reviewed journal published by the center.

The Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, was founded in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the developer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. This site is filled with research and resources into the use of mindfulness-based intervention, particularly for use in healthcare fields.

The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at the Stanford University Medical School, has a wealth of research, resources, and engaging videos with a focus on compassion.

Greater Good in Action is a collection of research-based methods to cultivate a happy and meaningful life, presented by UC Berkeley.

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Contemplative Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning with the goal of encouraging deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and heightened awareness. Learners are encouraged to engage deeply with course material through contemplation and introspection (examining their thoughts and feelings as related to the classroom content and their learning experiences).

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Great starting point if you're just learning about contemplative pedagogy

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Great starting point if you're just learning about contemplative pedagogy

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Many resources and wonderful webinars

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The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind) transforms higher education by supporting and encouraging the use of contemplative/introspective practices and perspectives to create active learning and research environments that look deeply into experience and meaning for all in service of a more just and compassionate society.

We envision an education that promotes the exploration of meaning, purpose and values and seeks to serve our common human future. An education that enables and enhances personal introspection and contemplation leads to the realization of our inextricable connection to each other, opening the heart and mind to true community, deeper insight, sustainable living, and a more just society.

Though powerful and vitally important, the conventional methods of scientific research, pedagogy, and critical scholarship need to be broadened. The experiential methods developed within the contemplative traditions offer a rich set of tools for exploring the mind, the heart, and the world. When they are combined with conventional practices, an enriched research methodology and pedagogy become available for deepening and enlarging perspectives, leading to lasting solutions to the problems we confront. None of these methods require an ideology or creed and each is available equally to all.

We envision higher education as an opportunity to cultivate a deep personal and social awareness in order to stimulate inquiry into what is most meaningful to us as interconnected human beings. We seek to recast the traditional foundations for education into a truly integrative, transformative, and communal enterprise that is wholly open and inclusive of all backgrounds and that cultivates each person in the fullest possible way.

Since 1997, our programs have explored the effectiveness of contemplative practices within professional settings. Our primary focus is Higher Education. We organize and hold conferences, retreats, lectures, and intensive workshops, create and identify useful resources, and connect like-minded individuals and organizations to help bring contemplative practice to all of higher education.

Please visit our FAQ page for answers to commonly asked questions about our organization and learn more about how you can get involved. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact us.

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We envision an education that promotes the exploration of meaning, purpose and values and seeks to serve our common human future. An education that enables and enhances personal introspection and contemplation leads to the realization of our inextricable connection to each other, opening the heart and mind to true community, deeper insight, sustainable living, and a more just society.

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photo from: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/

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photo from: https://www.mosaicvoices.org/

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Maitreya Buddha, Thiksey Gompa, Leh Ladakh, India

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Maitreya Buddha, Thiksey Gompa, Leh Ladakh, India

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In May 2018, my family and I visited Leh Ladakh on vacation. It was a beautiful and spiritual experience visiting all the ancient monasteries and meditating in the gompas. This photo is one of my favorites because it reminds me of the vibrancy of the Buddha statue (symbolic of hope for the future) and the quaint atmosphere of the monastery. Also, we had to climb a lot of stairs to see this beautiful Buddha statue; so it's reminder for me to work hard in order to see the beautiful things in life ❤️ PS: I love photography, so please don't mind me sharing some of my clicks 😇