Share “Secrets are at the heart of many pieces of writing, since God, creation, the world itself, and even our own lives seem to be a secret. Every narrative is based on a question, a mystery, something we cannot understand. Mystery and secrets keep the reader in suspense, waiting for more information to be revealed. Secrets mirror the mystery of our lives, the inescapable mystery of death. The world is a mystery, yet as writers, we don’t always have to solve that mystery; rather we need to respect it and honor it. “Sod [Secret] is also connect...

Share Author Sherri Mandell is the author of a book that won the prestigious National Jewish Book Award, and she earned a master’s degree in creative writing. Her studies of Kabbalah with scholars and mystics in Israel (where she lives) led her to this project. Jewish mysticism, it turns out, has a lot of resources to encourage those of us who use creative arts to make our way into the world. She aims to help readers unravel “the spiritual truth of writing” and the ways that writing can lead to our understanding. She explains: “Writing is a mea...

Share Through benefit concerts and civil disobedience over the course of decades, renowned folksinger and songwriter Joan Baez has brought her influence to bear on issues of free speech, opposition to the Vietnam War and other military engagements of the United States, LGBT rights, desegregated schools, rights of farm workers, abolition of the death penalty, and the nuclear freeze movement. She persists in practicing civil disobedience and has faced legal challenges for following her conscience. In 1941, Baez was born in New York City to a Meth...

Share Epiphany, the day after Christmastide or the 12 days of Christmas, is traditionally celebrated in Christian churches on the first Sunday of a New Year, between January 2 and 8. The day commemorates the visit of the Three Magic to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Catholic devotional writer Edward Hays, who painted the portrait of the Three Kings at right, notes in A Pilgrim's Almanac that this is a day to honor the great star that led the Magi to the Christ child. It is a day to "bring peace and a blessing to your home" and "to ponder the larg...

Share “The arc of Thoreau’s recovery, from John’s [his brother’s] death in January 1842 to the publication of 'The Natural History of Massachusetts' in the 'Dial' for July 1842, spans just six months and resulted in neither a change of subject nor profession. Instead, the process involved a deepening, a rethinking and revalidation of an approach to nature that Thoreau had already held in a general way before John’s death. But what had been a more or less conventional romantic approach to nature quickly became, after John’s death, a profoundly f...

Share This is a little book, published posthumously, written by one of the best literary biographers of our time. Robert Richardson, who died in 2020 at 86, authored essential biographies of the three great American writers discussed in these pages. This book offers three essays on a theme common to each of them: death of loved ones and responses of recovery and returning to hope in life. When Richardson left the manuscript at his death, he’d titled it “Resilience.” His friend Megan Marshall, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margar...

While many of us take stock at the end of a year, set goals, or make new plans for the upcoming year, that sense of letting go of what we’re caught up in and the habits we’ve been living through are a part of our everyday mindfulness practice. Each time we sit for a few minutes, there’s an opportunity to let go of wherever our minds, attention, and awareness have gotten caught up in, come back, and realign ourselves with our best intentions and efforts.  It might be a sense of bringing full awareness and attention to our experience, to the peop...

Do you have a habit that you can’t change no matter what you have tried? For the last decade, I have worked as a teacher, coach, and consultant with companies. The subject of what drives and sustains change internally and socially fascinates me. I can say with absolute confidence that I know the steps to change a habit for good. These four tested steps all start with mindfulness. Step 1: Mindfulness What are habits? Habits are behaviors that become automatic because they have been performed frequently in the past. This repetition or automaticit...

Share Born in a slave family in 1864, George Washington Carver became a teacher, scientist, and advocate for poor African-Americans. Trained as an agricultural chemist, he pioneered programs to improve crops in his native South. Through various projects, he demonstrated how fertility could be restored to the land by diversification, especially by planting peanuts and sweet potatoes. In 1941 Time magazine dubbed him a "black Leonardo," a reference to the white Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci. He taught at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an...

Everyone needs their own Self-Care Plan, otherwise known as a Coping Strategy. If you’re looking to create a Self-Care Plan, start by defining self-care, examining the reasons why it’s so hard to consistently engage in self-care practices, and explore why self-care does not need to be an individual pursuit. Begin to shift toward looking at self-care as a long-term pursuit, one in which taking care of our inner and outer selves are equal parts of the equation. With these easy steps, we’ll learn how to develop coping strategies that can help us a...

Back in the 1990s, I was living outside Seattle, working at an internet startup during the first internet boom (the web 1.0 days). Oftentimes users would call to complain their system wasn’t working. Our response? Reset your computer. Even twenty years later a reset still fixes tech issues most of the time. It’s like the old line from Tara Brach, “everything works better once you’ve unplugged it for a while.”  So how do we reset ourselves and our dysregulated nervous systems when we’re emotionally overwhelmed? When I’m talking to kids or teens,...

With so many options for mindfulness and meditation podcasts today, it can be hard to choose just one episode to listen to while you commute, run on the treadmill, or wind down after work on the couch. We’re here to help with the top recommendations we reviewed this year.  Whether you’re looking for insightful conversations with teachers, skillful advice for working through a challenge, or simply inspiration for how to approach life with a little more compassion, we hope you enjoy the following mindfulness and meditation podcasts that stood out...

Adobe Stock/ antianti In the season of gift-giving, we may find ourselves saying “thanks” more often than usual. Saying thanks can become habitual, but there’s an opportunity to feel thankful, too, if we choose it. Embodying gratitude is more than a quick “thank you” when a stranger holds a door open or a way to end a transactional conversation. Building your capacity for gratitude isn’t difficult but it takes practice. Here are five gratitude meditations to fill your heart and help you re-discover the simple joys of giving thanks.  1) A 10-Min...

Share When the Catholic church declared Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821) a saint in 1975, she became the first native-born American to be canonized. Use a portion of her feast day to learn more about this extraordinary person in religious history. To Name This Day: Films The 1980 film A Time for Miracles: The Story of Mother Seton is available for purchase for $17.95 from Ignatius Press. Kate Mulgrew plays this convert to Catholicism who overcame adversity and went on to found the Catholic order the Sisters of Charity and the first Americ...

Share This meditation primer draws in elementary–school children through an appealing graphic-novel format sprinkled with humor, yet is surprisingly broad in scope. Leo lives in a family where everyone — his mother, father, older sister, the cat, and even, apparently, his teddy bear — meditates. He realizes that he doesn't even know what meditation is, so he asks his mom. She explains that it's like looking through the magnifying glass at the discovery museum: "Meditating means putting your whole mind on one thing." Leo has no trouble coming up...

Share St. Seraphim of Sarov was born in 1759. His parents were pious Orthodox Christians, and young Seraphim was immersed in church services. He was ordained as a priest at age 34 and then spent fifteen years in solitary existence as a hermit in the forest. Later he served as a spiritual counselor to lay people whom he called "my joys," seeing them at the monastery or at his forest cell. He was known for his visions and clairvoyant powers. He died on this day in 1833 and was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1903. St. Seraphim of Saro...

Share The basis of this book is a scientific study performed by the Harvard Study of Adult Development with individuals over the course of eighty years of life. Its results — and the authors’ corresponding conclusions — are multifaceted, but all center around one certainty: Relationships matter more than anything else to human happiness. What makes a good life? Why do some people flourish more than others? Many, many things, of course, are factors, but the authors — a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School plus the associate director...

Share “This is an important concept, the concept of protection. Life is hard, and sometimes it comes at you in full attack mode. Warm, connected relationships protect against the slings and arrows of life and of getting old. “Once we had followed the people in the Harvard Study all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn’t. So we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50 and found that it wasn’t their middle...

Share Image credit: Henry Louis Stephens (1824–1882), man reading a newspaper with headline, "Presidential Proclamation, Slavery." Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued during the Civil War by President Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863, was a calculated military move — upon which a crucial spiritual principle rode. The September before, Lincoln had warned that in four months, anyone still held as a slave in a Confederate state would be given freedom: "... on the 1st day of January, AD 1...

Share British novelist E. M. Forster was born on this day in 1879. He died on June 7, 1970. Recently, he has gained a new appreciative audience thanks to screen translations of several of his novels. To Name This Day: Pay homage to this gifted writer by watching one of the following: • A Passage to India is Forster's award winning drama criticizing British colonial rule and demonstrating his affection for Indian mysticism. • A Room with a View is an exquisite comedy of manners conveying Forster's scorn for individuals who are tethered by class ...