Where would you find yourself if your need to be right and your addiction to certainty dissolved into a willingness to listen? Who would you be, then? And who would we be together—as a country, as a planet—if each one of us actually knew what listening was and how to do it because we had, over the course of our lives, been deeply listened to?
A sense of beauty is a rigorous, perhaps even objective, foundation for environmental ethics. Our human aesthetic judgment integrates many strands of experience: intellect, emotion, bodily senses, and all we know from our interactions with others, both human and non-human others. From this integration, we understand the good. Of course, an aesthetic sense is subject to the whims of desire,…
Around the world, citizens are arising with new energy for transformation. The Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements were two recent manifestations of this. People are demanding that they participate and lead in their own governance and development. It is time to move beyond the control of corporatocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, patriarchy, and militarism. Citizens are capable of governing…
If we look at the political and social conditions on this planet, all indicators point out that the days ahead will be difficult ones. We are experiencing what Isaac Asimov called “the angry planet.” However, I believe it is not only an angry planet, but a sick and suffering planet. Since the beginning of the Renaissance period, Western civilization has…
During the winter season a few years ago, 108 inches of snow fell in Boston, breaking the record for the most seasonal snowfall in recorded history. And this snow, it did not melt. We watched it drift into six-foot banks in our backyard, burying our dwarf Japanese maple entirely. Day after day dawned frigid, stinging our cheeks as soon as…
At the Garrison Institute, we believe our current ecological crisis is also a spiritual crisis—one that asks us to both deepen our emotional, intuitive, and embodied ways of relating to the earth and to expand our collective sense of perspective, meaning, and solidarity around the global crisis. However, in addition to our efforts to encourage a societal shift around profound…
The phrase “voluntary simplicity” has, to my ears anyway, a quasi-paradoxical ring to it, not unlike “waking dream.” It accrues meaning by pointing to the implicit assumption in its antithesis: That we are by default, if not involuntarily, immersed in a world that tends toward complexity and confusion. For most of us alive today in the hyper-real world of the…
New York magazine recently published one of the grimmest accounts of the possible results of climate change. Unfortunately, it comes at the same time as news arrives of the long-anticipated “calving” from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica, creating of one of the largest icebergs ever, a sad reminder of the startling changes being brought by the warming planet.…