
One Saturday when I was 14, my friend Erin and I were hanging out at my home when the minister of our church stopped by to lay his hands on my mom’s sprained ankle.…
One Saturday when I was 14, my friend Erin and I were hanging out at my home when the minister of our church stopped by to lay his hands on my mom’s sprained ankle.…
Our beautiful green planet just marked a shocking new milestone – enduring 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat. Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record.…
What if, all through your childhood, your dad told you things like, “You’re gonna shake up this world,” and, “You’re gonna win Wimbledon.” And drove you past mansions in the wealthy part of town, assuring you that some day you’d have one of your own.…
It’s hard to imagine, especially for those of us (like me) who spent our summer vacations haunting the local library and devouring adventure novels, but many U.S. kids have no library near where they live – and thus no access to books.…
Waxing Moon Goddess by Ramona Szczerba
I went salsa dancing last Saturday night for the first time in years. Salsa used to be my world, and I was out dancing at least five times a week.…
A butterfly is a delicate, ephemeral creature. So, the Zuni Butterfly Dance, which took place off a dusty, remote New Mexico road, came as a shock to many. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes it in Women Who Run with the Wolves, the dancer, Maria Lujan, was a large, elderly native woman with long, gray hair wearing a one-shouldered, red-and-black blanket dress and sporting butterfly wings.…
Some years ago, motivational teacher Debra Poneman was preparing a big speech for Jack Canfield’s Transformational Leadership Council. But fate had a twist up its sleeve. As Poneman recalls, “I had my presentation all planned, replete with my flip chart and white board and power point, and I was ready to romp around the stage and give the presentation of a lifetime.…
“Anything done for another is done for oneself.” –Pope John Paul II
Human beings can be profoundly contradictory. Take Pope John Paul II, who helped usher the Catholic Church into the 21st century.…
At age 35, Jennifer Flewellen was put into a medically induced coma after crashing her car into a pole. Doctors soon became certain she would never recover and encouraged Flewellen’s mother, Peggy Means, to take her off life-support.…
“Newton was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head and he discovered gravity. And we here are living in darkness and tragedy, and rockets are falling on us, therefore I thought of creating light.”…
There’s no place so identified with car culture as California. Once the fourth-largest crude oil producer in the U.S., my home state’s abundant fossil fuels and balmy weather helped birth a culture of iconic cars, highways, drive-in theaters and restaurants.…
Martha Graham’s provocative dance, Errand into the Maze
In the mid-1940s, legendary dance choreographer Martha Graham was on a flight to Iran that got caught in a brutal snowstorm. As the plane was tossed about, everyone onboard went into a panic – terrified that they were going to die.…
“Relax” is my word for 2024. At first I was annoyed when I drew this rune from a bag. What do you mean, relax? That’s all I’ve been doing in 2023!…
When Time Magazine asked Taylor Swift to pose for the cover as their Person of the Year, her response was, “Can I bring my cat?”
That’s how Swift and Benjamin Button (one of her three cats), ended up on the Dec.…
When legendary photographer Sebastião Salgado took over family land in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, instead of the tropical paradise that he remembered as a child, he found a barren landscape devoid of wildlife.…