The Gift of Grief

An elderly man caught my eye on Decatur Street. He was encouraging tourists to drop money in a hat for his friend, a street musician. As we chatted, we realized we were acquainted forty years ago. He was the neighbor of a family I’m close to from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. When I asked how he was doing, he replied, “a hard life makes a good song.” The past forty…

To Lament | Dawn Songs and the Human-Bird Bond

"The term ‘lament’ is typically associated with grief, with sorrow, with loss. Maybe the loss is physical – a beloved passes. Maybe the loss is etheric – a longed for dream of what could be is dissolved by circumstance. Those who have awakened to the nature of dawn songs lament the loss of birds… Perhaps lamentation is a song that enables the necessary mystery to find us in ways that we long to…

Seven Foundations for a New Era

"I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds...how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there…

Impermanent and Eternal | Portraits of Tibet

It has been (and continues to be) a joy to be allowed to record the lives of these remarkable people – a kind of photo-driven love letter to what could be a dying way of life. The experience of hanging out with families in their black yak hair tents has been both down to earth and profound, awakening some ancient memory inside me.

The Penetrating Wind

"To be released into the visceral certainty of being connected to everything is to become receptive to the influences of everything upon me. That my actions reach far beyond a parochial view is confirmed. I am reminded that the boundaries of those actions are virtually non-existent, that everything is always in intra-active motion. I cannot assume as much choice about how my life unfolds as I…

First There Must Be an End

"I don’t write to announce the end of the world or to change the minds of those who are convinced that the world as we have known it can be saved or made sustainable. I write for anyone who has found themselves, as I have, needing to make sense of what is ending, how we can talk about it and what tasks are worth taking on in whatever time it turns out that we have."

Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Gustavo Esteva

DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES Episode 1 – Alnoor Ladha with Gustavo Esteva Alnoor Ladha (AL) | Welcome to the Deschooling Dialagues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change. Learn more at www.culturehack.io…

The Sanctity of Food

The sacred within us instinctively resonates with the sanctity of food. Therefore, the growing, transporting, distribution, and consumption of food are sacred acts that deserve ritual and reverence from the moment the seed is planted in the Earth to the moment we have washed and put away the plate on which our food was served.

The Promise of Liberty and the Pain of Separation

We have a civilisation that is unrooted from its embodied past, focused on separation and the “objective” world intelligible to the rational mind, and which has lost its ability to sense the relationships in the whole and feel the suffering that we inflict on other life forms.