Andreas Nussbaumer, with credit to his wife, recounts being lured away from a successful business career and the empty feeling that came with it “into just being, surrounded by the vegetables and the animals.” They steward a sanctuary for rescued farm animals in Weppersdorf, Austria. Animals “show...
In a test center in the Netherlands, a sleek white-and-yellow vehicle glides quietly over concrete -- but it was built for something far rougher: the red-dirt roads of rural Kenya, where the nearest clinic can be a day's journey away. Twenty-three university students, many of whom paused their...
At seventeen, Charles Gibbs was asked to stay after Sunday school class by a well-meaning elder -- and left with a message that would redirect the entire arc of his life: we don't ask questions like that here. Rather than killing his spiritual hunger, that closed door sent him into theater,...
Luke Holdsworth spent his teenage years assuming live music simply wasn't for him -- not until his mid-20s did he attend his first concert, standing in a crowd he couldn't fully enter. Now, as one of the UK's most respected British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters at live events, he...
Sister Elizabeth Greim dreamed of becoming a nun early on, but was told she couldn’t because her parents were divorced. In spite of this and other rejections, she wanted to be of service. In 1993, at age 33, with 4 earrings in each ear, a cigarette dangling, a failed marriage, and nowhere else to...
The tailor said 150 meters would be enough. One dress each. But the grieving mother looked at him and replied, "I want to give them five dresses each." There was silence. Then came school bags, lunch boxes, water bottles, chocolates, and name tags -- so that each child at the orphanage would...
Every message Ella Joy Martinez writes disappears with the tide -- and that's exactly the point. The 13-year-old from Kaua'i, who has Down Syndrome and is nonverbal, has turned a family shoreline ritual into Sand Scribletz, a small business offering handwritten sand messages photographed...
For many of us, when someone else is speaking, our minds are busy. As we take in what they are saying, we may be quietly, and often unknowingly, holding court inside our own heads -- agreeing, disagreeing, comparing, diagnosing, solving. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a pioneer in the fields of healing...
Randima Fernando spent seven years scaling mindfulness into schools and eight more advising Silicon Valley on humane design — which is precisely why it lands differently when he says meditation alone won't save you. Not because it doesn't work, but because the thing on the other side of...
At fifteen, Ruth Brigandi woke up without language, without a name, without any sense of where her body ended and the world began. For four months, she existed in a state of pure, undifferentiated presence -- no emotions, no thoughts, no self. Modern medicine attributed it to inflammation in the...