Assuming Value Everywhere
Viral Mehta
They call it a “kindness internship.” My fourteen-year-old cousin and his best friend have decided, of their own accord, to spend much of their summer creating spontaneous and mostly anonymous opportunities to grow in kindness.
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Hogwarts Is Home
Rhiannon Thomas
Hogwarts is home. I have never climbed its marble staircase or eaten breakfast in its candle-lit Great Hall, but since I was eight years old, a part of me has lived within its walls. I shared my childhood with Harry Potter, poring over the well-worn pages of J.K. Rowling’s novels and forming lasting friendships on spontaneous debates about his adventures and his world. When I proudly declare that I am part of the “Harry Potter generation,” I don’t simply mean that I grew up during the period that these seven books were published, but that my life for as long as I have known, and possibly for a long time to come, has been shaped and strengthened by this series.
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Finding the Path
Tracy Cochran
(Paintings by Emma Tapley)
Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer. Before dawn and before every meditation session during the day, the bell ringers walk around the grounds and through the halls of a rambling brick building that was once a Jesuit seminary, striking a bronze bell that is held suspended by a thick strap. I remember being curled in a little cell of a room, hearing the bell sound deep and low in the distance. As the “awakener” progressed on his or her appointed rounds, layer upon layer of reverberations built up so that the ringer literally struck a chord that touched the heart—at least this heart.
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The Unfinished Painting
Mark Nepo
Dreams and art are the smoke signals connecting the one tribe over time. Stories and myths do the same. Often we are so greatly taxed by circumstance that we lose the larger view of time and how we are always related, not only to those around us but to those who came before us and those who will come after us. Often when I’m thrown out of my own complications, I feel a sense of this larger tribe that I can never quite name or place. When tossed into great loss or wonder, I feel compelled to understand this unnamable community.
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