Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire explains how great ideas arise:

"Inspiration is merely the reward for working every day."

Source: Curiosites Esthetiques (1868)

There are a lot of organizational structures and lived practices embedded in our bodies that we just enact by default. But through explicit facilitation practices or when we make meetings happen in a certain way, that helps change these conditioned ways of operating. In the process of learning to work this way, what really helps is, again, trust. T... See more

At 97, Monti is animated and unstoppable. She runs Santa Maddalena as her personal passion project, accepting no applications and choosing writers according to her instincts, in consultation with her network of friends, publishers and other authors. Her taste, developed over a lifetime of nurturing and being nurtured by literature and art, is consi... See more

Telling stories is a process of mattering. Who matters? When we tell stories, we make ethical choices about who to bring in and who to leave out. We cannot bring in all of the voices. The voices themselves only come to exist once we recognize them. The in-between power increases the probability that we notice the voices, listen to the voices and in... See more

No matter how much wisdom you gain from the pages of your favorite author, if you haven’t experienced the visceral events that led to that wisdom yourself, then it’s just knowledge. Sure, you can leverage the hard-earned wisdom of others to help you, but understanding only happens when you earn that wisdom in the tumultuous arena of real life.

Then I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points'' (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it ... See more

The world can feel very out of control, especially for younger people. And controlling your own body is a coping mechanism. Part of the solution, if there is one, is to educate about this. There's so much out there right now about diet culture, and no one is really talking about beauty culture in the same way.

At the same time, a lot of this would b... See more

In choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we’ll ever know. And to me, that’s the substance of the spiritual journey. That’s not an exasperating idea but an infinitely emboldening one.