Sangha of Auspicious Companions

How Morocco’s Abandoned Cemeteries Give New Life Across Faiths

Abandoned cemeteries in Morocco are opening hearts between Jewish and Muslim people in a unique interfaith project that began in 2012 when the Moroccan Jewish community allowed 36-year-old Abderahim Baddah to use land beside the Akrich cemetery to cultivate crops while restoring the site. Now that once abandoned 700-year-old Jewish cemetery is home to a plant nursery run by local Muslims that gives the community 46,000 fruit and nut tree saplings and has brought the village other benefits such as solar panels, a water well, and a women’s weaving cooperative. Thanks to the nonprofit High Atlas Foundation, the idea is spreading and many old Jewish burial sites are being loaned for free to establish organic fruit tree and medicinal plant nurseries that benefit Muslim villagers. Nearly 300,000 tree saplings, including almond, fig, pomegranate, olive and carob, have been grown and supplied to 1,500 farming families since 2012.

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Find a land-based project to work on with people of other faiths. Think outside the box when it comes to economic development.

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The Ice Cube Forest

On Google Earth, Nguyen Minh Hai’s twenty-year forest looks like an ice cube melting in hot water—a small patch of biodiversity surrounded by endless monoculture. It began with a misunderstanding: Vietnamese farmers read Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution and thought natural farming would be easy. One woman spent $21,000 clearing hillsides, pumping water uphill, battling disease—only to notice, exhausted and broke, that the land she’d left untouched had grown trees “as thick as paint buckets.” As one Dutch engineer discovered, “I even built my house around a large boulder instead of breaking it.” Over a decade, these farmers learned that the forest’s secret lies in a humble 5% of the soil—the living organisms that activate everything else. Now they call each other “straw,” a network of gift-economy practitioners who’ve realized that nurturing a forest and nurturing oneself are the same slow revolution. The ultimate goal, Fukuoka wrote, is not growing crops but “the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

Be The Change

Notice one thing in your life you’ve been trying to control or fix through force. This week, experiment with stepping back—let it rest, observe what emerges naturally when you stop intervening.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

In the past month’s roundup of stories and articles from DailyGood, we explored the quiet revolutions shaping our lives.

In recent weeks on DailyGood, we embarked on journeys that redefined success beyond the glitter, as Rudy Karsan shared palpable realizations after selling his company for a billion dollars. Meanwhile, 17 year-old Chanda Prosper illuminated the power of learning beyond talent through his self-taught physicist eyes. Kevin Kelly reminded us of the everyday miracles we encounter through the kindness of strangers. Jennifer Schramm took us to the barn, where leadership lessons from horses offered grounding wisdom. Abby Falik explored the essential task of rebuilding trust from within. Aryae Coopersmith shared a harrowing moment of clarity in embracing life when faced with danger. Vicki Garlock’s journey through 185 doors revealed unexpected connections in her quest for a world record. Lastly, Brinda Govindan found the energy of community in the simple act of sharing food, illustrating the deep ties that bind us all.

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Inside the Teen-Run Hotline Meeting America’s Mental Health Crisis

Teen Line was founded in 1980 under a different name; the grassroots nonprofit evolved into a vital resource for young people struggling with stress, loneliness, relationships and mental health challenges. Teen Line still runs on the same core model: Trained teens supporting peers through nonjudgmental listening. “I think the biggest thing I say to almost every caller is that it’s okay not to be okay,” says Sanaya, a soft-spoken volunteer who joined in fall 2024 and prefers to only give her first name. “There’s such a culture, especially among teenagers, to just say, ‘I’m fine.’ But by reassuring them that it’s really okay to talk about what’s going on, people start to open up. Then we can have a much deeper conversation.” Teen Line’s mission feels more critical than ever. Approximately 40 percent of U.S. high-school students report persistent sadness or hopelessness, and suicide remains the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24. Teen Line fills a widening gap in the nation’s fraying youth mental health system — with no federal funding, only grants, donations and the dedication of 100 teen volunteers who log more than 10,000 contacts a year from youth around the world.

Be The Change

Reach out and truly listen to a young person in your life today. Ask how they’re really doing, create space for them to be honest, and validate their feelings without judgment.

What Blackberries Teach About Being Human

Rebecca Solnit once stood in a creek for hours, picking blackberries until her hands were scratched and stained purple, until the quiet had soaked into her. The jam she made was runny and seedy, but she gave it anyway — not as product but as process, as summer itself. Now Silicon Valley tells us to skip the wading, the scratches, the slow ripening of attention. We can order berries online, let AI judge their ripeness, outsource even our love letters and grief. But what we’re abandoning isn’t inefficiency — it’s the work of forging a self. As one bookstore clerk lamented, “People under 30 don’t make eye contact.” We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by naming what gets lost: the embodied animal joy of holding and being held, the resilience built through unmediated contact, the subtle wealth of giving as well as receiving. Ease, it turns out, can be corrosive.

Be The Change

Today, deliberately choose the slower path in one interaction: speak your order to a person instead of tapping a screen, write a thank-you note by hand, or simply hold someone’s gaze long enough to really see them. Notice what the friction gives you.

Mysterious ‘Hero’ Dog Leads Police Straight to Missing 3-year-old Officer Says in Body Cam Video

A police officer hooked his own instincts up to those of a local dog to find a missing 3-year-old in Kentucky in early January. Officer Josh Thompson was canvassing the street near the boy’s house with another officer when a dog started walking with them. After Thompson said “let’s go find this kid,” the dog spun around and started trotting back in the direction they had come from, barking periodically to say “hurry up.” Returning to the back of the house, the dog ran to a parked car, where the boy was locked inside with the child locks on. After coaching him on how to open the door, the boy “jumped out of the car, bear hugged my neck and wouldn’t let go,” said Thompson. He doesn’t know where the dog came from (neither does the department nor CBS) “but it was a blessing from God that day.”

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Today, notice when your first instinct is to be wary or to keep moving past something unexpected-a stray animal, an unfamiliar person, an interruption to your plan. Like Officer Thompson, who paused to follow a barking dog when he could have dismissed it, practice trusting that small tug of intuition that says “pay attention here.” Let yourself be led off-script just once, even if it feels inefficient or uncertain, and see what you might discover when you merge your heart and mind in the moment.

What the Glitter Couldn’t Give Me

When Rudy Karsan sold his company for over a billion dollars, he took a picture of the check, called the banker, and felt nothing. The elation never arrived. Instead, he cried every night for three weeks — the longest he had ever wept. What followed was a radical unraveling: he sold the Ferrari, threw away fifty trophies, moved with three boxes and his clothes. The man who had gone bankrupt three times chasing what he calls “glitter” discovered something unexpected in the emptiness. “The pathway to joy, for me, turned out to be three words: I don’t know,” he writes. Each time he says it, a warm feeling opens — he becomes a child again, curious, undefended. Now he asks every entrepreneur about their perception of death before investing. Joy, he’s learned, is the only currency you can’t bank. You’ve got to earn it every day.

Be The Change

Today, practice saying “I don’t know” when someone asks you something — not as evasion, but as genuine curiosity. Notice what opens inside you when you release the need to have the answer.

The Last Newspaper Hawker in Paris

Ali Akbar, the voice of Paris’ 6th arrondissement, is believed to be the last newspaper hawker in Paris. For more than 50 years, he has made the rounds on his secondhand bicycle. Last month, an old customer — French President Emmanuel Macron — named him a knight in the National Order of Merit, one of France’s highest honors. At 73, Akbar still works seven days a week, 10 hours a day, although now he’s lucky to make about 60 euros – about $70 – a day. Born in Pakistan, the oldest of 10 children, he grew up in poverty but dreamed of building his mom a house. After he wound up in Paris in 1973, an Argentinian friend suggested selling newspapers in the Latin Quarter. Eventually he built his mother her house, and he and his wife, Aziza, raised five sons in Paris. In his neighborhood, people say Akbar has given them something priceless — a chance for daily human connection. “He’s interested in you, and then you’re interested in him,” says a longtime customer. “And this is very rare now in the big cities.”

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