Sangha of Auspicious Companions

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

As we look back on this week’s inspirations, themes of transformation and renewal wove across inspired unfoldings across the globe.

We explored how being the change we wish to see in the world is a practice accessible to anyone, as highlighted in a Colorado mayor’s weekly stay in a homeless shelter. We saw how a mother’s love holds the power to transform systems, as witnessed in a cafe chain founder’s journey towards a more inclusive society. In France, the ‘Civic Hour’ celebrates generosity as a renewable energy, where people across 250 French municipalities have offered one no-strings-attached hour to give of their presence, time, and heart. Additionally, a Paris bakery is doing its part to reduce food waste by showing how yesterday’s croissants can indeed pave the way for a sustainable tomorrow. Meanwhile, a man in England who researches forgotten lives reminds us of life’s delicate impermanence and the gift of the present. Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto reflects on an elusive practice of emptiness by looking beyond the assumptions we carry about how things work. Finally, the view of trees as sanctuaries comes alive as a Quebec town grants them legal rights, inviting us to listen to and learn from nature. As we enter a new week, these stories remind us that transformation, like nature, is ever-present and ever-possible.

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Why Ukraine Is Rewilding in the Heat of War

In the semi-arid grasslands of southwestern Ukraine, within earshot of missile strikes, conservationists are returning wild donkeys, horses, and buffalo to a steppe that hasn’t heard their ancient sounds in two centuries — and in doing so, are rebuilding something more than an ecosystem. Rewilding Ukraine’s work in the Tarutino Steppe is at once practical and quietly radical: the reintroduced kulan reduce wildfire risk from exploding mines, enrich depleted soils, and sequester carbon, while the organization brings war veterans into rewilded landscapes as part of PTSD recovery and gathers Ukrainian and Romanian schoolchildren at the Danube Delta to learn what it means to tend a living world. “I genuinely love nature and I feel deeply connected to this landscape,” says local volunteer Petro Hramatik, whose words carry the particular weight of someone who has chosen to stay close to what he loves even as the ground around him is mined. In the spring of 2022, a kulan foal — the first born wild in 200 years — stumbled to its feet on the Tarutino Steppe after a punishing winter, making history in the middle of a war that was making its own kind of history. That an act of restoration could continue, and even bear new life, under such conditions says something worth sitting with about where human beings choose to place their hope.

Be The Change

Step outside today and spend five minutes listening, really listening, to whatever living sounds surround you — whether birdsong, wind in trees, or even a dog barking down the street. Paying attention to the landscape is itself an act of care, and noticing what’s already wild and alive near you is where a deeper relationship with nature begins. Let yourself be surprised by what you’ve been moving past without hearing.