Sangha of Auspicious Companions

A Dentist and 200 Bears

When Alan Knight slid photographs of a broken-toothed bear across the desk, a Chichester dentist named Martin Mulcahy couldn’t look away — and couldn’t say no. What followed was a 20-year detour into one of medicine’s more improbable callings: dental surgery for rescued wildlife. His first patient, a 180-kilogram sloth bear named Anthony, died on the operating table three hours in — anaesthesia gone wrong, local vets walking out with the words “you’ve killed our bear” still hanging in the air. What brought Anthony back was a crash kit, a shot of adrenaline, and three minutes of chest compressions from a man who had never lost a patient before. “When he woke up, I felt triumphant,” Mulcahy recalls. Anthony the bear went on to live another decade. Since then: 200 bears, half a dozen tigers, lions, hyenas, gorillas, orangutans, and one nickname — “Bear Drills.” There is something quietly instructive in this story: that a single photograph, shown at the right moment to the right person, can redirect an entire life towards others. The bears he treats have suffered deliberate cruelty — teeth hammered out by poachers to make them seem tame. Restoring what was broken is, in its way, a form of healing delivered without fanfare, one root canal at a time.

Be The Change

Spend at least 15 minutes with a non-human creature today. It could be a furry friend, a feathered wildlife, or a leafed form of life. Notice what gets communicated beyond words.

How Trees Stand Tall

Lay a young poplar on its side, surround it with light from every direction, eliminate gravity’s pull — and watch what happens. Over time, the tree rights itself, pushing back toward vertical through a mechanism that looks, functionally, like a muscle. Researchers from France’s INRAE have confirmed what was only suspected fifteen years ago: trees produce a specialized “tension wood” on alternating sides of their stems, working in opposing push-pull fashion the way antagonist muscles do in animals. The discovery points to what scientists call a “sensorimotor loop” — the tree sensing its own posture and actively correcting it. As lead researcher Bruno Moulia puts it, “poor coordination in the successive activation of tension wood results in excessive internal tension” — which means trees, like athletes, can be undone by their own straining. What lingers is not just the finding but the implication: we have been walking past beings engaged in a form of embodied intelligence for centuries without noticing. The researchers hope this helps cure what they call “plant blindness” — our tendency to see the living green world as backdrop rather than protagonist.

Be The Change

Notice the trees in your neighborhood or daily surroundings. Step-it-up by putting your hands on the trunk of a tree for one minute, and simply try to sense what is happening inside it.

Wendell Berry’s Life on Earth

Wendell Berry spent 92 years insisting that the largest problems in the world are answered, first, in the smallest gestures — a seed planted, a field tended, a pencil drawn across paper. The writer and farmer from Henry County, Kentucky, authored more than 50 books without a computer, was arrested twice for environmental protests, and still resisted the urgency that defined the movements he stood beside, believing that apocalyptic thinking missed something essential: “the world had no end and no beginning.” As his friend and scholar Jeffrey Bilbro observed, Berry understood that “our hands are all dirty, and we’re making these compromises, and it’s better to be honest about the necessity to do so and try to do what we can to live right, even if we can’t attain the purity that we might wish.” What Berry left behind is less a set of arguments than a way of seeing — one in which tending a handful of soil and fighting for a mountaintop are not different acts, but the same act at different scales. He trusted that a person who truly learns to belong to a place will naturally want to protect it, and that this quiet belonging is where lasting change begins.

Be The Change

Go outside today and find one small living thing — a weed pushing through pavement, a beetle crossing your path, a patch of moss — and stay with it long enough to really look. Berry believed that “in coming into relationship with the smallest handful of earth, you can understand what it means to fight for change almost too enormous to fathom,” and that shift in scale is itself a kind of action. Let this moment of attention be the beginning of something, even if you never see its end.

Gander’s Solace in a Time of Crisis

On the morning of September 11, 2001, 38 planes descended on a small Canadian town of 12,000 people who had no plan, no warning, and no hesitation. Gander, Newfoundland — perched at the edge of the Atlantic, closer to Europe than to most of Canada — became an accidental refuge for 7,000 stranded passengers from all over the world after the United States closed its airspace due to the tragic terrorist attacks. In Gander, schools opened. Churches opened. The local hockey rink was packed with food and used as a giant cooler. And volunteers like Beulah Cooper showed up with sandwiches, drove strangers to pay phones, and offered her own shower and bed to people she’d never met. “It does so good in here,” Cooper says, tapping her chest, “to know that you’re doing something to help somebody.” What followed became the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical “Come From Away” — a show that its creators call a “9/12 musical,” deliberately focused not on the catastrophe but on what ordinary people did the next morning. Former Mayor Claude Elliott, who had never seen a musical in his life, has now watched it 139 times across six countries. The story of Gander doesn’t argue for anything or prove a point — it simply shows what happens when a community decides that the people who have landed on their doorstep are their people now.

Be The Change

Think of one person currently “stranded” in your orbit. Perhaps someone new to the neighborhood, going through a challenging time, or simply unknown to you — and offer one small, specific act of welcome today: a meal, a listening ear, an invitation in.

At 96, the ‘Third Part of Life’ May Be the Best of All

At 96 years-old, Alice McGinty does resistance training three times a week, travels to Costa Rican jungles, and shows her paintings — work that has grown more vivid and abstract since macular degeneration narrowed her world to color alone. What she is pushing against is quieter than any of that: “It is subtle and unspoken,” she says of the dismissal she feels. “It is a quietness.” McGinty has named something many older people sense but rarely have the platform to articulate — that society’s silence around the later decades of life is its own kind of message, and that refusing to receive it is a form of courage. Perhaps the most striking thing she offers isn’t her yoga practice or her Instagram following, but this hard-won interior shift: “I have learned how to trust myself … perhaps one of the greatest gifts of getting older is realizing that trusting myself isn’t selfish; it is finally becoming someone I can count on.” She is not waiting to be studied, supported, or seen — she is simply, insistently, living.

Be The Change

Think of someone in your life who is at the edges of your daily world. Reach out to them today, and genuinely ask what they’re learning or excited about right now.

Wire Baskets of Books at the Laundromat

On the wall of a laundromat in Wyoming, Ohio, four wire baskets hold books like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel — each one stickered with an invitation to “Read it, Love it, Pass it on.” It’s a small thing, and also not a small thing at all. The Laundromat Library League, now spanning more than 200 locations across the United States, was born when two Pennsylvanians noticed children slumped over their parents’ phones in the spin-cycle waiting room and thought: ‘What if there were books instead?’ Volunteer stewards like Janice Weiser restock their displays every ten days, pulling stray magazines and adding donated titles — a quiet, unglamorous act of care on a regular Tuesday. The numbers behind the project carry their own weight: four in ten fourth graders read below grade level, and that figure climbs to seven in ten among lower-income children — kids who are also less likely to have age-appropriate books at home. A 2019 study found that children in laundromats with reading spaces engaged in literacy activities 30 times more than those without. As one board member puts it, “We find children where they live, where they spend time” — which turns out to be one of the most radical things you can do for a child. Over a decade, the league has quietly placed more than 400,000 books into circulation, one borrowed copy at a time.

Be The Change

Think of a laundromat, waiting room, or community space near you that could benefit from having children’s books. Gather a dozen children’s books from friends, a local library sale, or your own shelves and ask the owner of the space if you can set up a small book display. It could be as simple as a box with a handwritten sign.

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What Clowns Know About Saying Yes

Natalie Porias never planned to lead an organization of professional clowns working in earthquake zones and hospices — she just Googled “fundraising” and applied for an open internship in that department. Twenty years later, she’s CEO of Red Noses International, and one of her greatest lessons involves a single conjunction: replace “but” with “and,” she says, and watch how the world shifts. In the 2023 rubble of post-earthquake Turkey, sleeping on a bunk bed behind a curtain from three snoring colleagues — a Slovak, a Croatian, and a Palestinian — Natalie watched a clown playing ukulele with a kebab vendor while a small crowd gathered in the ruins. There was no agenda, and no transaction. Later, a woman who had lost her son to a motorcycle accident, and then her family to the earthquake, sat for forty-five minutes engaging with a clowning artist who kept dropping things. “Maybe we can put in a little sparkle,” Natalie says, “so that she feels it’s not all dark.” The clown’s art, she has come to understand, is precisely this: to walk into a room seeing only the human — all while being curious, present, and never judging.

Be The Change

Today, catch yourself about to say “but” in a conversation — with a colleague, a child, a friend — and swap it for “and” instead. Notice what opens up both in the exchange and in yourself.

Why One Father Filled 1,450+ Potholes

When Dadarao Bilhore lost his 16-year-old son to a motorbike accident caused by a water-filled pothole on a flooded Mumbai road in 2015, grief could have sealed him shut. Instead, a month later, he walked out with a shovel. In the years since, he has filled more than 1,450 potholes by hand — most of them being the kind a rider doesn’t see until it’s too late — driven by a straightforward logic: “I have lost my kid; I don’t want you to lose yours.” His work has helped seed a citizen collective and a pothole-reporting app, as well as inspired a retired railway worker in another city to fill 1,500 potholes of his own. What Dadarao built from the worst moment of his life has been a quiet blessing for countless unknown strangers who walk, bike, and drive over streets smoothed over by a paternal love.

Be The Change

Leave a public space better than you found it.