To Loot You With Love
One man’s coherence dissolved a civil war. What might a field of it do? |
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| In 1951, with Telangana’s villages caught between guerrillas by night and troops by day, a frail 55-year-old walked in without police escort. In a village called Pochampalli, landless families told him only the men with guns would give them land — so at an evening prayer gathering, half expecting nothing, he asked the crowd: can anyone help? A farmer stood up and offered a hundred acres. The families took only eighty. Vinoba Bhave — the man Gandhi called his spiritual successor — read that moment as an instruction and walked village to village for the next thirteen years, collecting over four million acres for India’s landless. Time magazine put him on its cover; his own explanation was simpler: “I have come to loot you with love.”
He carried no argument, no incentive, no shame — only a coherence so complete that villages reorganized around him: greed became awkward, generosity became obvious. And when crowds cheered “Jai Hind!” — victory to India — he kept gently widening the word: Jai Jagat. Victory to the world. Coherence, he wagered, has no border.
Seventy-five years later, the wager comes to the Badlands of North Dakota.
This Fall, as an experiment, Heart in the Heartland will gather one of the more improbable circles: generational farmers, a grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, indigenous community leaders, former US Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a truck-driving permaculturist, a marshmallow artist, AI pioneers — around an all-vegan table and a deliberately empty agenda. No panels, no positions. Just three days of what Rumi promised: out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. When our public squares reward the loudest voice, could a room of unlikely strangers slip into a shared rhythm — and noble friendship do what no policy paper has managed?
And the heartland is not alone. The same quiet physics is surfacing on every continent this season — in Himalayan caves and Spanish farmhouses, in an Austrian palace and a Brazilian gathering on heart intelligence, and in a hospice in Japan where a physician has spent her life proving that even dying can be a way of coming into rhythm with life.
Which brings us to this month’s invitation. |
| 7-Day Pod • Starts August 2 |
 Every one of us is dying. And every one of us, somehow, forgets. Death is the one appointment we all keep — and the one we’re least willing to talk about. Holding this space is Maki Saionji Kawamura, a pediatrician who founded Here and Now Hospice — where roughly 150 people each year are accompanied to the close of their life’s journey. Her premise is quietly radical: dying is not a failure of medicine, but a completion of life. Her “414 (Yoishi) Cards” now invite more than 5,000 people a year — in schools, care homes, festivals — into conversation about what matters most. Guest speaker Shay Beider brings her pioneering integrative work, healing touch to children in hospitals.
Seven days of head, hands, and heart — with kindred spirits around the globe sitting beside you in the questions no one can answer alone.
To set the tone, an Aug 1 Awakin Call features Janice Sullivan from Colombia, sharing her myriad experiences at the threshold of death. |
One Field, Many Fires
India. After hosting more than a hundred retreats across the country, we’re piloting a winter immersion for international guests — three gatherings threaded with community visits in cities across India: the Spirit of Service retreat in Ahmedabad (karma yoga, Dec 3–6), a Deepcast with the nuns at Pavnar — the very ashram where Vinoba’s sisters still keep his experiment alive — and AI + Wisdom with pioneers at Flame University.
Spain. Fresh from inaugurating Schumacher College’s new home alongside Satish Kumar and Sister Lucy, Joserra, Lulu, and Oscar host the next retreat on Spanish soil with 40 of us — regenerating a long lineage of ecological and inner education.
Austria.  Prior to celebrating Brother David Steindl-Rast’s 100th birthday in a small village — the monk who taught us that gratefulness makes us happy, not the other way round — Hermann and Bettina filled an Awakin Circle in Vienna with 120 friends. A couple of months before that, at Schönbrunn Palace, Georg gathered 300 business leaders for a silent dinner(!), with our own John Sweeney (a former plumber who founded Drop Dead Generous) and Tom Cledwyn as emcees. Next up: Bettina is expanding her Zukunfts Symposium in Linz — where Nimo’s Planting Seeds, sung in person last time, has become an anthem of sorts.
Nepal. Victor and Chen are hosting a pilgrimage through Himalayan caves — walking meditation in the most literal sense, into a silence older than any of our noise.
Japan. Kotaro and friends prepare their fourth Kuni pilgrimage this December — village to village on foot, in the spirit of finding fullness on the other side of emptiness.
Vietnam. Happy Schools movement that started in Hue’s classrooms and built on care for self, other and the planet, is spreading its wings through a 10-month pod — open to any educator, anywhere, ready to make school a place of belonging.
United States. From Soularize in Chicago to the Gandhi Museum in Houston to a return to Harvard Business School with a counter-curriculum, many ripples are on deck.
Freshly blossoming. In Poland, Zen Master Mikołaj wants to host a retreat on Polish soil — last year’s Europe gathering of pioneers from 18 countries, still rippling. In Brazil, we’re supporting the launch of Conecta, a new gathering around heart intelligence. And in Taiwan, a nunnery has begun co-creating with us — the least likely partnership on this list, and somehow the most natural.
Across borders.  A decade ago, Amardeep Singh stood beneath a bridge in disputed Kashmir, on the land his forefathers fled at Partition. He had come to carry home a little soil for his daughters. Thirty minutes later he walked away without it — refusing, he later said, to hand down the divisiveness — and spent the years since photographing what Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims still share across 36 cities. He joins a July 25 Awakin Call with stories and songs of bridges beyond borders.
Different soils, same seed. |
The Plumbing
Here’s the part of this story that rarely gets told — and the rarity is by design.
Underneath the circles and pilgrimages, ServiceSpace volunteers have spent twenty-five years quietly writing code. Not to build a platform; the world has plenty. The ambition runs opposite: technology designed to be the beam — like the wooden beam that once let Huygens’ pendulum clocks find each other’s rhythm — and then disappear. Our AI reads a thousand reflections and seeds a circle of five strangers who share an unnamed question; it arranges the call, mirrors the whole back to its parts, and then walks out of the room. The scaffolding comes down. The room remains.
Because the real scarcity of the AI age isn’t computing power or capital. The dominant economy runs on one logic — privatize the benefit, socialize the cost — and left to that logic, AI will simply run it faster. The rarer resource is the opposite reflex: the capacity to quietly absorb a cost so that a benefit can circulate freely. The way a mother does. A teacher does. A forest does.
That, it turns out, is what Vinoba was looting for. Not acres — the muscle underneath the acres.
Vinoba never argued for his amendment to the slogan. He just kept walking, and let the word widen on its own. Maybe that’s how a field grows — not by broadcast but by footsteps, one farm table, one cave, one bedside at a time, until clocks on distant walls begin, imperceptibly, to keep the same time.
Jai Jagat. May the whole world win. 🙏 |
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| This month, every seed is a voice on its way to the Story Booth — some just told, some just about to be. |
| ✨ “TZADIKH”
In Jerusalem, Erez walked into a live robbery — and instead of fighting or fleeing, spontaneously called the thief “Tzadikh”: righteous one. Honoring a virtue the man hadn’t yet shown — and watching him rise to meet it. Vinoba would have recognized the move. |
| 🎤 STORIES IN SINHALESE
In Sri Lanka, young people stepped into the booth in their mother tongue — a reminder that the sound of the genuine needs no translation. |
| 🎩 RED NOSES
The booth will also visit Vienna’s Red Noses — clowns who work with refugees — where laughter turns out to be its own way of holding space. |
| 🤝 A CHAIN OF SILENCE
From last year in Vienna: 400 people formed a silent human chain through the city — no chants, no signs, just linked hands and shared stillness — a story now making its way into the booth. |
| 💭 REMEMBERING THE FORGETTING
At Barcelona’s Festival of Consciousness we met Ruth, from Argentina, who lost her memory at fifteen and got it back four months later — and who recalls, in startling detail, the mechanics of both. |
| 🧶 RECEIVING BLANKETS
Ursula started a knitting network that delivers receiving blankets to newborns — the first thing some of these children are ever wrapped in, made by hands they will never meet. |
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| ServiceSpace incubates volunteer-run projects that nurture a culture of generosity and uplift the spiritual commons. Such small acts of service unlock an inner transformation that sustains external impact. |
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