Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Hundreds of Teen Poems, One Surprise Finding

Statistics about depression, mental health, and screen time cause concern for young people along with older people’s judgment that “today’s generation doesn’t read or doesn’t care.” Sean Murphy spent six months reading hundreds of poems submitted by young writers age 10 to 21 mostly from the US but also from nine other countries. He says, “They grapple with real fear and insist that bearing witness to the world gives purpose and meaning to people’s lives.” Sean shares a taste of their poetic wisdom as they try to answer questions that adults themselves struggle with or avoid, such as “how to remain human in a culture that monetizes distraction.” Or there is this insight from Emily who wrote, “Because, nothing true aches forever. And sometimes the bravest thing you can do is simply open your hands.” Sean suggests at least paying attention. “We might even seek to emulate them.”

Be The Change

Dedicate a little time and attention today to a young person and their unique gifts. Open your hands.

Writing as Spellcasting

Writer Mandy Len Catron finally finished a book proposal she began in 2019. A publisher liked it, but was hesitant to proceed because of similar books on the market. Then someone asked, “Do you think this book needs to exist?” She realized it was “started by a person I used to be” before the pandemic, before teaching, before two toddlers and a crisis pregnancy. “I had been trying to write someone else’s book.” So, Mandy began again, writing about her crisis pregnancy experience. “It felt less like making sentences and more like letting them flood through me. It was as though the draft already existed.” She now advises her students “to transmit a feeling, an experience, an idea that is wholly their own… so that another person might understand something new and specific about what it means to be human.” Tell the story that needs to exist, “that needs to be written, the one only you can write, in the words that belong only to you.”

Be The Change

Share an experience in some creative way that transmits your own unique truth about what it means to be human. Just begin.

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Bare Hands, Bandana, Six Million Bees

Clarence Chua shows up to a bee rescue with nothing but a bandana and bare hands — no suit, no gloves, just attention and respect. In six years, this 42-year-old in Singapore has relocated roughly 6 million bees, one nest at a time, moving entire colonies — queen, workers, larvae and all — to apiaries he manages, including one in his own backyard. Where pest control arrives with chemicals and a stopwatch, Chua arrives with patience, reading the mood of a swarm before deciding whether to suit up at all. He has coaxed bees from a condominium spirit house, from the engine of a grounded airplane, from the hidden corners of a city where almost no one thought to look. Once, misjudging a colony on a high ledge, he was stung a hundred times in thirty seconds — and still returned to the work. “Without bees,” he says, “there will be much less fruit or much more expensive fruit” — a quiet reminder that these small, misunderstood creatures underwrite much of what we eat. His story is less about heroism and more about what becomes possible when a single person decides to pay close attention to a being that many fear or avoid.

Be The Change

Next time you encounter an insect — a bee, a spider, an ant crossing your path — pause for ten seconds and simply watch it move. Let that brief attention be a small act of kinship with the non-human world.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

This week’s stories reveal how simple acts of kindness and service can ripple through communities and generations.

We explored the interconnectedness of our actions and their impact on the world. Starting with the Indigenous women who have fended off savanna fires in Brazil by understanding the language of their land, we learned that harmony is achieved through respect and knowledge. Then, a spirit of service came alive as we admired the dedication of Japanese doctors who, over decades, nurtured beacons of hope in a Vietnamese hospital. In India, one man’s efforts to plant 25 million trees reminds us that investing in what already exists can lead to monumental change. Brian Conroy’s journey as storyteller who empowers others exemplifies the power of stepping aside to let others shine. The courage of five teens who rescued an unconscious boy underscores the beauty of spontaneous compassion. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the act of rewilding amidst violent conflict speaks to the resilience of nature and spirit. We also remembered a philanthropist whose legacy of quietly enabling 5,000 schools to take root without public fanfare reflects the power of investing in a broader community. Finally, a mother’s full circle moment with her son at the cafe chain she founded reflects the power of designing systems that foster inclusion. Together, these stories remind us of the enduring power and legacy of kindness, service, and thoughtful acts of the heart.

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If you enjoy good news stories and want to help change the media landscape, join our volunteer team to curate, edit, spread the good! Login and get started.

Three Medicines: One Physician’s Journey

Dr. Cynthia Li had done everything right. She spent a decade rebuilding her health from the inside out after conventional medicine found nothing wrong with her — no diagnosis, no treatment, just labs that read normal while her body fell apart. She documented every step, wrote the book, and then collapsed again on the final page. What broke open in that second undoing was something the first decade of disciplined healing couldn’t reach. Her journey moves through five distinct medicines: the county hospital beds and Doctors Without Borders clinics where she learned to see whole lives behind presenting complaints; the root-cause medicine she made herself a one-person clinical trial to find; the grief she had sealed in a shoebox since residency and finally burned at a ritual fire, waking the next morning lighter than she’d been in years. Then, pinned to the couch again with no reserves left to strategize, she discovered that willpower — the Terminator she’d taped in her diary as a girl, the armor she’d worn over every loss — had a ceiling. As she writes, “I simply couldn’t anymore.” What came after wasn’t another protocol. It was the first time in her adult life she stopped trying to fix herself and fell, instead, into something larger than her effort.

Be The Change

Identify one thing you have been carrying privately — a grief, a fear, a loss you moved past without moving through — and give it five minutes of unhurried attention today. Write it down, share it with someone you trust, or simply sit with it without trying to resolve it. Notice what the body does when it is finally allowed to acknowledge what it already knows. For more inspiration, join a live conversation with Cynthia this weekend!

She Once Visited Food Pantries. Now She Runs 20.

Alyssa Curtis drives through a town in Michigan, US, with a trunk full of diapers and microwaveable mac-and-cheese cups. She restocks the 20 little pantries her nonprofit has quietly planted across the region. The Shame Free Collective is exactly what its name promises: no forms, no judgment, no humiliation tax on hunger. Curtis knows that tax personally. She grew up visiting food pantries weekly, and what stayed with her wasn’t the gratitude — it was “the lack of dignity or quality of items that were provided.” That memory became the blueprint for something different. She pivoted from cooking content to community infrastructure, one pantry at a time. She is currently the organization’s sole, unpaid employee, while raising five children, handling all her own admin, and restocking shelves with the donations that arrive from strangers who watch her videos. There is a quiet simplicity to her striking care: the daily driving, the careful attention to what each neighborhood actually needs, the refusal to let scarcity become shame. “Everybody should have food with dignity,” she says.

Be The Change

Donate food to a local pantry, or look up a Little Free Pantry near you, and drop off three or four items this week. Prioritize shelf-stable proteins, single-serve meals, or hygiene supplies.

The Indigenous Women Who Stopped a Burning Savanna

When fire swept through the Santana Indigenous Territory in 2018, the men went for help and the women watched the land burn. From that helplessness, something unexpected grew: a volunteer fire brigade where 25 of 45 trained firefighters are women — grandmothers, teenagers, educators — defending 73,000 hectares of Brazil’s Cerrado that the state has largely abandoned. In a year when nearly 10 million hectares of Cerrado went up in flames, the Bakairi women’s territory has recorded zero major fires for four consecutive years. They fend off fires in donated sneakers, sharing eight overalls among thirty volunteers, with no pay and no institutional support. As educator and brigade member Edna Rodrigues Bakairi puts it, “the land is our mother, it’s our life” — and that relationship, it turns out, is a more effective fire policy than most governments have managed. Their work carries ancestral knowledge alongside fire hoses: the same women who fight flames also tend rituals, medicinal plants, and the food gardens they planted after the 2018 destruction to feed the community and buffer against future burns. In a landscape where bureaucracy stalls trained brigades and neighboring territories are left to fight fires with buckets, the Bakairi women offer something rarer than technique — they offer proof that those who have always lived on the land may be its most reliable guardians.

Be The Change

Learn about one organization led by Indigenous communities doing land stewardship or environmental protection work in your region or globally.

58 Japanese Doctors, 34 Years, One Vietnamese Hospital

Every year, for the last 34 years, a team of Japanese surgeons, dentists, and nurses has made the same journey: through Ho Chi Minh City’s traffic, across the Mekong River, and into a rural hospital in Vinh Long province — to offer free cleft-lip and cleft-palate surgeries to people who might otherwise never receive them. This year, 58 medical professionals from across Japan made that trip, dispatched by the Nagoya-based Japan Cleft Palate Foundation. There is something quietly extraordinary about a commitment that outlasts trends, funding cycles, and the noise of the news — three and a half decades of showing up, year after year, for strangers. “This is my second hometown,” said Nagato Natsume, 69, Executive Director of the foundation. “Every time I come here, I feel like I’ve come home.” Cleft lips and palates are among the most common birth differences in the world, and in many rural communities, the gap between a child who receives surgery and one who doesn’t can shape an entire life. What hums beneath every detail is the kind of institutional love required to sustain a volunteer mission across generations of practitioners. The three-hour drive through delta traffic, the river crossing, the 1,400-bed hospital waiting on the other side: these are not the coordinates of a photo opportunity. They are the geography of a promise, renewed every spring.

Be The Change

Volunteer your time, presence, and skills in some way. Notice what forms of value get generated in the process that can’t be measured or transacted.