Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Monet’s Blurred Vision Saw More Clearly

Claude Monet, going blind in his later years, kept painting — and what he rendered wasn’t the world falling apart but, as poet Lisel Mueller saw it, a world revealing its hidden wholeness. Parker J. Palmer takes that image and turns it into something urgent: a meditation on what he calls “soft eyes,” the open, diffuse way of seeing that finds the vulnerable life beneath hard surfaces — in a frozen winter landscape, in another person’s armor, in a democracy under strain. Hard eyes, Palmer writes, are the narrowed eyes of fight-or-flight, laser-focused on threat. They keep us alive in moments of danger, but they cannot find what sustains us. “It takes soft eyes to look at another person and see behind their armor to the shy soul that’s yearning to be seen and heard.” The essay moves between Mueller’s poem, the interconnected root systems of trees, and the Beloved Community that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could only have glimpsed through soft eyes — a vision that required seeing possibility through rock-hard oppression. Palmer’s argument is neither naive nor merely poetic: he insists that how we look shapes what becomes possible, that perception is not passive but political, even spiritual. He closes with Monet’s own words from the poem — “how infinitely the heart expands / to claim this world” — as a kind of invitation to practice the finest work the human heart can do.

Be The Change

Choose one person today — a stranger, a colleague, someone who frustrates you — and spend sixty seconds genuinely trying to see what might be tender or scared behind whatever face they’re showing the world. Notice how your body changes when you look that way.

Uganda’s First Buddhist Monk

A boy raised Catholic in Kampala flew to India in 1990 to earn an MBA and returned, seven years later, with a shaved head, brown robes, and a large Buddha statue that customs officials mistook for witchcraft. What Bhante Buddharakkhita built from that improbable homecoming — a meditation hall, a school, a clinic, and a borehole bringing clean water to a lakeshore village — is a story about the patience required to plant something you may never see flower. Perhaps the most astonishing harvest was his own mother, who had first drawn him toward stillness simply by teaching him to lie quiet on long afternoons. When she decided to become a nun, he warned her of the hardships; she only laughed — “If you can do it, I can do it” — and on the morning of her ceremony, he arrived to find she had already shaved her own head. She became the first Buddhist nun Uganda had ever known, taking the name Dhammakami: “one who loves the Dhamma.” Against those who spread rumors that the center was trafficking children, Bhante’s response was characteristically exact: he gave a scholarship to the child of the man who had told the lie, and months later received a note and a bunch of bananas in return. There are still only two monks for Uganda’s forty million — but he keeps planting, one seed at a time, the way a sleepless boy once learned to be still at his mother’s side.

Be The Change

Think of one person who has opposed or misunderstood you. Do one small, concrete good for them today — a kind word, a practical help, an acknowledgment — without explanation or expectation of recognition.

Why Dopamine Isn’t the Problem

The popular concept of a “dopamine detox” rests on a fundamental misunderstanding: dopamine isn’t the villain of compulsive behavior, but the engine of all goal-directed action, from scrolling to meditation. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge’s research reveals something more useful: there is a crucial difference between wanting (the drive toward something, powered by dopamine) and liking (the actual pleasure of having it, governed by different molecules entirely). Dr. Richie Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl point out that the problem isn’t wanting itself, but what happens when wanting decouples from liking — when we scroll endlessly not because we’re enjoying it, but because we’re trapped in “hollow seeking,” chasing the next thing that might finally satisfy. Rather than renunciation, what actually helps is what contemplatives call savoring: the learnable skill of lingering in what’s already nourishing, whether that’s a deep breath or a real conversation, until “you can let go of seeking completely and tune right into the delicious nectar that is always there.” You aren’t trying to want less — you’re learning to like more.

Be The Change

Today, choose one small moment you’d normally rush through — your morning coffee, a few bites of lunch, the feeling of a breeze on your face, the sound of birds chirping — and let yourself linger there for thirty seconds longer than feels natural. Don’t try to stop wanting the next thing; just practice receiving what’s already in your hands, training the part of you that knows how to be nourished by what is actually present.

Unsubscribe from this email

I’ll Just Write One

At ten, Reva Agrawal made an impatient bargain with her mother: if she couldn’t have a new book every week, she would simply write one herself. Five years later, that stubborn logic has produced a published novel — and a way of sharing it that quietly refuses the usual transaction. Instead of selling copies online, Reva gives her book away, asking only for an act of kindness in return. The logic, she explains, fits the book’s own heart: “maybe we can lessen each other’s loneliness through small kindnesses for people we don’t even know.” Along the way she taught herself something most adult writers spend years learning — that a convincing villain needs an interior life, that a flawless hero is no hero at all, and that to make a reader feel something, you have to have felt it yourself first. This teenage author already knows that the point of a story is not fame, not money, but the chance to reach one person who was looking for it.

Be The Change

Find a book that shaped you and pass it on today — to a friend, a library’s free shelf, or a stranger — with a handwritten note about why it mattered. Let the story keep moving.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

In a week woven with stories of resilience and connection, our daily inspirations reminded us of the power within to affect change around us.

We explored seeds of compassion within and around us, as Lobsang Phuntsok reminds us of inner work’s potential to heal both ourselves and our world. Along similar lines, The Wisdom Collective invited us to imagine a world healed from separation, intertwining collective transformation with individual growth. In France, a city chooses to champion its trees, mirroring how nature’s wisdom is a sanctuary for all. In California, a story of relentless outreach from frontline social workers demonstrates a community’s unwavering support for its mentally ill residents. Globally, a startup accelerator program supports an organic building of bridges between Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs, fostering hope for peace. Hannah Wallace reports on how communities integrating cycling into the day shows improvement in kids’ focus, reflecting the mind-body connection. And Ruth Pittard’s 80-year love story of a life shows us that love transcends words or action to become a state of being.

Join The Community

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.

A Pangolin Pup Found in a Cardboard Box

Inside a car boot in Johannesburg, a three-month-old pangolin pup lay curled in a cardboard box, a cabbage leaf beside him — the trafficker’s well-meaning but useless gesture toward feeding an animal whose diet consists entirely of ants and termites. That detail somehow says everything about the vast distance between the illegal wildlife trade and the natural world it plunders. Named Stevie, after the police officer whose sting operation saved him, the pup spent six months in the careful hands of veterinarian Kelsey Skinner — bottle-fed cat milk formula, walked daily through natural habitat where she’d flip rocks to expose ant eggs, slowly coaxed back toward wildness. Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked wild mammal, their scales ground into traditional medicine, their meat sold as delicacy, yet they are so poorly understood that the first rescuer to encounter one in 2008 simply had to “release it back into a safe habitat and hope for the best.” What’s been built since then — the expertise, the facilities, the networks — is a quiet, painstaking science of return. Stevie was eventually released into the Manyoni Private Game Reserve, fitted with telemetry trackers, and left to find his own way. The trackers now show him regularly visiting females in their burrows. “It’s pretty guaranteed,” says Skinner, “that he is now a father to a few pangolin pups.” A cabbage leaf in a cardboard box to fatherhood in the Zululand bush — the distance traveled in that arc is remarkable.

Be The Change

Look up one animal currently listed as trafficked or endangered that you’ve never heard of — pangolin, saiga, sun bear — and spend ten minutes reading about the people working to protect it. Let one unfamiliar creature become real to you today.

The Schools Giving Children a Say in How They Are Run

When a six-year-old suggests a “buddy bench” for lonely classmates and watches it become real, something shifts – not just in the schoolyard, but in how that child understands their own place in the world. Smart School Councils, a UK charity founded by former teacher Greg Sanderson, has built a simple platform that gives even the youngest pupils a structured voice in shaping their school life, with nearly 90% of participating students now reporting that they feel listened to. The premise is modest but the stakes are not: as trust in democratic institutions erodes and young people grow increasingly disenchanted with politics, Sanderson believes that civic confidence must be cultivated long before anyone is old enough to vote. As assistant headteacher Ellie Nott puts it, “If you can look back and say, ‘I had an idea when I was six, and somebody listened, and then it happened’, that will stand children in good stead, hopefully, to vote when they’re older.” What the project quietly reveals is that democracy doesn’t fail first at the ballot box – it fails when people never learn, in their bones, that their voice can change anything at all.

Be The Change

Today, bring the spirit of this experiment into a conversation you’re already having — at work, at home, or with a friend — by asking someone whose opinion is rarely sought what they think should change and then genuinely listening to build on what they say, rather than waiting for your turn to speak.

‘Relentless Outreach’: the State That Doesn’t Give up on Mentally Ill Residents

For nearly two decades, Janina Estrada searched for her son Jimmy Barela in the rain, behind dumpsters, in the margins where people disappear when every system has stopped looking. What changed wasn’t a law or a court order – it was two outreach workers who understood that trust is built not through authority but through presence, showing up again and again even after a person says no. “You don’t start by telling someone they have to come to court with you,” says clinician Juan Banda. “You start by offering them food and asking them what they need.” Orange County’s version of California’s CARE Court has reached far fewer people than projected, and its leaders don’t pretend otherwise — but what it has built is something harder to measure: a model of care that treats the forgotten as worth finding. Estrada and her husband now live in a white van parked outside her son’s halfway house, still making sure he’s eaten, still showing up — proof that the impulse to refuse to abandon someone runs deeper than any program, and that sometimes, astonishingly, the system learns to do the same.

Be The Change

Reach out to someone you’ve lost touch with over time. Simply offer the gift of your presence.