Sangha of Auspicious Companions

The Library That Lends Live Stories

In Copenhagen, there is a library where the books have heartbeats. You check one out for thirty minutes, ask anything you want, and they answer — openly, without script, without armor. The Human Library, founded by Ronni Abergel 26 years ago, now operates in more than 80 countries, and its most borrowed “volumes” are people living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and depression. One such book, 33-year-old Christian Sarner, describes the night his psychosis convinced him he might be a robot — so he calmly disinfected a kitchen knife to find out. Another, Syrian refugee Noura Bitar, carries the particular wound of survival guilt: “I always dreamed that I was a bride walking and there are gunshots in my wedding dress.” And then there is Viva Olsen, an indigenous Greenlander who grew up hunting seals and still remembers American soldiers arriving by helicopter with Christmas presents for the children. What these three strangers share is a willingness to let another person’s curiosity lead — to be, as Abergel puts it, an open book. The library’s quiet mission is to “unjudge” — not to manufacture friendship, but to dissolve just enough fear that understanding becomes possible.

Be The Change

Find a person in your life whose experience feels genuinely foreign to yours — a different generation, background, or struggle — and ask them one real question today, then listen without redirecting the conversation toward your own story.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

This week’s stories brought us to diverse corners of the world through the lenses of inner growth and systemic change.

We tuned into disarming moments of resilience across Africa with the rediscovery of rare bongos in Kenya’s Maasai Mau forest and a pangolin pup’s rescue in a cardboard box in Johannesburg. In Uganda, a monk’s remarkably improbable journey illuminated the path to self-discovery and a burgeoning community rooted in values. In the US, two mindfulness brain researchers take a deeper look at dopamine and the brain, inviting us to notice that rather than trying to want less, the key lies in learning to like more. In parallel, Parker Palmer’s stirring reflection demonstrates how seeing with soft eyes allows us to connect deeply with others amidst the world’s cacophony of diverse viewpoints. In India, one teenager’s process of writing the book she wanted to read invites us into powerful insights on creativity and the kindness embedded in storytelling. Speaking of young voices, across hundreds of schools in the UK, a reimagined student council process unearths how learning at a young age that one’s voice matters has life-long ripple effects. Finally, a state’s relentless outreach to its mentally ill residents unveils how compassion is a powerful equalizer. Through these stories, we find living examples of how taking small steps to be true to one’s values can weave remarkable social tapestries of hope and possibility.

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A Carpenter and the Boy He Saved, 30 Years Later

Two carpenters were on a second floor with no stairs yet built in. That detail alone tells you something about the urgency of what happened next. In 1987, Brad Jachna and his friend Kip Kerfoot jumped from that unfinished floor and ran when they spotted a toddler, Tom Copeland, motionless in a Florida pond. Brad slapped the boy’s back until he heard him catch his first breath of air — and then life moved on, as it does, carrying all three in separate directions. Kip kept the newspaper clipping framed on his shop wall. Brad would occasionally think, “I wonder what happened to him?” Decades later, an online search for the toddler’s name answered that question — and Brad sent a message to a grown man who had never known who saved him. They met at StoryCorps in 2018, two years after Kip had already passed away, and Tom asked what his rescuer might have said. “I know he’d give you a hug and say he’s happy,” Brad answered. What makes this story linger isn’t the rescue itself but Brad’s quiet confession: “I have not been the nicest person… but it makes me feel good inside, for something that didn’t take five minutes. But it’s lasted a lifetime.” Sometimes the most enduring things we do are the ones we almost didn’t notice doing.

Be The Change

Think of one small act you did — or someone did for you — that took almost no time but changed something real. Write it down in a sentence or two, then share it with the person involved, or with someone who should know.

How Our Lineages Mirror the Mycelial Network

Ashley Glowiak invites us to understand ourselves as part of living networks rather than individuals — “nodes” carrying forward what ancestors survived, loved, and left unmetabolized. She compares, “When a node in a fungal network is struggling, depleted, isolated, unable to access what it needs from its immediate environment, the network routes toward it. Resources move from abundance toward deficiency with a precision no individual organism is directing, because the intelligence of the whole understands what no single node can see from its own position…” A family is a similar network of nodes. When a family member is severed through shame or silence, they don’t simply disappear; they become distortion points where healthy signals scatter. Through four movements — sealing boundaries to become “selectively permeable,” acknowledging excluded members to restore their place, metabolizing stored activation through the body, and pruning patterns that have outlived their protective function — a single family can change the signal it transmits through the entire lineage. “The saprotrophic fungi are the network’s composters,” she writes, and in the same way, what families release and metabolize becomes “the fertility of everything growing next.” No healing, she suggests, ever happens alone.

Be The Change

Today, bring to mind a family member you’ve distanced yourself from — whether through silence, judgment, or simple withdrawal — and speak their name out loud with one true thing you can acknowledge about their struggle or their place in the family. You don’t need to contact them or resolve anything; you’re simply practicing what the article calls “network restoration,” allowing a severed node to be seen again, which changes the signal moving through the entire system. Notice what shifts in your own body when you stop holding someone out and start holding them in the larger story your family has been trying to complete.

Incredibly Rare Bongos Found in Area They Were Thought to Be Extinct

A single trail camera photograph has confirmed what conservationists feared was lost forever: mountain bongos still roam the Maasai Mau forest in Kenya, a region where the rare antelope was believed extinct. With only 28 to 40 individuals estimated in their last known stronghold, the discovery of three bongos — including a mature male who may have hidden there for years –has sparked what one researcher calls “unbelievable” excitement and renewed determination. The find is largely thanks to Maasai rangers working in isolation, using ancestral knowledge of the ecosystem to track Africa’s largest and shyest forest antelope through nearly inaccessible terrain. As one scientist reflects, “Their presence makes the forest more magical, and the world would be poorer for their loss” — a reminder that persistence in the face of disappearance sometimes reveals that what we thought was gone was simply waiting to be seen again.

Be The Change

Today, notice something in your neighborhood that others have given up on, and spend just ten minutes there with fresh eyes, as if you were a ranger with a trail camera waiting to see what life might still persist.

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.

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