By Tamara S. Hamilton
in the current edition of Kosmos Journal

“What happened in Watts those six hot August nights forced me to think about my identity—who I was and who I was going to be. I have never had an identity crisis—or so I thought. You know, that heavy feeling of not knowing yourself, who you are, or where you are going in this world.”

By Spring Washam, an excerpt from her book ‘A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment’

“When we’re purifying ourselves, when we’re letting go of ancestral sorrows, it doesn’t necessarily come with bliss and light. I had expected serenity and moments connecting to nature. I had imagined it would be all beauty. We want liberation; we want to be awakened. We want to understand the Four Noble Truths without feeling the suffering or anything else too difficult.  But that’s not how it happens.”

By Matt Licata, via his blog, A Healing Space

“Between the worlds, burning up, longing for an end to the contradictions. We have found ourselves in the liminal, but how do we rest there? Where is the healing, the transcendence, the resolution? How could we be asked to surrender more? It can seem that we are falling apart, but were we ever together to begin with? Is that even the right lens from which to attempt navigation? Or were we always something more vast, more whole, more majestic that all that?”

By Bayo Akomolafe
In the current edition of Kosmos Journal

Ej and I are regular Mrs. Grundies. She grew up in India, in a home where one was supposed to apologize if someone else stepped on your toes. And I grew up in a Yoruba household where saying “good morning” and “thank you,” and being able to respond to our mother’s instructions, encoded in rapid stealthy winks and thin-slit eyes, meant you had received proper home-training.

Alethea, our two-year-old, not-going-to-school, shrapnel-of-a-thunderbolt daughter, is nothing like us.

By Willa Miller, via the Garrison Institute

Fierce compassion that is based in the contemplative perspective helps us to evolve towards inclusive altruism in four distinct ways.

by Scott Lenox, via his blog, The Beautiful Question

“We can’t possibly know in what ways orchids or black swans, or meadowlarks, or leaping colts are aware of themselves, or if they can do anything other than to act spontaneously. But we can know that they continue to be naturally beautiful, even when there are things taking place in the world that are anything but beautiful. And how powerful a thing it is when we consciously choose to act from that spontaneous and genuine part of us.”