~ Socrates

Black Bean Salad by foodnetwork.com

With at least 18 grams per serving, these meals prove vegetarians can have their protein and eat it too.

Click to check out these vegetarian meals packed with protein.

Why meditate? When you sit still and watch your thoughts rise and fall, without commenting, without criticizing or editing, gradually your mind, which before was a no-fly zone, becomes your inner neighborhood, a place you like to visit, a clean, well-lit garden, free of fear and tension.

Via Dharma Forest

 

In April 2011 one of my best friends, Owen Thomas, committed suicide. I miss him more than words can describe. Earlier this week I heard another case of a Penn athlete taking her life. (more…)

“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an endorsement—and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)

His conclusions are often bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back that up.) WIRED got Smil’s take on the problems facing America and the world.

You’ve written over 30 books and published three this year alone. How do you do it?

Hemingway knew the secret. I mean, he was a lush and a bad man in many ways, but he knew the secret. You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

Click to read more of Vaclav Smil’s interview on wired.image via wired 

The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future. Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions.

~ Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, ‘Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness’

~ Sonya Parker