KommunityKoin, KoinPurse, TheKoinBlog

Leadership is guiding the fire of others without ever dimming their flame — River Stephens

We don’t usually think of brushing our teeth, sending a text, or walking into a room as anything special. Our days are filled with automatic actions like these; rapid thoughts, small habits that seem like background noise. But there’s actually a deeper idea here, drawn from a Native American saying, that implies we may be

Let’s talk about co-dependence, shall we? That word usually shows up in therapy sessions, pop psychology books with vaguely floral covers, or during Thanksgiving dinner right after someone brings up “boundaries.” It’s not a compliment. Nobody wants to be labeled co-dependent, much in the same way no one wants to be called “moist” or “clingy.”

Let me just say right off the bat: perfection sounds lovely in theory. Like a beach vacation where you never get sunburned and the waiter always knows exactly when to refill your cocktail. But in practice, perfection is exhausting. It's the human equivalent of a hotel room where you’re afraid to touch anything because it’s

We tend to think of economies in terms of money. Monetary systems, markets, prices; these are the structures we’re taught to see. But what if we’ve been looking at it the wrong way? What if, beneath or beside the financial framework of our lives, there’s another kind of economy already at work? One that trades

At some point in the last ten years, I realized I no longer know how to relax. I don’t mean in the cute, candlelit, bubble-bath sense. I mean in the deep, biological, parasympathetic-nervous-system sense. The kind of relaxation that makes your shoulders drop three inches and lets you blink like you’re not guarding state secrets.

...this is one of my photos, by the way There persists, in every era, a quiet but stubborn prejudice: the belief that the value of a creation is determined by the tool used in its making. In our own age, this belief has taken on new form. I refer not to the chisel and the

I once had a therapist (I'll call him Stuart, because that was his name) who told me that life is like a painting. “It’s your canvas,” he said. “You’re the artist.” This would have felt more inspiring if he hadn’t also compared my emotional maturity to a “toddler finger-painting with rage.” But the metaphor stuck.