This week Awesome Stories brings you compassion, expanded horizons, intuition, dance, solar and biomimicry.

Compassionate Homeboys

Father Greg Boyle is an inspiring man. He’s been serving some of the roughest gang neighborhoods of LA for over 25 years. When he couldn’t find the former gang members jobs, he created Homeboy Industries that serves them with education, counseling, jobs and community. Reading an interview from On Being podcast with Krista Tippett, I was touched by his living example of love, compassion and wisdom. I was profoundly touched by his simple wisdom gained from a life of service. Like his reminder that service is merely the entrance to the ballroom. Ultimately the path to love and God is built on relationships filled with delight and compassion where we are all included as equals.

Expanding our Horizons

I love examples of people overcoming their challenges or what we might perceive as handicaps. Sue Austin certainly knows how to live beyond limited thinking. For her, a wheelchair was an expansion, not a contraction. It has given her more mobility and even more importantly, an expanded way of looking at the world. She uses her wheelchair to push the boundaries of what we expect. Watch her TED Talk with video clips of her sea diving with her chair!

Dance Intermission

Enjoy this lovely dance routine from Duo Flame with a beautiful song by Lara Fabian. Two of my passions; singing and dancing! 🙂

Solar Success

Solar continues to grow as a great source of energy. The costs have come down dramatically as production and installations have increased with solar achieving many milestones lately. Some of them include the world’s largest installation in Arizona, more solar installed in the last 18 months than the previous 30 years, and grid parity cost in some parts of the world. Go solar!

Nurturing Your Intuition

Here’s a list of suggestions for nurturing our intuition. The most important is to take time to listen, but others like solitude, creating, and mindfulness all help. Sitting and observing nature has helped me to hear the quiet, inner-voice of intuition. But even at mid-life, I’m still learning how to hear and distinguish the voice of my intuition. How about you? Is intuition easy or hard for you?

Biomimicry Lessons

Janine Benyus gives an inspiring TED Talk on biomimicry. I really enjoyed her upbeat attitude even in the face of the many environmental challenges in the world. She reminds us that nature has 3.8 Billion years experience at creating and enhancing life in a systems context. The key is to learn from nature and apply those lessons to our human systems. Her approach to biomimicry is a systems approach, not simply using nature like bacteria to clean up water. Nature is teaching us about self assembly, resiliency, self cleaning, CO2 as a food, solar transformation, metals without mining, green chemistry and much more. With biomimicry, we can learn to manufacture in life enhancing ways rather than the life destroying ways found in most of our current manufacturing.

Emma Stone Crushes Jimmy

Signing off this episode with some fun and laughs. Watch Emma Stone and Jimmy Fallon battle it out for lip sync champ.

What touches your heart and helps you expand your horizons? I’d love to hear from you. Blessings, Brad