Sometime last week, we saw a big spike in the number of new subscribers on DailyGood -- 171 in 24 hours. We were wondering what was going on, when Alan Z. sent us a newsletter by David Spangler. David is an author, a clairvoyant, and one of the founding figures of the modern New Age movement (although he is highly critical of what much of the movement has since become, especially its commercialistic and sensationalist elements). He was one of the original people at Findhorn in Scotland, back in the early '70s, and helped create the Lindisfarne Fellowships, which subsequently included various luminaries like EF Schumacher, James Lovelock, Paul Hawken, Joan Halifax and many others. His Lorain newsletter perhaps gave one of the most stellar testimonials to two of our sites (which he may not even realize are connected) ...
Some months ago I stumbled across a website which I have been following ever since. Called Daily Good: News that Inspires, it is a place that specializes in stories about the small miracles that make a difference in peoples’ lives. It can be found at http://www.dailygood.org/. Every morning I receive a short email giving the beginning of a “good news” story. If I want to read the whole piece, and others like it, I can by conveniently clicking on a link in the email itself, but often just the shortened abstract is enough to start my day off with a good heart. These days with all the writing I’m doing and the concentration it requires, I tend to let my emails slide, usually taking one day out of the week to catch up reading and answering them. But every day, I check my DailyGood.
The stories are wide-ranging. Some give useful tips and hints for improving one’s life, some tell inspiring true stories about ordinary people in the world doing extraordinary things in small ways to make the world a better place, some describe important scientific research, and some describe larger-scale efforts by groups to make a difference. The website itself is organized into categories such as “Generosity,” “Everyday Heroes,” “Business,” “Science and Tech,” and “Work,” among others. I have yet to find a story that didn’t have meaning for me or failed to leave me feeling more positive and hopeful about ourselves and our future than the news on the mainstream media would give me any right to expect.
The point of most of these stories is that it doesn’t take a superhero or a saint or a lot of money or a large organization to make meaningful contributions to the good of the world. Usually it takes just one person doing some small, relatively simple thing that is born of their caring heart and a mindful attention to what someone else needs.
Some of the stories are about the wonder of the natural world around us. One recent item showed pictures of individual grains of sand taken through a 3D microscope by Dr. Gary Greenburg and published both on his website and in his book, A Grain of Sand.
When I saw these photos, I couldn’t help but think of the small miracles that go unseen around 
us and think as well that our world is founded on beauty—beauty all the way down!
Another website I like to visit which does something similar is http://www.helpothers.org/. Here also you can subscribe to receive a daily email dose of inspiration. In this case, the stories are all about small acts of kindness that make a difference.
I remember once talking to a reporter from the local paper in Milwaukee where I was living at the time. A group of us connected with the University of Wisconsin were putting on a major conference focusing on positive political, economic, scientific, and social efforts to make the world a better place. The reporter had interviewed me about the conference and went away fired up to write a glowing article about our efforts. When days passed and no such article appeared, I called the reporter. She was very apologetic. Her editor, she said, had vetoed it with the comment, “No one wants to read good news. It will never sell papers.”
Fortunately, we now have the internet and are not dependent on such editorial perspectives. With a little research, it can be a source of all the news we might wish about the small miracles that people are performing for each other daily to help make our world work more humanely and compassionately. This is information we need, otherwise our picture of the world may become unreservedly gloomy and depressing. Transformation is possible, and it’s well within our individual capacities to make it so. After all, we all can be sources of miracles, which is a not-so-small miracle all by itself.
