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A Longing for Unity in a Fractured Time

A meaningful encounter with Swami Vivekananda in Chicago
By Anu Prabhala, Maryland.

With everything unfolding in our nation and across the world, I found myself longing—almost aching—for a message of unity. I have never encountered that idea expressed more beautifully or more boldly than in Swami Vivekananda’s address at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.

What he offered was not a soft call for tolerance, but a radical reimagining of unity itself: unity across religions, yes—but also between science and philosophy, reason and faith, intellect and intuition. His words dissolved borders we insist on keeping rigid—between belief systems, nations, even between what we call perfection and imperfection—revealing them instead as expressions of a single, indivisible truth.

At the heart of his message was a simple yet demanding idea: happiness does not arise from narrowing identity, but from expanding it. As Vivekananda put it, “Happiness comes best from universal consciousness.” And to reach that expansiveness, he insisted, we must loosen our grip on the anxious, isolated self: “To gain universal individuality, this miserable little-person individuality must go.”

More than a century later, the address endures—not only for its philosophical clarity, but for its quiet poetry and moral courage.

Photo: Swami Vivekananda in Chicago, 1893 (handwritten words say, “one infinite pure and holy—beyond thought beyond qualities I bow down to thee”). Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago.

When Two Worlds Quietly Merged:
I felt the full weight of that courage standing in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda delivered his world-altering address—just one floor below George Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, one of my favorite paintings of all time. In that moment, two long-standing currents of my life converged: my love of art, particularly French painting, and my grounding in Vedanta, a philosophy that feels like a pair of well-worn jeans: real, practical, comforting, and quietly accepting.

Art and philosophy, France and India, my adopted country and my birthplace—under one roof, they did not compete. They conversed.

That is what happens, I have learned, when we allow the world to shape us: the Self expands to make room for more of humanity, not less.

Humble Rooms, World-Altering Ideas:
The room itself was modest—neither grand nor theatrical. Its restraint felt fitting. History reminds us repeatedly that transformative ideas rarely announce themselves with spectacle. Mahatma Gandhi, a failed lawyer, reshaped a nation. Franz Kafka, an anxious bureaucrat, altered world literature. John Harrison, a self-taught carpenter, solved the longitude problem that changed navigation forever.

Photo: Fullerton Hall’s podium, where Swami Vivekananda delivered his address in 1893.

And Swami Vivekananda—a nearly penniless, 30-year-old monk from India—arrived in America after a long sea voyage to speak at what was then a radical gathering: a Western, Christian, male-dominated Parliament of Religions. His courage lay not just in showing up, but in declaring—without apology—that no single tradition owned the truth.

As he told the audience plainly, “If anyone here hopes that his unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, ‘Brother, yours is an impossible hope.’”

Plurality as Sacred Truth:
For Swami Vivekananda, the universe’s beauty lay precisely in its plurality—in many paths converging toward one reality. He captured this vision with enduring grace:

“As the different streams, having their sources in different places, all mingle their waters in the sea… so the different paths which men take all lead to Thee.”

In a world increasingly fractured by certainty and fear, his tone feels almost maternal—firm, reassuring, deeply confident in the human spirit. From his very first words—“Brothers and sisters of America”—he transformed a formal assembly into a human family, drawing a standing ovation that lasted nearly two minutes.

Unity, for him, was not sentimental. It was a moral necessity.

He explained this idea through an image as simple as it was profound: a seed planted in the earth. Surrounded by soil, air, and water, the seed does not become any one of them. It grows according to its own law—assimilating what it needs while remaining true to its nature. So too, he argued, with religion, each tradition must grow in its own way, enriched by others, yet never erased by them. It was this insistence on growth and individuality rather than imitation that gave his words such enduring force.

A Childhood Trained in Coexistence:
His message resonated deeply with my own upbringing in Dadar Parsi Colony in Mumbai, where a Zoroastrian agiary, Hindu temples, and a mosque existed within a few hundred feet of one another. You prayed to your own gods, and then, as children, we came together to play. Coexistence required no explanation.

That innocence was shaken during the Hindu–Muslim riots of the 1990s, when curfews confined us indoors for weeks and fear fractured neighborhoods that had once lived generously with difference. It was my first encounter with how easily love for the divine can be manipulated into division.

That is why Vivekananda’s message feels so urgent today. He reminded the world that faith is not defined by labels, but by a deeply human plea for meaning, reassurance, and strength in moments of vulnerability. Faith, in that sense, speaks a universal language.

He said, “So long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.”

What he seemed to suggest was that true faith is not defined by religious labels at all, but by a deeply human plea—for meaning, for strength, for reassurance in moments of vulnerability. In that sense, faith speaks a universal language, capable of being heard by many names.

Not Belief, but Becoming:
Vivekananda also offered a quiet corrective: religion, he argued, is not about struggling to believe doctrines, but about realizing truth—about being and becoming. What mattered was not the form of God one worshipped, but the character one cultivated. Did faith enlarge the heart? Did it make room for others? Did it foster harmony?

In his vision, religion was not about believing in God. It was about becoming more fully human—again and again, with tolerance and acceptance at the center of the effort.

Perhaps that is why his words endure. In a fractured world, Vivekananda reminds us that unity is not an idea to defend, but a way of being to practice—and that only through a serene soul can we truly see the beauty of the world, and our place within it.

Let us learn to see beauty in unity. It is the only way humanity sustains itself.

Meaningfully yours,
Anu Prabhala

PS: Swami Vivekananda delivered a series of six speeches between September 11 -27, 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Read a transcript of all six speeches here. Here’s an audio recording of his first speech (~28 minutes) delivered on September 11th, 1893.

Bio: Anu Prabhala is a senior consulting writer at the World Bank and a former French instructor who has spent her career working with nonprofit organizations in international development. Inspired by Vedanta, her personal writing explores travel and cross-cultural encounters as pathways to understanding beauty, wisdom, and our shared humanity.

This article, reprinted with permission from Anu’s Substack, Imperfectly Perfect, is part of a chapter from her forthcoming travel memoir, Imperfectly Perfect: Love Letters to the World | A Travel Memoir of Beauty, Scars, and the Human Spirit. To stay informed on the publication of the book, you can subscribe to Anu’s Substack at https://imperfectlyperfect.substack.com/subscribe (Subscription is free; choose “no pledge”).

In Defense of Dirt: Rewilding Our Children

In Defense of Dirt: Rewilding Our Children
Before their Bodies Forget

From Finnish forest floors to Michigan creek beds, the science is clear:
real dirt is medicine, memory, and the immune system’s original teacher

By Thom Hartmann, author, speaker, activist, and educator

I grew up on the edge of Lansing, Michigan, with a stream just down the road and woods that felt like a secret frontier. We all did: the neighborhood kids, barefoot in the damp grass after rain, boots mucked up with creek-silt, hands scrubbed raw from climbing fallen logs and digging in the undergrowth. Getting in the dirt was part of childhood. We didn’t ask permission from microbes.

So when I read the recent report in The Guardian about Finnish nursery experiments transforming children’s health by simply letting them play in real soil, sand, leaves and forest-floor, I felt the past crash into the present and I knew again that the story of our species and our health lies in that innocent, messy contact.

In Finland, at a daycare center in Lahti (north of Helsinki), the researchers from the Natural Resources Institute of Finland adopted a radical experiment: rip out the asphalt, dig into the soil, roll out a live carpet of forest-floor moss and blueberry bushes, build compost heaps for children to feed, invite the kids to play, dig, muddle, get their hands in it.

The result, in a two-year study of three- to five-year-olds, was striking: children in the “rewilded” yards had fewer disease-causing skin bacteria (like Streptococcus) and showed stronger immune regulation (increased T-regulatory cells) within weeks. Gut microbiomes were healthier, inflammatory-associated Clostridium levels dropped.

This is the antithesis of today’s “modern” societal perspective on childhood and nature.

On the one hand, we have the modern obsession with pristine, sanitized lives: rubber-surfaced playgrounds, plastic mats, antibacterial everything. On the other, there’s the simple fact that our inner biology, our immune systems, our gut and skin microbiomes, were forged in the wild: the wild of forest floors, streams, soils, plants, bugs.

As I argued in my earlier essay “It’s All One Thing – The Story of the Worms” here in Wisdom School, our estrangement from that substrate is the seed of auto-immune disorders, of chronic inflammation, and a body that’s forgotten it’s actually part of nature.

In Michigan I was lucky: the woods and stream were mine for the exploring. I remember fingers crawling over moist logs, the smell of leaves turning, the damp cold run-off water slipping under my boots. I didn’t know at the time that those experiences were more than play: they were calibration.

They were training my immune system, teaching my skin and gut to know what nature looked like and smelled like and felt like. To know that dirt is not an enemy. And those childhood experiences are probably why I’ve never been troubled by autoimmune disorders or asthma.

So let’s call this what it is: a radical restoration. Not of some exotic wilderness, but of our lost contact with the natural microbial terrains that co-evolved with our species. The Finnish results are more than a Kindergarten trend; they’re a signal of what our children—and we all—are missing.

Here are some of the stakes:

When kids play in dirt rich with soil microbes, their immune system steps into a healthier balance: fewer disease-causing bacteria on the skin surface, greater regulation of internal immune responses.
The “outer layer” of biodiversity—soil, plants, forest floor—directly influences the “inner layer” of biodiversity in our bodies, our skin, gut, and airways. This is co-evolved, not incidental.
The modern shift away from exposure—to “sterile” play surfaces, indoor confinement, sanitized surfaces—may appear benign, but it’s been quietly shaping the epidemic rise of allergies, auto-immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases that both disturb the quality of life and can shorten lifespan itself.
This is not just personal wellness: it’s ecological and societal. The health of children, the immune burdens we carry, the resilience of future generations: all of this ties back to whether we let the next generation touch the living earth.
In the Finnish classroom yard they said: “We’re moving the action from inside to outside. We want to show the children nature so they learn about it.”

That sentence is packed. Show the children nature. Let them learn through contact, through play, through mess. Not as a museum piece, not as a “nature corridor” behind a fence, but as the ground they run on, dig in, climb across, whose bugs and fungus mix with theirs.

So, I want to issue a personal call to you—if you have children, nieces, nephews—or if you’re planning for grandchildren—or if you’re simply human, who used to feel the dirt under your fingernails and the creek cold on your shins—do this: Let the next generation get messy.

Plant a compost heap. Bring real soil into the sandbox. Create a border of moss and stones. Let the rain puddle, let the bugs crawl, let the children burrow. Let the forest floor not be exotic but ordinary.

I remember that stream down the road from the house I grew up in, the woods on the edge of Lansing, the sticky Michigan clay, the little fish, frogs, and crawdads under rocks, the mud mixing into water. I remember coming home with smudged socks, grass stains and a face kissed by sap.

I didn’t know at the time that I was feeding my immune system. I simply knew I was alive and it was a thrill.

We’ve forgotten that aliveness. Our culture has prized immaculateness, separation from the “dirty” wild, the exclusion of microbes like we exclude strangers. Yet the wildness is in us. The soil is in us. We’re made of the same living matrix as the tree roots and the beetles and the moss. Broken contact with that matrix isn’t harmless: it’s a literal loss.

In the wise old words I referenced in “It’s All One Thing”: “When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.”

The Finnish story is not just cute or scientific: it’s urgent. Rebuild our contact with the living earth. Let children scoop sand and soil, let them bury their hands, let them build mud-cakes like Aurora in Finland’s day-care. Laugh as they smear soil on their faces. It’s not chaos: it’s calibration.

Yes, modernization has brought us many gifts. Clean water. Sanitation. Vaccines. But modernization taken too far, with too much separation from our biological roots, leaves us with immune systems that misfire, bodies that mistake harmless soil microbes for threats, children who never taste actual dirt. The Finnish experiment is clear: get back to the soil, get back to the forest floor, get back to the messy, ordinary earth.

And the earth—our living earth—benefits too. More forest-floor carpets. More compost heaps. More kids playing outside, fewer rubber mats, fewer sterile boxes. We begin to treat biodiversity as not just glamorous (rainforests, coral reefs) but local (yard patches, old tree stumps, rain puddles). We begin to remember that our health is tied to the health of that biodiversity.

So my invitation to you: On your next weekend, find a patch of ground the kids (or you!) can mess with. Dig into it. Feel the soil. Let a leaf rot into the compost. Let worms do their work. Let the world pull you back. Because we’re not apart from nature: we are nature. And when we pretend otherwise, we hurt ourselves and the world around us.

It’s time to stop treating microbes as abstract threats or invisible villains. They are—and have always been—our companions, our allies, our ancestral family. The Finnish children’s laughter in the sandy forest-floor yard is our ancient laughter too.

Let’s dig in.

—Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of many respected books. Reprinted with permission. To receive new Wisdom School posts you can become a free or paid subscriber of this reader-supported digital publication, The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human. All Wisdom School articles are free and available to everyone. Copyright by Thom Hartmann, 2025.

Meet Our Contributor: Youtao Cao, Age 9, Japan

Meet Our Contributor:
Youtao Cao, Age 9, Japan

A Landscape Painting Showing Mt. Fuji by Youtao Cao, painted at age 6, Japan.

We are delighted to re-introduce our Meet Our Contributor feature in Skipping Stones. Through an online interview, young authors, poets and/or artists will share what inspires them in this space. We’ll learn about their individual processes, what they like to read and other topics that are important to them.

We see this space as a way for the international Skipping Stones community to know each other better and to learn from one another.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce Youtao Cao, our 9-year-old contributor from Japan. (We recently published four of his poems, and we plan to publish his science fiction story in our upcoming print issue). We asked him many questions about his background, his inspirations and writing process. He shares books that he has read (and reread!), as well as films, TV series and documentaries. He has a variety of interests (including visual arts—see some of his artwork in this space) and the creativity and enthusiasm to learn from many sources. We’re sure you’ll be inspired as you meet him!

Now, here is Youtao to speak for himself.

—Judith Volem, Skipping Stones.

“Aurora.” I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights, so in this painting, the little person in the yellow coat at the bottom left is me, looking through a telescope to watch the Aurora Borealis. The white figure beside me is a polar bear lying down. Art by Youtao, painted at age 6, Japan.

I live in Tokyo, Japan—a city with a mix of quiet parks and lively streets, small toy shops and big malls. It’s a good balance, and I enjoy exploring both sides. I’m about to start 4th grade at K. International School in Tokyo. I’ve been in its preschool program since I was one and a half years old, so I’ve grown up in an English-speaking environment even though my parents don’t speak much English.
Over the years, many teachers have encouraged and guided me. School writing contests have also given me inspiration and space to create. Outside of school, my writing professor has been an important mentor, often reminding us to “show, not tell” and inspiring me to explore different styles and voices. Many people say I have a talent for writing, but I know there’s always more to learn, so I keep working hard to improve.

I choose books based on curiosity. Sometimes I pick stories that challenge me morally, like The Ox-Bow Incident, and other times I want to understand historical movements and the people who shaped the world, like Dr. King in Stride Toward Freedom. I also take recommendations from teachers or discover something new just by browsing the library shelves. My mom often helps me choose books, but she also believes—and I agree—that reading different kinds of books is the best way to learn. So I read across all genres: fiction and nonfiction, fairy tales and biographies, classics and science fiction, poetry and news articles.

Although I don’t often reread books, I do reread comics—and sometimes, I revisit my favorite novels. Lately, I’ve been reading the Percy Jackson series so much that my copies are falling apart. I also like to bring a book with me whenever I go out, so I can read whenever there’s a spare moment.

Since I was very young I’ve watched a wide range of original language films—starting with Disney classics and the Marvel series, then moving on to The Lord of the Rings, The Shawshank Redemption and the Transformer films, to name a few.
I get ideas from books, travel, art and even games. Sometimes I combine what I see with other influences. Recently, I blended a Roblox game event with the gilded doors of Florence to write a poem about beauty and hidden decay.

When I first started writing poems, my mom couldn’t believe I could come up with them entirely on my own, so she always turned off the WiFi router—just to be sure. Now it’s simply part of my writing routine.

I’d like to keep writing, whether as an author, journalist, or even a screenwriter. Whatever I do, I hope it involves creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and maybe a little weirdness.

If I could give advice to other young writers, I’d say: Don’t wait to be perfect before you start. Don’t let anyone stop you. The best stories come from being honest and curious. Write what you love, even if it doesn’t seem “serious” or “literary” enough at first. Be chaotic! Be weird! Be funny! Your voice matters! Don’t be afraid to rewrite, to take risks, and to share your work. Reading is part of developing writing skills. Every book you read teaches you something about how stories are told.

—Youtao Cao, age 9, Japan.

Our Family Dog, Yuanbao (元宝) by Youtao Cao, painted at age 6, Japan.

Editor’s Note: See four poems and a painting by Youtao Cao by clicking here.

Three Generations of Moroccan Women

By Marina Hammoud, age 15, grade 10, Toronto, Canada

The way I imagine it, the day she left was breezy, almost a token of encouragement for the long months to come in treacherous heat. She bent down to give her young son a kiss on each cheek before moving her things onto her camel. And so, as the sun rose that morning, she and her eldest departed on the most sacred and dangerous journey one could make. Hajj. They didn’t return for seven years.

Pilgrimage to Mecca is an important part of Islamic belief but being a woman with limited resources in the 1930s, a 3,800 mile journey by foot is a true testament to Allah. It is hard for me to know what exactly my grandfather’s grandmother experienced as she and her son made their way across the Sahara desert but I can say with complete certainty that her bravery was not just a manifestation to God. Climbing sand dunes of 180 metres with only the resources that fit on a camel’s back and facing the hidden risks of looting, violence and sexual assault for months is a testament of her will and of her strength. After the three year trek to Saudi Arabia, she could not return due to the impending war. The dangers of leaving were too great and so they stayed for four years until French soldiers brought them back. I only wish today, as I consider my identity, that I could have met the courageous Zhor.

One generation down, in a supposedly more modern world not too far away, Rita possessed a different kind of strength, a far less appreciated fortitude because her story is definitely not out of the ordinary. Child marriage, teen pregnancy, an apparent success in a young woman’s life. Sixteen year old Rita got married (see her wedding photo) and in the years to come she had five daughters.

She watched her children grow up differently than she did. She saw them become educated, and run around. She probably questioned her husband’s draconian outlook on studying. These are guesses on my part, but what I do know is that she was happy. At least in the fifteen years I have known her. She lives with her own sisters, her old nanny, her daughter. She cooks with them to make a couscous like none other. She stretches. She buys me gifts. Mama Rita questions police officers as to why she cannot go to the medina (market) without a quarantine pass. She found contentment in a life she did not have complete control over. She may not have been physically ground breaking but she raised a generation of well-educated women. She is happy in her nineties, and I am glad I have known her.

A metaphorical world away—but really just a few steps from where Rita prepares tea—Nora sits at her desk. She crams information into her brain until she can’t focus anymore and then she starts again. She impatiently sits through tea until her father lets her go back to study, knowing that he doesn’t need to remind her she can’t go out until she finishes. Nora is the first woman in her family to graduate.

Nora ran around Kenitra with her cousins. They ran past the market, past their mosque, past their school. They made up stories for the cats that owned the streets, they watched the boys play soccer with a tennis ball, they found a goat and kept it as a pet until their parents made them return it. She told me once that her family, her father especially, was ahead of their time. She had more freedom than any girl she knew, yet compared to my life, she had very little. Nora got married at eighteen, and a year-and-a-half later she had my father. She finished her education and became a grade school teacher. She raised three high achieving children. They moved around the country and settled on a lemon tree farm outside of Rabat. Her children moved away, to England and to Canada. She bought her grandchildren a swing set and made them msemen(Moroccan square pancakes, usually eaten for breakfast or tea time).They call her once a month, supposedly because of the “time difference”.

I grew up—I am still growing up—believing that I could be anything that I wanted to. I could write books, I could travel the world, I could become a racecar driver. I grew up privileged in the sense that the world is my oyster. I often think about how different the lives of my ancestors were. Zhor spent seven painstaking years crossing the desert and I can fly halfway across the world for 150 dollars in a few hours. Rita got married before she grew up and Nora, by just graduating, broke the glass ceiling. 50 years later, I order Cambodian or Peruvian food with a tap on my phone. But when thinking about these things, I have to remind myself that it is not just a question of time or of modernization, because in the same town that my father was raised, there are girls younger than me getting married with just as little freedom or education as my ancestors. As I reflect on the powerful women who through generations shaped who I am today, as I apply to one of the most prestigious journalism schools in America, I remind myself that a young girl who may have the same last name as me, begins her adult life. Perhaps my North American side has washed away the influences of Zhor, Rita and Nora throughout my life but they have still inspired me to open my eyes, to tell me that I have the resources to help give other girls a voice. And I want to start now.

By Marina Hammoud, age 15, grade 10, Toronto, Canada. She adds: “I love to read and write. I have been writing creatively for as long as I can remember and want some more experience and exposure under my belt! I’m also trying to start a literary magazine at my school.”