Simone Butler's Blog

Rachid Lazraq has been the proprietor of Rich Collection Italia in Shoreditch, East London, for over 30 years. The shop, which sells vintage Italian shoes, had a loyal following before online shopping and an aging clientele began to slow foot traffic.…

In a recent Facebook post, renowned healer, writer and teacher Denise Linn shared a message from nature that profoundly changed her outlook on life. It involved a tiny killdeer bird who’d laid four eggs next to Linn’s gravel driveway on the dry, desert landscape.…

Years ago, when Kim D’Eramo was sick with an auto-immune disorder, she felt a lot of fear every time her back or neck went into spasm or fatigue overwhelmed her. As this perceptive osteopathic doctor writes in her mind-bending book Be Your Own Healer: An Intuitive Doctor’s Guide to Activating Your Innate Abilities Through Mind-Body Medicine, “I made what was happening wrong.…

In 2001, when Julia Roberts received the Oscar for her gutsy portrayal of the title character in Erin Brockovich, few of us were surprised. She was a knockout in the role of a scrappy young woman who used her smarts and sex appeal to uncover info that took down a power company over poisoned water.…

Ken Allen was a Bornean orangutan who lived at the San Diego Zoo from the 1970s through the 1990s. Ken’s enclosure had been designed to be escape-proof: high walls, smooth surfaces, no obvious handholds.…

In her fabulous new book, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of our Ancestors, Perdita Finn tells a story about her husband’s grandmother, who’d just turned one hundred. The whole family had assembled at her house for a party.…

In the late 1930s, Gerald Gardner returned home to Britain’s southern coast after traveling abroad for many years. There he joined a coven of witches in Highcliffe-by-the-Sea. On the cross-quarter holy day of Lammas, August 1, 1940, Gardner and 16 other witches (or Wiccans, as they prefer to be called) gathered secretly at night in the forest.…

Crowds across the globe erupted in cheers last Friday evening as Integrity, the Artemis II Orion capsule, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and four brave astronauts disembarked after their week-long lunar tour.…

In the 1960s, an eminent European anthropologist was studying a Zulu tribe in Africa. Near the end of his stay, he invited the local children to play a game. The kids were of various ages and sizes; some had disabilities, others held hands with a younger sibling.…

An ancient Chinese story tells of a fisherman whose wife was gravely ill and near death. When doctors could not help, the man visited a small temple dedicated to Guanyin, goddess of compassion and healing.…