29, 2013 Today is my father's birthday. If  he were living today, he'd be 102. I cannot even imagine that. He was 67 when he died, and that's too young, but lately, as I stare at some hard realities of aging and mortality, I begin to appreciate the fact that  he didn't have to endure a long period of frailty, pain, and dependence. My father was himself to very the end, brilliant and good and a force of nature, the most important person in my world, and I miss him terribly even now.  Maybe especially now. I find solace in these words from a poem my friend Naomi Shihab Nye wrote after the death of her own beloved father:  There's a wa... posted on Aug 6 2023 (3,643 reads)

in this house, but it means I have clearer expectations and therefore no resentment about what my work looks like. If I were to live in a house with another human being again, another adult, it would have to look really different from what I did before and in some ways, I think the idea of negotiating that– it’s not a place where I am right now. It’s not a place that I’m really ready to figure out how to negotiate that. Because I know I’m a caregiver by nature and so part of listening to myself– and this is one of the uncomfortable truths– is if I had another partner living in my house now, I think it would be really hard for me not to re... posted on Aug 10 2023 (2,892 reads)

security and certainty for the future — and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our present experience — something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes: There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secu... posted on Sep 19 2023 (4,038 reads)

how the dead go on living with them So that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk falls to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside and have their young and their young will live safely inside the dead tree So that nothing is wasted in nature or in love. ... posted on Sep 30 2023 (8,675 reads)

become part of the action. […] When you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you’re talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community. Illustration from ‘Donald and the…’ by Edward Gorey. Click image for more. In a complement to Susan Sontag’s terrific treatise on the the aesthetics of silence, Le Guin considers the singular nature of sound: Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let’s say there’s a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in wi... posted on Nov 13 2023 (2,958 reads)

this deeply moving episode, Fill to Capacity podcast host Pat Benincasa speaks with writer and life coach Jennifer Bichanich. Jennifer opens a window on her experiences with profound loss, including losing her beloved husband when the church they were remodeling went up in flames. Despite immense grief and despair, Jennifer found ways to rebuild her life and discover her own creative resilience. Working with a shamanic energy healer, delving into art therapy, and joining the Modern Widows Club, she found community, healing and the possibility of creating something beautiful from the ashes of her life. This podcast explores themes of grief, healing, and the power of creativity in navigatin... posted on Nov 20 2023 (2,495 reads)

people, bikes, cars, and trucks. "It's just one little part of the world but things take place there too just like everywhere else," Auggie explains. And sure enough, when Paul looks carefully at the by now remarkably unique photographs, he notices a detail in one of them that makes all the difference in the world to him. We see Auggie as a model of a spiritually literate person. He reads the world – in his case, one corner of Brooklyn – for meaning. By its very nature, his project is rooted in the everyday. He knows how closely we may need to see the significance of seemingly ordinary and insignificant events. He understands that some of the most rewarding s... posted on Mar 12 2024 (3,086 reads)

O’Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, spoke these words to me last year, during an interview for The reMAKERs podcast about climate change and what gives her hope. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued their latest report, a Code Red for Humanity warning on the nature of things to come. I asked her how she’s able to get up and do this work every day, during a pandemic, knowing that the future for life on Earth is looking so grim.“The future is not a linear extension of the past,” she replied. I felt myself exhale.So who shapes the future?I’ve spent the better part of two decades working in activism an... posted on Apr 10 2024 (1,747 reads)

go backwards and tell everybody your story. But maybe this is a good moment to just talk about the arc of your life and why these questions are being asked of you. Well it’s been now 40 years in the United States. My family immigrated to United States. My parents in the late 1970s and siblings in the early 1980s. I came in 1982 to Brooklyn, in the middle of my teen years, went to high school there. I came from Guyana, the tropics, being 70 per cent Amazon rainforest. I felt like I had nature in its abundance in my 15 years of life there. In school, I took interest in science but then my exposure to philosophy, my exposure to history, at least the deeper history of African history i... posted on Apr 30 2024 (1,750 reads)

"How many shades of green?" That's a question you get to ask when you're moving really slowly, as cancer forced me to do for the first time in my life.[a photo of design detail] Spiral learning of the B Corp movement, and of all of social change. That is a banister at this little gem of a park that I  found because I could only walk at a  snail's pace. So I was discovering things I hadn't discovered before because I  had always been moving too fast.[photos of other details in nature] Beauty in the small things.Then, 2020: the murder of George Floyd, racial reckoning, COVID, etc.. SMore trauma to the system and at every level of the fractal and more slowing down and time fo... posted on Apr 16 2024 (1,587 reads)

I was bedridden. Many, many, many things that I won't go into. And each of you will have your own suffering. People who have passed, hearts broken rejections, the ways that life brings us to our knees. And there's something magical that happens in the alchemy of suffering. When we open our hearts and say yes from a really earnest place, God enters through the wound. That is in our control. The places where we push against and say no to suffering, that's when we hurt. But our comfort is not nature's priority. Emergence is. Our deepening is. And we always have the opportunity to say, let this open me. Let this deepen me. Let this burn me into being, not in an insincere way. This is betwee... posted on Apr 26 2024 (3,086 reads)

an ongoing learning process for both identifying the problem and coming up with a solution. Addressing the climate crisis, sexism or racism, or transforming education systems are adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges, intricately intertwined with the human psyche and societal dynamics, prove resistant to technical solutions. They demand a shift in our awareness. A common leadership mistake, as Heifetz points out, is to apply a technical fix to a challenge that is fundamentally adaptive in nature. For example, we generate reports, make committees, or hire consultants to work a broken organizational culture, many times avoiding addressing the underlying issues of trust that are at the he... posted on Dec 31 1969 (14 reads)