Being a parent isn’t a part-time job. You can’t just show up for the dramatic moments and photo ops, or only select the opportunities that meet your terms. It’s not about being performative but rather about being there for all of the formative experiences that shape lives. Parenting comes through in the everyday things that make
I hope this open letter finds you well and summer has been good! Hard to believe we’re back at it, but super excited for what’s ahead. Let’s push the envelope and grab the low-hanging fruit! Appreciate you… Yeah, no. Sorry, but generic pleasantries aren’t going to cut it. Still, just to be fair, I
Life rolls along with a quiet ferocity that can lull one into normalizing intermittent calamities and ongoing emergencies alike. Maybe this is part of developing a coping mechanism, to fall into a routine that accommodates ruptures that could be more jarring, even ones that might have been delivered precisely in order to jolt us
{fast-forwarding from 5+ years ago…} It would be hard to overstate just how dire our current predicament truly is — and while it may be tempting to encapsulate our woes within the confines of the grim year 2020, this is evidently an acute flare-up of a protracted period of internal crises and ignored preexisting
Dispatch from two Matrices over… They had it bad, really bad, kind of like our BAD! but with one important difference: they refused to let their fear and cynicism overtake their sense of responsibility and, dare I say, love for their world and their future. The message received through the portal (which keeps opening
Dispatch from one Matrix over… There have been so many atrocities in recent weeks that it’s hard to focus on any one of them. This dizzying effect obviously is part of the plan, or the lack thereof, to keep everyone off balance and destabilize as much as possible before any pretense of a guardrail
It’s the end of the world, but you might hardly know it. Sure, there’s the inconvenience of being mostly stuck at home, making do with a bit less and rationing a bit more, and foregoing most of our exterior social interactions. But let’s face it: for many people right now, our streaming services are
I’ve noticed a not-too-subtle shift in recent years that seems relatively minor but is perhaps quite revealing of larger trends. People rarely seem to ask the question anymore, “what do you do for a living?” Instead, it’s usually expressed in more transactional terms as, “where do you work?” or “what’s your job?” By itself
Well, it was “fun” while it lasted! Sure, we tried to impose our will on the world and render the biosphere uninhabitable… But everyone makes mistakes now and then. Still, despite the judgment by Blue-Ribbon titans that we fell short of the mark (mainly because we had made so many marks that it was
Wrangling with the Final Frontier There was a time in my adult life that I wanted to be an astronomer, following the usual boyhood dalliances with aspiring to be an astronaut. From my earliest memories I was fascinated with the stars—but more so the concept of them than the studying thereof, which made the
{NB: Reposting this piece from 2011 in memory of my friend Klee Benally, who walked on from this world right before the calendar turned. Klee was an ardent defender of the people and the land, tirelessly dedicating himself to critical causes expressed through an incredible range of living arts and media. Some of the
{NB: This essay originally appeared in the Peace Chronicle among a collection of other writings on the theme of “re-enchantment” earlier this year — you should definitely check out the great array of material in the whole issue (PDF posted by the Peace & Justice Studies Association, which you should join!)} Rekindling Rootedness in
{NB: I wrote this article way back in 2009 for the now-defunct HuffPost contributor platform, following one of the early major climate demonstrations; with another round planned for next week, I realized that I keep trying to get this essential message across but can’t really do so any more clearly than I did in
A long time ago in a classroom far, far away, I had a vision that has shaped my journey in profound ways. It was inspired by a film screened in grade school half a century ago, depicting what reality might look like from the vantage point of the edge of the universe AND from
Just the fact of you being here with (too) many words on the screen makes you a rare breed. In a micro-attention world, you still embrace the long form; maybe you even write things out by hand sometimes, perhaps in cursive (I see you!). If you’ve gotten this far into this essay, you’re already