One of the challenges of inspiring people to care about transforming land to better grow food is making the lifestyle appealing. So far, no go! The aesthetic is monotone: white people playing folk music. This is seriously problematic! Forging alliances is not easy work, but it is meaningful labor.
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Latest: Spontaneous Action Research: Interrogating Intersectionality
by mjd • July 2nd, 2013
The challenge of making the invisible visible, of bringing those aspects of relationships and identities that have been silenced into awareness and open conversation, was a common problem across seven international research projects explored at a workshop on “intersectionality” hosted by the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons College School of Management.
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Latest: Adventures in Looking
by Steph • April 23rd, 2013
Coincidences of of time/timing, language, and existence are simultaneously the very stuff of the scientific method, the foundation for religious faith, and the source of madness. Only blatant ethnocentrism discounts the magic of a society that successfully sent a message over one thousand years into the future.
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Latest: Hope versus Hopium
by Steph • February 26th, 2013
“How to live a life not worth living?” The nihilist poses this question in a vacuum. There may not be any “meaning” beyond what we humans create for ourselves as meaningful, but we are meaning-making creatures. That is what we do. We communicate meaning into being. Using language and cognition we apply sense to patterns. ‘Rightly’ or ‘wrongly’ we interpret each other’s actions and inactions. Sense-making, and the values and behaviors that follow (or are invoked), is only possible within boundaries. There is no science without belief, just as there is no religion without faith. Skepticism involves as much commitment as being an apostle.
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Latest: “The World is Still Living” (Flight Behavior: A Review)
by Steph • February 5th, 2013
Kingsolver’s formulation of the intelligent non-scientist coming to terms with the scope of climate shift is brilliant. Getting beyond the paralysis of fear involves living motivated by something other than the need to feel safe. Essentially, the liberals are just as bad as the conservatives—for different reasons, but with the same effect of no change to the status quo.
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Latest: Monks and Nuns (“Adam had them”)
by Steph • January 29th, 2013
“It’s gonna be fast, it’s gonna be hectic!” Which pretty much summed up the party. The early round of appetizers and aperitifs accompanied spirited conversation on topics which ranged from climate shift (if you happened to talk with me) to whatever everybody else (the ‘normal’ people?) talked about. Bringing joy in the now is a skill at which my closest friends excel. But the now is always in flux . . . What storyline are we actually living? What function does a spiritualist approach to the now contribute in the aggregate history humanity is producing?
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Latest: Mudfire! May the World Be Good to You
by Steph • January 22nd, 2013
When the early crowd at Pat and Carol’s New Year’s Day Open House invited me to blog about the event, I was thinking of the kind of entries that are tagged “group dynamics” – most of them are pure fun, although they can include a serious subtext which was sometimes made overt and other times left […]
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Latest: Deepening
by Steph • January 15th, 2013
Bill Moyers talked with Yale Professor Leiserowitz explains how human psychology inhibits perception of the threat of climate change simply because the evidence is not immediate to our physical senses. Rather than believing in false hope, and instead of surrendering to the fear-mongering talk of so-called “Doomers,” we can choose to evolve ourselves beyond the limits of these human-created conditions, to deepen how we listen to the natural world and each other so that we can create and spread the motivation, means and methods of resilient survival.
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