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by Steph • May 23rd, 2013
“We need to practice how we’ll play.”
Practicing how we’ll play means identifying gaps and weaknesses and moving to fill them. Washington DC Fire Chief John Sollers’ message is “We need to practice how we’ll play.” His message is aimed at fellow firefighters and professional first responders who have not yet been in a situation of needing to communicate with and understand a Deaf person who uses American Sign Language. Practicing how we’ll play means learning how to work with ASL interpreters to recognize differences in meaning and co-construct mutual understanding without erasing those differences or artificially forcing a meaning that is not actually understood. Learning how to communicate with the involvement of a third party is a skill that transfers to all kinds of communication situations, including cross-discipline communication in English as well as intercultural communication with non-English speakers of all kinds.
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by Steph • May 20th, 2013
This is an important workshop from the VERA Institute of Justice; I learned a lot and began the process of toughening up my own trauma responses. I know my trauma reactions can be elicited in the presence of violence and accidental severe injury. Taking this workshop is a conscious effort in the direction of being […]
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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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by Steph • April 18th, 2013
Download the pdf to print and submit the Registration Form.
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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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by Steph • February 14th, 2013
Fox News, Boston affiliate channel 25, and Doug VB Goudie should be sued for hate speech. Seriously. Denying Deaf people the right to information in a language they can understand is violence. Ridicule of their language is an act of violence on a continumm that begins with disregard and ends with people dying because they […]
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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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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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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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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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