The title of this essay comes from a heartbreaking three-minute film made by a teenage girl, Liv McNeil. Simply yet precisely crafted, it documents the withering of a teenager’s life in the time of Covid lockdown. The camera lingers over photographs of her having fun with her friends. Then onto her computer screen, her assignments, […]
education
Numb
Institutes for Technologies of Reunion
Imagine a worldwide archipelago of land-based institutions of learning, sanctuaries of alternative technologies of earth, mind, matter, and body that are marginal or absent within conventional universities.
Letter to my Younger Self
Earlier this year Erick Joseph filmed me in a short interview “for a younger audience.” We talked about stuff I wished I’d known when I was 20. We also talked about yoga. Anyway, here is the short film he made from the interview. I also wrote a short essay to accompany it, which I’ll paste […]
The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn
The best and brightest are abandoning the ship, and even those who remain aboard are participating half-heartedly as they sense the inevitable shipwreck. Eventually even going through the motions of complicity becomes intolerable, as our hunger to live a meaningful life draws us towards a new and ancient story of interconnection, interbeing, and social, personal and ecological healing.
How to Bore the Children
Here is how to make a child bored: first and foremost, keep him indoors so that the infinitude of nature, its endless variation and chaotic messiness is replaced by a finite, orderly, predictable realm. Second, through television and video games, habituate him to intense stimuli so that everything else seems boring by comparison. Third, eliminate […]
The Deschooling Convivium
The Deschooling Convivium: Leaders’ Handbook by Charles Eisenstein The Deschooling Convivium is a project dedicated to undoing the habits of the classroom, habits like looking to authority for answers and instructions, following a program determined by someone else, needing to be right, addiction to meaningless praise, conditioning to dull, trivial work to obtain external rewards, […]