Shrinking back from leadership, letting the group decide, and refusing to exercise power are quite understandable reactions to centuries of patriarchal domination and exploitation of the Other. We want nothing to do with that, and so retreat sometimes to its antipode: self-abnegation. Perhaps recasting the next paradigm of leadership in terms of service rather than nonviolence (itself a negation) will remedy this tendency. A more beautiful world is calling us, and we need people to bow into its service as leaders.
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The Humbler Realms, Part 2
My last post about the contributions of humble people seems to have struck a chord. People are writing to tell me about the “Charlie’s” in their lives, the people who unostentatiously contribute to their places and communities. One woman wrote,“He is a man much like Charlie. He takes in the stray cats and loves them […]
The Humbler Realms
I met three beautiful souls on my walk today in the Harrisburg Greenbelt, a charming, albeit poison ivy and tick-infested, oasis of greenery near my semi-urban neighborhood. The three were retirees who do maintenance on the greenbelt, in this case removing a fallen tree. They are volunteers who get paid nothing in money and little […]
Aluna: A Message to Little Brother
Only by hardening our hearts can we view the film’s images of filled-in swamps and bare, scarred mountains, and disbelieve that something is feeling very great pain. Only by the colonialistic dismissal of an entire culture’s cosmology and ways of knowing, can we uphold our own dying mythology of nature as an insensate source of materials and repository of wastes.
Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014
As individuals we are in transition between two stories that each define what it means to be a human. Our civilization is going through the same crisis. A convergence of crises is birthing us into a new world.
The Waters of Heterodoxy
In The Fourth Phase of Water, Gerald Pollack offers an elegant new theory of water chemistry that has profound implications not only for chemistry and biology, but for the metaphoric foundation of our understanding of reality and our treatment of nature.