I’m on my way home from New York. At Bowery Poetry, I gave my first Culture of Possibility workshop, aimed at actualizing the ideas in my new books. As so often happens, everyone resonated with my critique of Datastan, the realm in which human being in all their delightful particularity are asked to adapt to …
I’m going through one of those bumpy passages on the journey to belonging. I moved a couple of months ago, and while the reason was love and I feel the opposite of regret, the adjustment to a new community is pushing some ancient buttons. As with many children of immigrants, I know what it’s like …
The day will come when you will trust you more than you do now, and you will trust me more than you do now. We can trust each other. I do believe, I really believe…that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are …
Silence, as every meditator knows, confers the opportunity to notice what matters most. This past week, I’ve been noticing our ideas about age and thinking about an important event approaching fast: On November 3, The Shalom Center (where I have the honor of serving as president) will honor Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Gloria Steinem with …
This silly little story keeps popping into my head. It must have been at the height of the Sixties—1968, maybe. My aunt was reminiscing about the past. Reaching for a story to impress me with the sacrifices of the Great Depression, she said that she’d walked to work all week to save carfare so she …
You know the “Stockholm Syndrome,” right? It’s when hostages empathize with their captors, a form of what psychologists call “traumatic bonding.” Welcome to the Stockholm Syndrome State. The culture of politics is in a coma, the result of an overdose of deference to authority dissolved in a long drink of state-sponsored fear. Shall we wake …
When we have rights, it’s easy to take them for granted. It’s when they are contested that they matter most. Today, I write about two very different examples provided by the U.S. Supreme Court and the movement for Scottish independence. There have been many times in my adulthood that I questioned the meaning of voting. …
I first got wind of it in Linda Essig’s post on Facebook (Linda, who writes the blog “Creative Infrastructure,” was also kind enough to post a “love letter” to The Culture of Possibility last week). Then I got a note from my friend David Francis in Edinburgh, a wonderful musician (he and Mairi Campbell make …
It’s interesting to have opportunities to give advice to young artists. Each time, I learn something about myself, something about the way I may appear in others’ eyes—and something about the gap between them too. I suppose the easiest way to explain that gap is that to those several decades my junior, my life—or at …
My sweetheart loves to fly fish. He never keeps the fish, just tenderly tips them back into the sea. So he’s plugged into various fishing networks, some devoted to survival of species that are imperiled by human impact. He’s the one who turned me onto Twyla Roscovich’s quite remarkable film, Salmon Confidential. The film painstakingly …