The Blog
Here’s where I share thoughts on the work of moving toward our biggest lives and baddest selves.
Who do you want to be when things go sideways?
A week or two ago, during a newspaper-inspired conversation about the coming election, Theresa asked, “What are we going to do it if it doesn’t go the way we want?” Admittedly, I gave her a pat rah-rah of an answer, a somebody’s-got-to-keep-doing-the-work kind...
The Often Overlooked Critical Component to Survival
It was 2004 or so when I first heard of the Slow Foods Movement. Started in Italy, Slow Foods was a reaction to, you guessed it, fast food. The movement embraces the way our culture lives in food long after the traditional dress, customs, and even language...
Joy and Sorrow as Humanity’s Warp and Weft
It astonishes me sometimes – no, often – how ever person I get to know – everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything – lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer...
Your Psyche is Made of Velcro
In her memoir Why Religion? Elaine Pagels described noticing that she’s attracted to a female friend. A little background on her: Raised by atheist parents, she chose Christianity as both a faith tradition and focus of scholarship in her early adulthood,...
Prison Abolition for This Guy?
Twenty-four years later and it’s still a touch surreal to me to think that I was nearly murdered at 18. I’m not sure there are other words for it: My ex-beau had stolen a knife from his steakhouse job and sat outside of my mom’s house until she and my step-father left...
When Old and New Trauma are Shaken AND Stirred
Since making my first entry in September of 2016, my five-year journal has paid dividends, both each evening as it cues me to ask myself, “What do I most want to remember about today? An event? A feeling? A question? A thought?” and as I look back through the...
Unlearning My Way Forward
A handful of years ago, I asked my mom to recount for me a bit of family lore. It was the kind of story that infuses most families, so deeply interwoven that it doesn’t often occur to us to examine it more closely, to check whether the story was, in fact, woven...
Seven Years and I’m More a Fool than Ever
…only the fool thinks he is wise; the wise man knows himself to be a fool. Perhaps to be educated is to be a fool. The wise man knows that for the small pile of books and experiences that lay behind him, there are infinitely more to go. ...
My Formula for Joy
I share Shinzen Young’s equation for suffering – Pain x Resistance = Suffering – several times each week. That’s how powerful I find it: its presupposition of pain; its invitation to accept the fullness of our experiences; its simple reminder that suffering is...
History will Squeeze the Complexity from This Moment, Too
I’m from Greensboro, North Carolina, originally. This past February 1 marked the 60th anniversary of when four young NC A&T students - David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), and Joseph McNeil – sat down at the lunch counter of...