Things that make you go Hmmmm

To be soft also means to be open to new encounters: to not have a fixed boundary, but a porous and negotiable one. The softness of the living is embodied in our capacity to form new relations across the thresholds of skin, cell membrane, and genetic heritage.

We can’t adjust course much less make sense of the last new thing before the next new thing comes along.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to.

Yes, we continue to care about things. I am not saying to move into a state of denial — but I am choosing an alternative to watching the news all day in a state of paralysis when I could be attending to real people,... See more

Discipline is a feature of identity. When you are trying to become a new person, who you are is fighting who you want to become , and that’s painful. You will go through a period of growing pains until your new identity solidifies.

We need to take this process gradually.

The world, the values of the world, are shaped by the choices each of us makes. Which means my thinking, my actions, my relationships, and my life create a front line for the possibilities of the entire species. Each one of us is an individual practice ground for what the whole can or cannot do, will or will not do.

Imagining communities isn’t simply about who can be in the community, but also about who in the community can participate in imagining the community. This is why the move to undo birthright citizenship, which not-so-subtly targets people of color, must also be understood alongside the move to restrict reproductive access and repeal no-fault divorce... See more

let’s talk about patterns.

Because trust isn’t about love, loyalty, or how someone makes you feel in the moment. It’s about what they do. Consistently. Predictably. Especially when it’s inconvenient.

Trust is pattern recognition.

Not sexy. Not sentimental. But clean. And if your perception has been used against you, clean is sacred.

Connective tissue wasn’t even acknowledged, much less treated as an organ, by Western medicine until the last few years. They didn’t even acknowledge its existence, or the meridians, gut biome, or any of the other liminal, in-between things that actually compose the community of organisms our bodies represent and share.

The organs are just the... See more

Anger aims at restoring lost control and often achieves at least an illusion of it.

I’ve spent most of life and career thinking of myself as an agent of change. I grew up at the end of the Vietnam War protests, and mixed one part Brechtian activist theater to another part prophetic Judaism and ended up at the TWO protests and Occupy Wall Street. I really believed we could use those deliberate mechanisms to create policy, fight the... See more