Jay Matthews

The Response Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.

But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying... See more

Grief is love. How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live. We can cry.

“Most or all of what I do takes off from looking at the description of the world we have… like an art critic—saying, how could this have been better? And then trying to improve the equations …to explain things that don’t seem to fit,” he says. “Aesthetic guidance has been very crucial in trying to formulate new laws—and sometimes it’s worked.”

Sir Patrick Geddes emphasized the need for transdisciplinary education as a facilitator of cultural change. He advocated ecologically and socially appropriate practices, and stressed the need for an integration of human settlements and livelihoods into the natural conditions of their particular region. According to Geddes, appropriate local action... See more

What do these changes to our forests mean? What are the trees taking with them and what is arriving in their wake? What is the relationship between the trees’ migration and the ecological systems and human communities that they are leaving behind? What does the movement of these beings reflect back to us in the present and foreshadow for the... See more

People call too many meetings when they want to feel more in control; those meetings often make you worse at completing whatever task or project you’re struggling to complete, in part because they’re conducted in a mononchronic way, reinscribing systems of authority, obsessed with (inactionable) action plans, and never actually building any sort of... See more