Author of Sheila Says We're Weird and Defenders of Dirt. Promoting creativity, craft, cooperatives, and communities of care. I believe ideas can inform and inspire positive actions.
The chaos machine spun out so rapidly this week, I gave up on trying to read books to understand what's going on. Searching for in-depth news analysis, I ran across way too many videos in which people—especially women—were being assaulted by uniformed men. And when
As I write this, my tiny habitat garden already shows autumn's encroachment. Only the asters, goldenrods, and brown-eyed susans are still in bloom, while the echinacea and yarrow flowers look like burnt toast. Over the last few years, I've been learning to garden more for
The yoga teacher had guided us into one of my favorite restorative poses, balasana. Commonly known as child's pose, it involves folding into yourself like a pocket knife. Rest is the operative word here: your torso rests on your thighs, which rest on your calves. With any luck,
"One of the greatest struggles of our time will be to cultivate a life-affirming political culture that can be enacted in the everyday, a counterculture of rebellious care." Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You It is easy to despair when we focus on the
I am a little over halfway through Heather Cox Richardson's provocatively titled 2020 book, How the South Won the Civil War. The subtitle sums up her view of the ongoing aftermath: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. I was planning to finish the
This is one of those old expressions that has undergone a seeming reversal of it's original meaning. A garment made from "whole cloth" used to be considered of a higher quality; it was not patched together from remnants and smaller pieces. Evidently, deceptive sellers of clothing
D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the KKK in Indiana (aka Steve and The Old Man), was serving his twenty-year prison sentence when the lawyer who convicted him "asked him if he'd been serious about running for the White House. Steve said the plan was real.
This is my seventeenth post here, and I'm officially declaring it the end of the first semester of this 4-year Learn, Imagine, Act project. During my years as a college professor, I felt a lot of institutional pressure to require final exams. But finals never struck me
It's nearly impossible to keep up. Last week, right after I pushed the "publish" button on my article, "Poison Words: Language, Dehumanization, and Death," I heard about the president's anti-semitic reference to "bad bankers" as "Shylocks." And,
Yes, this is another post related to eugenics. So many current issues involving the mistreatment of immigrants, people of color, women, and LGBTQIA people are laced with ideas that have carried over from this conceptual base. Victor Klemperer’s quote grew out of his experience of being a Jew in
The aim of this history is not to indict any particular figure, nor is it to undermine the positive discussion of neurodiversity that Asperger's work has inspired. Rather, it is cautionary tale in service of neurodiversity—revealing the extent to which diagnoses can be shaped by social and
"The moment an individual’s fundamental rights are subjected to a simple cost-benefit analysis is the moment the gates of hell open wide." Stephen Unwin, "Life Unworthy of Life: The Lessons of T4" I keep adding to my Learn, Imagine, Act resource list. Current events