Blog
A story worth telling: The world we will build
‘Let This Radicalize You’ asks us to tell stories about how we’ll support each other. Tell a story about how people support each other. People who are listening want to feel they can find a personal role to play. It’s worth doing.
5 ways philosophy fails (sometimes)
Too much time looking down, forgetting to come up for air. I do philosophy. I must accept there’s no one true answer. I must care, help others care, be practical, keep going. I’ll fail often. I hope for small wins.
We wait for the writer to finish the story
Patiently waiting for that person to return. We find ourselves talking too much. Sick of the sound of our own voice. Self-consciousness restricts creativity. Better to write nothing at all?
Climate change, predicted (three decades ago)
Returning to an environmental classic: ‘The Ages of Gaia’ by James Lovelock. We don’t yet know what it will be like when the forests are gone. But we should live in a way that prevents this outcome. We must support our own survival.
The Industrial Revolution: All of it has to change again
Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next. Steel, aluminum, concrete; fossil fuels; electric light; transportation, communication, refrigeration, medicine. Do we know what we have to change?
Tadpoles teach us in Kern’s ‘Real Sugar’
Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’. We can grieve “all the frogs that aren’t.” Some of our stories going forward, though, have to be about the frogs that are. Which will those be?
How we’re here now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’. We know in our bones what being is. Because we are. ‘To be’ is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to past and future.
We know who’s responsible for orange sky
We need to hold them accountable. It’s Exx-smog and Shell-smoke. The big orange cats must be held accountable, and there’s more than one. Each of us has a role to play.
Designing a town people can get around? Repeat this exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder. Sometimes we lack empathy for each other’s transportation needs and preferences. We have no idea because we haven’t stopped to try.