Last week I wrote a lot about griefâa feeling that, for nearly all of us, can be gut-wrenching. This week I want to turn my attention to a less intense element of the âecosystem,â one that plays an important, if at times almost invisible, part in our organizational health. Itâs essentially about taking the advice […]
I hadnât really planned to write about grief this week. Somehow, though I wasnât expecting it, grief and grieving seemed to keep showing up over, and over, again. Which is very much what my experience of grieving has been like. Even when I think Iâve got a handle on it, it creeps up on me […]
As I write, world leaders are gathered in Glasgow, attempting to come to consensus on a way to address the increasingly urgent world crisis of climate change. Despite what seems to be general agreement on the gravity of the situation, the visitors to Glasgow appear unable (at least so far) to coalesce around a comprehensive […]
In the spirit of last weekâs discussion of compassion and compost, I thought I could begin this piece by pulling from the place I left off by returning to the work of writer Janisse Ray. I met Ms. Ray for the first time a few weeks ago at the annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium in Oxford, Mississippi where […]
This past spring, Joy Harjoâpoet, artist, musician, and member of the Muscogee Creek Nationâcelebrated her 70th birthday. Born in Oklahoma in the spring of 1951, Harjo has seen and experienced a good deal of suffering in the world; harm inflicted on the planet, on her people, and on herself as well. In March of this […]
Back in 1991, right around the right time I began the intentional explorations of my own emotions, Sam Keen published a book called Fire in the Belly. I read it shortly after it came out, and all these years later, Iâm still benefiting from what I learned. Three decades down the road, Iâve gone on to […]
“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?â author Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wonders in The Mushroom at the End of the World. Her answer: âI go for a walk, and if Iâm really lucky, I find mushrooms.â When BrenĂ© Brown asked British actress Sarah Niles, âYou, Sarah, are called to be really brave, […]
Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson A well-connected friend asked me the other day to let her know what she should tell politicians of both parties that small-business people would like to have right now. Since I struggle to find the words […]
Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson here and there, all the while continuing to do whatever it is they do for a âliving.â I went in the other direction. I started cooking for a living, and in the process, ended up with […]
There is nothing I can think of in the early years of my existence back in suburban Chicago that would have led me, or anyone else for that matter, to believe that the story of my life would later be transformed by a deep connection to food and cooking. We ate supper together more often […]
Forty years ago this week, on the 13th of September, 1971, a ninety-one-year-old woman died quietly in Genoa. She had moved there near the end of WWII to live with her sonâs family, while continuing to do the anarchist writing and publishing work that had helped her make her way in the world throughout her […]
In the strange corners of my mind, sometimes I start to imagine conversations between people who I know full well never met one another. Silly as they may seem, these imaginary âchatsâ are flights of historically mixed-up fantasy that help me get my mind around what shifts might have happened along the course of human […]
