Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Learning from Life – A Journal

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I decided I wanted to expose the bits and pieces below for the purpose of showing, both myself and others, how everything that happens, happy or not, can support our movement toward where we want to go. If you are reading this blog, you know that I am plagued by a fundamental and deep impatience fueled by a deep longing for an entirely different way for us, humans, to live on the planet. The vision is strong, and what I most want is companionship, many people willing to join me on this amazing journey to a profound personal freedom that will allow us to take a stand and, together, turn the tide.

Culture

What the Right Understands About Poverty and Dependency

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David Azerrad in a recent post at the Heritage Foundation’s site, “What the Left Misunderstands about Poverty and Dependency” offers a long list of right wing assumptions: that housing, food, and medical assistance prevent people from marrying and working, that government assistance “erodes the virtues that allow people to flourish,” and most astonishingly, that “all Americans – conservative and liberal alike – believe in a strong safety net.” I sent him an email with several questions (if he answers, I’ll provide that in an update). Here is the first:
When you mention, “the virtues that allow people to flourish,” which virtues do you mean and what would be “flourishing”? From what I can gather, when conservatives talk about flourishing, they mean working hard (but not in any public or government position, Republican politics excepted), going to college, getting married, starting a business, buying a house, etc.. If you’re really flourishing, you live in a gated “community,” go to a private school, own high-end cars, play golf, travel by air, help out with the Boy Scouts (while your sons are in a troop), and perhaps donate your old clothes to charity.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Mourning Our Way to Acceptance

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For years and years I’ve been mystified by the idea of acceptance. I could point to it as a need on the list that people who study Nonviolent Communication consult for their learning and growth. I could understand, in some general sense, what people mean when they say that they want to be accepted. I even included a commitment called “Accepting What Is” in the 17 Core Commitments. Still, all the same, there was something that simply didn’t make sense.

Christianity

Salvation at the Animal Shelter

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Seventy percent of cats at the shelter have to be euthanized. Who shall be saved and who shall be damned? We didn’t want to think of it that way. Who deserves to escape the burning fiery furnace? What do you bring as currency to buy salvation? Your suffering? That seems right, but suffering can create an abyss. That big surly cat growling from a cage might have suffered more than most, but we didn’t want her bites and scratches, her hissing and fleeing under the bed. Your good deeds? But how can we know the past from what we see in the present? Your love?

art

Another Anne Frank and a Jewish Oskar Schindler

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I’m wondering if — 68 years on — “Holocaust fatigue” is setting in, perhaps reinforced by a certain weariness regarding “Jewish dramas” in general, because of the seemingly endless succession of world crises directly or indirectly related to Israel.

Culture

Prayers for Immigration and Immigrants

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O God, remind us that we are part of a whole, part of the land or our ancestry and your future, that we are both bordered people and unbordered, national and trans-national, wound and unwound people. Let us be citizens of a globe, where love and respect have just borders. Amen.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Money and the Web of Love

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It was only when I sat down to write this piece, some version of which has been brewing for some time, that I realized that it is, in some ways, a direct continuation of what I wrote about last week. It is a piece that’s about how we came to make money so central to our lives that it masks the fundamental dependence we have on each other. It is also about how our interdependence likely was and can become again fueled by a web of love and care instead of fear and separation, as it is now.

Christianity

Speaking Peace on Palm/Passion Sunday

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We live at a time of global empire, held together by an interconnected global economy, dominated by huge corporations, supported by an ideology of unrestrained free market capitalism, dependent upon a permanent war economy, and enforced by militarized police forces and home and the most powerful military industrial complex in history.
The world desperately needs people who are passionate and willing to take action for peace.

Culture

About Death, II

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Rather, I take comfort in having been here at all. That the universe came into existence, and that the combined forces of particles, atoms, gravity, the strong force and the weak force, molecules, cells, DNA, evolution, weather patterns and the like have enabled me to exist.
These are the forces so much more powerful, creative and long-lived than my own little self. These are the forces to which I feel compelled and privileged to bow in gratitude.