Redemption

These songs of freedom. Redemption song.Bob Marley It’s the season. Spring. Close to the equinox – that moment when day and night balance their time. When winter lets go its weary grip happy, as most of us are, to let dormancy give way to the impulses of sprouts. I’m spending these transitional days in Montana – a place of bold crownings of grape hiacynth, fuzzy promises of catkins. And tomorrow is the day recognized by Christians… Read More

Paying Attention

Today a friend posted the notice above on her Facebook page. This friend is a communications and diversity specialist – a Chippewa/Cree woman nearing completion of her PhD as a scholar of decolonization. Another friend, a white Texan in Denver, posted the runoff results in Georgia’s 58th District. Park Cannon, a health advocate, has earned this Congressional seat, filling the post left vacant when Simone Bell, the first Black lesbian to serve in… Read More

Listening as Leadership

In our polarized society, we need a starting place for rediscovering each other. I believe that we all share the essential things: love of family, courage in adversity, sustaining faith, hope for the future. Living stories [are] told from the inside out.  Windows into the hearts and minds of people.  David Hughes Duke I just got off the phone with a man in Georgia.  He contacted me because we both have this… Read More

February 1 – Re-imagining Underway

February.  The love month.  The month my skin has historically hit its most green (being of “olive” complexion – or so I’ve been told).  The shrimpy month perhaps made so out of some vague attempt compensate the rutheless grind mid-winter in the northern hemisphere can present whether rainy in Portland, sub-zero in eastern Montana or, this year, astonishingly dry in California and wildly cold where my Mama lives in Georgia. It was February, 2009… Read More

One Change Leader — My Mama

There it was – the enormous stack of mail that comes from being away from home for awhile.  Daunting as it seems, it’s always possible, even curious, to riffle through – separating the “must attend to this” ones from the far more plentiful immediate candidates for the recycling bin.  In a way that has become exceptional and continues a bit thrilling, there was a hand addressed envelope from a real person —… Read More

My Uncle Abbott and World Peace

As I begin writing, the body that carried my beloved uncle’s vivid spirit is being placed in a grave.  I am, of course, not there, but thousands of miles away.  Uncle Abbott died October 3.  He was born August 17, 1926 – 87 years were his to know and walk through here on the surface of this beautiful planet and among all of the rest of us.  Those of us who had… Read More