Game Change -or- Change the Game

“It might feel good it might sound a little somethin’ but damn the game if it don’t mean nothin what is game who got game where’s the game in life behind the game “ Public Enemy Since the dawn of the species – a moment we can only approximate since the missing link is still…well…missing — human beings have had stories.  Stories help us know how to live, how to endure.  Through… Read More

Warming Trend and the Cool Constant of Cooperation

Today is the third above 70 degrees in Wisconsin.  Locals clearly love it.  So do I. And … really?  70’s in late winter here in a U.S. state that shares a rather large lake (Superior) with the Canadian state of Ontario? Maybe it’s the Texan in me who can’t imagine anyplace else acting in total defiance of the seasons.  Maybe it’s my vigilant interest in our reading the trends to avert calamitous… Read More

MC & EX:Change on Public Broadcasting this Wednesday

www.wpr.org Mar 14 ~ 5:00-6:00p.m. CDT MC ~on~AT ISSUE w/ Ben Merens … The EX:Change project and 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE debut on an hour-long public radio show this week.  This is exciting, for sure! An hour call-in for chatting about listening across difference.  The Wisconsin Public Broadcasting range includes Wisconsin, northern Illinois, Michigan and western Minnesota.  And Ben Merens – an exceptional soul entirely devoted professionally and personally… Read More

Civil Rights Remembered in Wisconsin

A year ago, I spoke with Susan Stout (Voice 075), a PhD forester with primary oversight of significant research in the forests of the Allegheny of western Pennsylvania.  Then, yesterday I marched with a small group of people who gathered in the small downtown area of Whitewater, WI.  These things fit together. Almost 9000 miles down the road, I’m taking a break to visit here in Whitewater for the month.  This is… Read More

March 4th has it all over Super Tuesday

I drove into Cincinnati from Manhattan.  How many times will I be able to say that?  Not many. And it was no minor feat.  I’m guessing this is not the least bit surprising to any of you.  Still, we say these things out loud to one another – partly as a request for validation – a “wow” that fits with the relative enormity of the accomplishment.  The vast majority of Americans don’t… Read More

Leap Year and Minding the Gap

It happens relatively rarely in a lifetime, this date that adjusts for the inaccuracies in our calendar.  I can’t help but take comfort in the reminder that human ingenuity requires human fallibility. Dine (Navajo) weavers, Yakama beadworkers, Appalachian quilters sometimes become so good at their crafts that they purposefully place mistakes in their work.  It’s an act of humility, recognition that nothing humanly constructed can be perfect.  Most of us don’t need… Read More

Man Up – Dedication to Community before Distraction

“In a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us.” A friend in North Dakota just sent this to me.  His name is Anthony.  He’s a black man, a gay man.  He’s a playful prophet who lingers profoundly on the living side of dead serious.  Today, his quote came from a man named Sogyal Rimpoche. The trouble with distraction seems vast.  The people I’ve been spending time with here in the… Read More

Georgians in the Radical Act of Listening

I want to tell you about the last three groups to hear about 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.  Night before last in a Decatur, GA neighborhood, about 20 women who know each other from the Presbyterian church they all attend gathered the way they do every month.  They come for dinner, community and inquiry at the home of Kent Leslie author and scholar.  Most of the women are in their 60’s… Read More

Keeping Courage

I’ve just spent the past three days crossing the Southern tier states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama into Georgia.  I’ve spent precious time with relatives – kin by birth and kin by choice and community.  Along the slow roll of land falling toward and then rising up from the Mississippi River’s reliable flow I found story after story, learning after learning. In the three years since I last drove these Southern highways… Read More

The Highest Point in Austin

Last night I stood in my friends’  kitchen.  Lori, the mom of the family was working on white bean soup and her eldest daughter, Eliza was sitting on the counter delivering the speech she’d give in class the next day.  Eliza is 14 and a first year high school student at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, a public school in Austin,TX.  Her speech was on the life of that… Read More