Clare Consultation, LLCTruth Be Told – Montgomery
On her MoreThanTours, Michelle Browder tells the truth. She starts on the banks of the Alabama River where the lands of the Alabama Tribes were stolen, by hostility or trickery: Apache, Caddo, Alabama-Quassarte, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Arapaho, Cherokee, Cheyenne. Where black American slaves were marched from ships to storehouses to market. People descended from the Africans stolen into involuntary servitude. After 1808, when stealing people from outside our country was banned, domestic trade sustained… Read More
In a Time When Integrity Seems in Short Supply
This is Dan Wenk. He’s a dad, a husband, a grandfather, a friend, and a profoundly wise and effective public servant. Today marks the first day following his 43-year career with the National Park Service. Today – too early and in circumstances disrespectful and baffling – Dan is retired. His last post – Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. You can read in this June 7 Washington Post piece a bit about those circumstances…. Read More
Loneliness and Listening In
Being in positive, healthy, reciprocal relationship is the most powerful predictor of mental and emotional wellbeing. Friendships, love partnerships, neighborhoods, community groups. This fact is increasingly worth considering given the evidence that loneliness in the United States is on the increase. Perhaps the most profound symptom – suicide. Last week, we learned of the suicide of a young man we know from a rural Montana town. Montana has the highest suicide rate… Read More
John McCain – “But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement”
I did not vote for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. But because of his candidacy, I got in my car early in 2009, and began what would be a 10,000 mile circumnavigation of the lower 48. I did this because, by the time Americans got to the polls in November 2008, no matter who we voted for, everyone was using the word change. So, because of McCain and Obama, because… Read More
The Presence of Absence
Yesterday, I learned of a word. A Portuguese word. Saudade. Saudade reveals its meaning in context. Something like the English words longing, yearning, and love when it’s about a quality of ineffable missing. Like many words in other languages, there’s really not a direct translation. This is because the word holds more than its parts. A noun that’s bigger than we English speakers think nouns can be. Bigger than person, place, thing – but holding all… Read More
Keeping Calm
Here’s a paradox for you. We do better as individuals and communities if we calm down. We do better if, instead of anxious monitoring, overwork, worry, agitation and heated opposition we opt for calm. We know this but, these days, practice it too rarely. Instead, we either withdraw or lash out. Another thing about calm – it, like any other great way of being, can be trivialized. Alongside the truth of calm’s… Read More
Chatting with Eric
Sometimes it feels like a former life. The days I was riding city buses to and from my years as a professor. The time later in that career when I was living all alone – my daughter off to graduate study in Scotland, single-parenting a thing of the past, and my new husband not yet a person I knew. During those days – those years – I got my social sustenance in… Read More
The justice possible with knowing we (white people) do not know as much as we think we do.
We know Roy Moore is a monster, a total embarrassment to our state. But in the eyes of black voters, what makes him more of a monster than the parade of sleazy politicians who have stood against black interests for generations? So yes, I’m voting for Doug Jones but only because it’s a vote against Roy Moore. And that’s not good enough to rally a base of voters who are already stricken… Read More
Mentor of the Highest Order – A Precious Elder has Passed
An hour ago, this text message from my dear friend, Charles Hudson: Roy has passed. In immediate loving memory, I am reposting this blog from October 10, 2014. Before you read this, though, I want you to know this man is one of the very few about whom no one can exaggerate upon his death. Roy Sampsel is truly a Great Tribal Leader. Daily, he touched the world and its people… Read More