On On Being

I woke up yesterday morning to a long, kind email from a stranger who claimed to have read my writing on Krista Tippett's On Being website. I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I got a notice that someone had tweeted something I said, or should I say I got a tweet? I have a twitter account (is that how you say it?), but I have used it maybe four times. I have no idea what I'm doing reading or writing tweets. Or twittering. And then someone liked -- or is it favorited? -- that tweet. Or is it twitter? Oh, twat! In any case, I eventually made my way to the On Being site and saw that a post I wrote years ago was their featured blog post for the day and that they'd also posted many photos from my blog and the Extreme Parenting Video Project. My name was right on there, as was my picture and a little bio. A link to the ebook was there, too.

I'll make a long story short. I had no idea why all of this was published. I never received any word from the site that they were publishing my work, and here's the clincher: I have no memory of submitting anything to them. I wrote the editor and explained that while I was thrilled and honored to be featured, it felt weird to have not been contacted beforehand.

The internets are strange and wild, indeed.

The editor got back to me with an apology for their oversight in not contacting me. Evidently, I had submitted the piece, but I'm not sure when. Have I gone mad? Again, I have no recollection of doing so, and the piece was written in 2012, well before we embarked on the cannabis odyssey.

 The On Being website and recorded interviews are some of my favorite things generated online, and I have often felt that Krista Tippet might have the best job in the universe. So, wow. I'm honored and grateful to be included on the site.

You can read it here.

Feel free to tweet and twat and twank about it, too.

While I'm away,

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 

please listen to this -- all of it.



or Click HERE.

There's something for everyone -- the creative, the intelligent, the abled and the disabled. It's really something.

Listen to it.

A Really Great Essay, especially for Claire and Ken and Single Dad

It's hard not to think of what's going on in America today -- the grappling with national healthcare, the politicization of what some (like me) might consider basic morality, the decimation of social programs for the disabled in the interest of individualism, the notion of what it means to be human. 

Thanks to Sally over at Maggie World, I read this essay today, written by Chris Gabbard, the father of August. It's wonderful to hear these words from a male perspective -- please read and share.

And if you're sitting around, knitting or something, listen to any program on Krista Tippett's show Being, but particularly this one, Fragility and the Evolution of Our Humanity. Here's an excerpt, written by Xavier Le Pichon, geophysicist and spiritual thinker:

Thus, the most revealing character of human societies seems to me to be that they take care of those who, when considered on the sole basis of immediate efficiency, appear to be debris that should be eliminated. Taking care of fragile and vulnerable individuals has revealed to humans their own fragility and vulnerability. It has forced them to enter this dark world of fear in order to learn to live with it. They have realized that the human individual is a unique reality that keeps its unity under widely changing aspects from the fetus to the aged person at the end of his life. This process must have played a decisive role in the psychological mutation of humans and their acquisition of an artistic and metaphysical capacity. As a result, the social presence of an individual within a human society is related to the tight network of relations, of emotions and more deeply of love that has been progressively woven throughout his life, and not primarily to its immediate material usefulness.