At the end of January, one of my close spiritual friends died. A queer Black man, a Sufi imam “scholartivist” (scholar–artist–activist) and professor of ministry students, Baba Ibrahim Farajajé died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-three, and I’m guessing he had been carrying too much. It was only six months earlier that Baba and I had sat together…
No one ever says, “You do leadership really well.” People say, “You are a great leader.” Leadership is not something you do; it’s someone you are. Leadership is a Personal Practice A client and friend of mine reflected that a critical and life-changing realization for him was that “with care and practice, with awareness and attention, by doing the work…
The Garrison Institute’s recent symposium, Pathways to Planetary Health, brought together almost five dozen experts from around the world to discuss the climate change and biodiversity crisis. We explored the intersection of four emerging ideas–Half Earth, an Ecological Civilization, Regenerative Economics, and Pervasive Altruism–their convergence, and indications of the pathways towards planetary health. To keep the conversation going, we recently…
In Zen we say that everyone is already a buddha, an awakened one. But we don’t know we are until we are shaken out of our complacent habitual thoughts and see clearly that everything we encounter, including ourselves, has the same awakened nature.
The First Amendment is the most important of all amendments to the US Constitution — after all, it is first not the second or anything beyond amendment, enacted along with the additional nine amendments as the price of acceptance by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Founding Fathers who feared the power of the government they were creating, worried that…
We entered together, but I found the lushest dress in the store: crinoline flowers, bright blue, and floor length. We had gone to get my mom something. After medical school and a grueling residency, she was graduating. She didn’t find a dress and, in my memory, she wore a pink shirt-dress from her closet to the celebration. I, six years…
It seems that after any disaster or tragedy, be it a horror of human making, or the aftermath of nature’s wrath, be it across the oceans or around the corner, we are inundated with images of suffering across our TV screens and social media feeds. We witness faces contorted with fear, mouths gaping in disbelief, bodies crouched, crying uncontrollably. In…
In faith-based organizing or spiritual movements, we rely on internal power a lot. We wear T-shirts that read, “What’s inside Matters.” We generate our own power. We don’t have material power, don’t have big lobbyists to pay, or a lot of wind at our back from the status quo. Thus, we go inside. We are powered by solar and wind…