live a SevaLife
https://youtu.be/mzj9N6Zjblk Calling all dreamers! Calling all healers! This will be a short post. I want to save the world. If you’re reading my stuff, you probably want to do that too. I have an idea for how we can do it, but we need to move a lot faster than our busy 21st-century consumer capitalist …
Continue reading "Calling all dreamers, artists, idealists, healers, leaders, and educators"
Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash Last week I wrote about how you can’t change the world without changing people. For those of you who were itching to start proselytizing about your vision for social change, today I’m taking the lesson one step further, into the realm of personal growth. You can’t change people without …
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash In 2012, my hope for the future of the world died. And yet, in that same year, the seeds of a new hope were also planted. On the Berkeley campus, I attended a talk by Aric McBay, Derrick Jensen, and Lierre Keith, the authors of Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the …
Continue reading "The personal is political: You can’t change the world without changing people"
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash Over the past several weeks, I have been writing about the seven values that make up my personal code. Today I’m going to talk about what the seventh value, community, means to me. The various crises facing humanity today (COVID-19, systemic racism, war, the climate crisis) are all man-made, …
Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash When I first started dipping my toes into the personal development world, one of the things that didn’t sit right with the social justice warrior in me was the emphasis on personal responsibility. In the capitalism-can-do-no-wrong world of traditional personal development, personal responsibility is a bootstraps ethos. No matter …
Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash As a white, left-brained, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, college-educated, able-bodied man born in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, and raised by an atheist step-dad, the circumstances of my socialization were ideal for sewing doubt into my consciousness for anything spiritual, new-age, or “woo-woo.” That is perhaps why …
Continue reading "Talking about spirituality is like dancing about architecture"
Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash For years now I’ve said that my top three values are love, humor, and justice. I liked the simplicity of that, and at times I would even say that humor and justice are just different flavors of love, so really it’s just one value. Then at the beginning of …
Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash Cornel West is one of my favorite public figures because of his unique ability to embody both a deeply rooted brotherly love for anyone he encounters alongside a fiery righteous indignation at all examples of injustice in the world. As far as I’m concerned, the moment we are …
Continue reading "“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”"
Photo by Gemma Chua-Tran on Unsplash Have you ever considered how awkward it would be to try to explain the name of the color salmon to an actual salmon? The fish would look at it and look back at you confused and say, “You know we’re not that color, right?” And you’d have to look …
Continue reading "You love to laugh, but do you laugh to love?"
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash For the last four weeks, I have been focusing on the theme of four guideposts on the path to a more nourishing kind of love than what is typically achievable without committed study in today’s society. I say “committed study” because I agree with Erich Fromm that loving is …