Common Good Collective

Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Significance Of Place, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

A Nation On the Verge of Becoming

The most impacting liberation has always been collective and grassroots. North Carolina Black Alliance is one such collective effort that his grown tremendously in power and impact over its lifespan. Below is a reflection on the history of such movements in North Carolina and how collective, grassroots organizing is more important than ever.

Really Becoming America
By North Carolina Black Alliance staff

A NATION ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING

Increased attacks on voting rights, ramped up gerrymandering, the January 6th insurrection, and the endless stream of videos of unarmed Black and Brown men and women killed in unjustified police shootings make us question who and what America is.

A common sentiment is that these assaults are merely an unmasking of the systemic racism and oppression that has always existed beneath our nation’s surface.

Minding The Gap

In a society that has deeply embraced a colorblind racist ideology of ignoring differences and focusing on strengths, we have yet to learn as a country the magic of embracing differences as invitations to greater intimacy, knowledge, and innovation. Chaplain and activist Yuri Yamamoto illustrates this idea in their short yet powerful reflection in The Universalist Unitarian Association’s newsletter, Braver/Wiser.

Minding the Gap
By Yuri Yamamoto

“Yuri began crying and said in a sorrowful voice, ‘I don’t want stereo. I want terebi.’ She sounded so miserable that my spirit sunk… I wonder if not having a TV makes it hard at preschool. What is the point of being so proud about ‘not buying a TV’ if it makes her feel like that?”—from my father’s journal, dated June 20, 1964

I grew up without a TV and still don’t have one today. My parents made the choice, and this has been my normal as far as I could remember. When I read my father’s journal, however, a flood of memories came back. 1964 was the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In anticipation for the big event, every family seemed to have bought their first TV. Soon, a TV sat at the head of the dinner table in every typical Japanese household.

Practice Liberation

Liberation is ongoing. This week’s reader focuses on four practices that bring more and more freedom: openheartedness, imagination, rest, and gratitude. Maybe these sound fuzzy or soft, but the clarity and courage they provide is real.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

“We Lived Happily During the War”

Ilya Kamisky is a Ukrainian-American poet whose work voices the unease we feel at this moment. Though we must defend joy, rest, and gratitude, we insist that they cannot numb us. They must compel us.

We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

This poem was published by The Poetry Foundation.

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Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

A Little More Than Kin

Richard Powers won the Pulitzer prize for Overstory, his novel tracing the essential connections between trees and humans. In this essay, he urges us to find liberation from our small selves and find kinship everywhere we look. Powers writes that to meet this moment in history, we need “tales in which the humans and the nonhumans each hold half a locket. Only stories will help us to rejoin human to humility to humus, through their shared root.

A Little More Than Kin
by Richard Powers

Richard Powers reaches beyond the cold calculus of kin selection to look at how human beings find kinship with nonhuman relatives and how stories can reveal our shared fate.

REFLECTING ON A possible genetic basis for altruism, the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton once wrote that “in the world of our model organisms … everyone would sacrifice [his own life] when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half brothers or eight first cousins.” (A similar quip is often attributed to J. B. S. Haldane, one of history’s most quotable scientists, although Haldane never wrote it down.) The arithmetical precision of Hamilton’s formula gives it an almost comical ring, and the line sounds at least a little tongue-in-cheek. But Hamilton, one of the progenitors of the theory of kin selection, took the meme seriously enough to use it in developing what is now called Hamilton’s rule:

rB > C