In March 2020, seven members of our “family of choice” took the train from NYC to our rented house 3 hours away in Montauk. During the worst of the Covid pandemic, we all lived there together. People began to leave and go back to NYC in June. By October, everyone...
Are you familiar with my “Words to Ponder” column on this site? It’s a place where—when the spirit moves me—I quote something that someone wrote that provokes my pondering. My contemplating. My mulling. My imagining. My conversing with them. It could be a few lines from a poet, a sentence...
Growing up is a mixed bag. Case in point: We have more varied and richer experiences but we less frequently free our imaginations to create new experiences with them. There’s what’s real and there’s fantasy—the line between them becomes rigid and “what’s real” comes to dominate our lives. “Oh, that’s...
The garden metaphor is pervasive as a picture of human development. Children grow, it is said, from seeds. With the right kind of nurturing, they will ”flower” and “bloom.” Think kindergarten. I like the metaphor for how it evokes a unified process—the person-environment interface, rather than person on the one hand...
Today's words are from the sometimes imponderable but always evocative Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ...
Each year the Institute hosts a Community Meeting and Fundraiser. We design each gathering around a theme. This past May our theme was Giving in a Culture of Getting and Loss. Among the elements were original poems written by six Institute supporters (referred to below). At these gatherings it’s always...
Just as human exceptionalism and superiority were conceptualized and have been practiced by humans, so too are any and all attempts to go beyond them, to dig our way out of the anthropocene and inhabit a non human-centric world. For any such attempts will be our (human) conceptions and practices....
In 1999, Ken Gergen wrote about the tyranny of the normal—“the pattern of expectations, obligations and swift sanctions within the core of most disciplines.” In 2019, Jerry Z. Muller, zeroed in on how one dominant feature of the normal —metrics—tyrannizes us. His book is aptly titled The Tyranny of Metrics. Lately, I’ve...
Last week I turned 80 and one of the many ways we marked the occasion (in addition to a fantastic truly global Zoom celebration) was for Jan Wootten, my creative advisor, and me to reread an essay I wrote for the book Narrative Identities, Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction many years...
Instead of asking "What's the solution?" ask "How can we become the kind of species/society/community/organization that can create solutions that seem impossible?" That question—"How can we become?"— is unanswerable through traditional means. It requires a completely different relationship to knowledge, expertise, and human possibility. That's what The International Class at the...
