The Fearless Heart

According to my initial plan, this piece would not have been written. The original project included nine pieces: an introduction, and eight peeks into one area after another that the Coronavirus crisis has exposed for us to dig into, see what may have been hidden before, to understand better how …

In 1961, at five, in a conversation with my mother, I was working out what to say, as a future prime minister, to all the prime ministers of the world. In 2017, with the same global passion and a larger vision, I convened a group from several continents to submit …

“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” – R. D. Laing

The appearance of the current Coronavirus, and the major disruptions that both the pandemic and the responses to …

“The belief that if you don’t do “anything wrong” you would never be bothered by the police is deeply entrenched in many places, especially in those countries where the dominant population believes that country to be democratic, which many do. It’s extremely difficult to show: anyone who is not in …

“The personal is political” was one of the rallying cries of second-wave feminism in the US. As much as this slogan has been contested and put to different uses, it came to my mind as I sat down to write this piece (the 7th in my “Apart and Together” series …

This is the 6th piece in a series I named “Apart and Together” to capture the paradoxical reality of the pandemic we are part of: we are being asked to be apart from each other, physically, in the most elemental ways that we are, even as our species’ fate is …

As a child, I was always struck, when reading 19th century novels, by figures about annual amounts of money given to people. I couldn’t figure out, even taking into account insane inflation rates, how it would have been possible for anyone to subsist on those amounts. …

One of the ways I see the Coronavirus as having brought to us some new possibilities in the midst of a growing crisis is that it calls into question one of the deepest and most pervasive narratives of modern life under liberal democracy-style capitalism: that every problem originates in an …

“I contend that the cry of Black Power is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think we have to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.” – …

My approach to personal growth, healing, group learning, and activism is grounded in a general systems theory perspective. One of my guides for this approach is r. buckminster fuller. From reading his essays and major works, and sitting in his lectures, I came …