As COVID changes our Thanksgiving celebrations, can we get to the roots of Thanksgiving, including the ugly histories the holiday too often hides, to create something new?

“I’m really sad, but I’m not going to come for Thanksgiving,” my mother told me over the phone the other night. I closed my eyes and sighed. I knew she was probably making the best decision. With the recent spike in Corona numbers, I was even a bit relieved. The last thing I want is for her to get sick from being in the airport on her way to visit me. …

This Equinox, what is really coming into balance? What is really growing amidst this year’s harvest?

I frowned. The balance hovering in my minds’ eye looks ugly.

Every solstice and Equinox, I offer an online circular time reflection space, using a simple circular temporal technology that was given to me in prayer several years ago. Circular calendars are ancient temporal technologies — they’ve lasted as long as they have across different cultural contexts because they work. I use them in part as a dynamic tool to reconnect people to place. I also use it because it is a powerful and simple way to sense patterns. Every solstice and equinox, I bring a different set of questions to the process and the folks who sign up get to answer the questions. …

Integrate powerful online gatherings with delighting in the sensuousness of our human-earth family. As Earthlings, to celebrate our home is to celebrate our creaturely interconnection with it.

Earth Day celebrations without being outside (usually a local park or other manicured ecosystem) with my fellow people, dogs, and related animals feels, well, not at all like Earth Day. In the 50 years since the first demonstrations across the U.S. against what Walter Cronkite then termed the “fouled skies, filthy waters and littered earth” caused by so-called human progress, significant environmental progress has been made because people, as citizens and consumers and spiritual beings, came together and demanded it of their lawmakers and corporations. …

“Waking up is weird these days,” one of my friends texted me this morning.

For sure.

And it is not just waking up. Time itself feels weird.

To be honest: even in “normal times” I find calendars, clocks and schedules a bit confusing. It is probably why I spend a fair amount of time engaging with creating better histories in order to create better futures and create circular calendars: I find time mysterious … and not always easy to navigate.

But this is more bizarre than usual. I was surprised at the extent to which I was having a hard time keeping up with time and getting confused about my own schedule, given that I usually work from home. The rhythm of my days is different than Before COVID-19 (BC-19), but not as drastically different as those whose entire schedules have been cancelled; or who shifted from being on the road to being at home; or who have lost their jobs entirely. …

Art is not a luxury when you need it to survive.

When you are far from the home you love and the song you sing brings you back to your own soul.

When making an instrument brings you out of your own depression.

When you fold paper cranes, hundreds of them, for your own healing journey out of cancer.

When dancing the dance danced by your ancestors and their ancestors and their ancestors tells you who you are and where you come from.

When you are sitting in quarantine, and you can’t touch anyone, but you can pick up that guitar, or the paintbrush, or the spindle, or the clay, and create something that tells you that you are still alive. …

Upon hearing how many Universities were suddenly shifting to remote teaching due to the novel coronavirus, I, as an entrepreneur who has been running my own online courses to grow adults’ capacity to engage with social and ecological shifts for several years, thought, oh wow! Great time to write a ’10 tips for newly remote professors’ article!

Then, after drafting my initial article, I started talking to some of my academic friends and clients who were actually going through this shift in their own higher education institutions. I realized pretty quickly that there were three interrelated issues. …

If you are one of the thousands of professors who are suddenly being asked to teach online (aka “teaching remotely”) due to Universities and colleges closing campuses during the coronavirus pandemic, you might well be feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. You might even be feeling a lot of angst.

If you are thinking to yourself, but I can’t create the same experience online, well, you are correct. You can not. But as someone who has been running my own online education company for several years now, I want to assure you that much is possible in the weird world of online or remote/online teaching. It is not the same. It is different. …