GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

My father would never talk about the war when I was growing up. We live in an age now where it is generally expected to show respect for our military veterans, but when I was growing up things were different. Veterans of my father’s war came home to jeers and name calling.   There must be so many reasons not to say a thing when you have been through an experience like that. The war veteran like my father has sacrificed his individual will for the sake of a good that stands apart from questions. The private will is surrendered to the will of a general.  With or without gratitude, the nation cannot maintain a memory of what was surrendered or what was gained for very long. That may be more brutal than any of the atrocities of war in the end, the loss of consciousness. When I was a boy growing up we would get in fights on the schoolyard. As I recall, girls would make the arrangements as often as boys themselves, but the boys were the ones who had to fight in almost every ins...

  To do impossible things, we must make impossible efforts. When it seems like the whole world is in doubt or denial about what is possible, you have to fight for your right mind if you are going to stand for something that other's don't. Let there be a fair trial.   We can start by being as clear as possible about the words we use. There are no miracles.   I am not asking you to take my word for it, you can see for yourself.  No amount of wishful thinking is going to make a fact of Nature give up the ghost and stop being true. If something is, it is. There is no going back, or changing a fact.    What can and does change is what we think we can do about a fact. This may be where some of the confusion lies. A better world is constantly in the progress of being constructed on the foundation of what we have learned from uncovering false and limiting beliefs and understandings. Some might call this a miracle, but there is nothing supernatural about it.  ...

There is no time to waste. You have to make the list, and check it twice yourself this year.    This is the year to start telling the little children about Santa Claus as soon as possible, the whole truth. This is not going to be popular with a lot of people, I know. We are used to having Santa Claus as a sort of bogeyman to scare the young ones into behaving themselves but the time is past where we can do that sort of thing in good conscience.  On this first night of Hanukkah, let’s get to work on a true story to have in its place right away so we can all enjoy the holiday lights in good faith. A reassuring and respectful plan so that nobody has reason to be afraid of the truth.  We don’t want any tears because we botched the job of revealing the spirit of Christmas to the young ones heavy handedly.    I know you are here for a good story and I promise you will have one. For now, I have shared enough. You and I both have preparations to begin, this very mo...

  What if you were a damsel who came from a poor White family where there was a great deal of distress for generations, and you were having none of it? If you were like Cinderella, and worked from morning until night to care for your family home without a kind word or any help, I imagine you could use some rest. Doing everything a person in your situation could ever be expected to do for your family and more, you would deserve it. Your persistent efforts to elevate your family and care for its future is befitting of royalty, if royalty was the product of profound love and every day hard work.  What if your mother, whatever her faults may have been, taught you how to present yourself to the world so that people have to respect you, regardless of the circumstances you come from. You dress well, act right, and honor the depth of your experience and the quality of your intelligence by handling life and death situations in a way that most people think only happens in fairy tales. L...

  If we want to gain perspective on the source of light in our lives, we can use our own hands to let the sun shine in. We raise our hands to the heavens the right way, and we see the source of everything streaming through our fingers.  We can draw up plans, purchase materials, and build a house with a window to let the sun in, but the sun is already there. We do not have to make things so complicated. The Learning Story approach is a quantum leap strategy because it notices, recognizes, and responds to learning that might not ever be revealed using a more complicated approach. Family court has a lot of complicated approaches to facilitating positive outcomes. These approaches are a lot like building houses with windows to let in the sun.    Legal action is all based on past precedents. In family court, the actions are even more limited because the precedents that matter most often are local precedents. Nothing out of the ordinary. The ordinary way of doing things re...

  Murmuration of Starlings by a Clocktower We flock together for Thanksgiving and something happens. The pattern of our individual flight becomes part of the  murmurations of our kin, and turning points in our lives are facilitated by our togetherness. We all have knowledge, and when we come together we combine what we know into a lived experience that is shared among those who are gathered. We access what Timo Jattu calls “flock intelligence” through the process of combining our individual experiences to form a shared understanding. Our primary survival instinct is served by this process because, as Jattu points out,  “One of the things is that you need to be part of something, part of the flock, part of the herd. If you are not, you are eaten by a lion.”    Whatever our Thanksgiving story may be, the original moment marked a turning point for our people. Abraham Lincoln declared the last day of November 1863 as our  first national day of Thanksgiving and ...

  With understanding of only a few words from the language and metaphysical worldview of our Cherokee people I have a deep yearning to know more. It is my understanding that our White people with a scientific materialist worldview have made their questions and concerns about the future a priority above all other considerations. I have heard it said that we do this because there is money and power in pursuing these kinds of problems but I think that misses the target. Money and power can be found in anything, and the greatest danger to our planet is not the availability of resources but our ignorance of how to use them.  The Double Asteroid Redirection Test launched today from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Supposedly, the effort could save the world for future generations. The question is, how do we focus on saving the world from an inevitable but far from imminent catastrophe without adding to the mindset that already makes our lives here and now ever more catastrophic? If the c...

  "International Man of Mystery" is not on the list of accepted occupations for fathers in most families. It seems like a trope from fiction. Fathers who go down that path are subject to ridicule, and I have to acknowledge there are good reasons for that. It is such a far out idea in comparison to the experience of family court judges in small town America, or anywhere. It’s hard for anyone to believe there are regular people who would live that way and in a court of law, what you want more than anything is for the judge to believe you are a regular person.  Let’s compare Austin Powers of “Yeah, baby” swinging 60’s fame with Perry the Platypus, otherwise known as “Agent P” from Disney’s Phineas and Ferb. While Perry’s owners perceive him as mindless and domesticated, it is the film audience who perceives Powers as a clown. What Agent P and Powers have in common is they each have their own nemesis in the form of an evil-genius-mad-scientist whom they succeed in thwarting on a ...

Custody battles are about each parent's desire to protect their children more than anything. After divorce, fathers commit suicide at a rate that is eight times higher than mothers. There may be many reasons for this, but I imagine a feeling of powerlessness to protect their children is chief among them.  When I was first served papers showing a judge had signed the order to revoke legal custody of my children I was in shock. In the United States of America, criminals have legal rights that parents do not enjoy. In criminal court, there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty but not so in family court. A sworn statement of what one person thinks is in the best interests of a child can serve as the basis for removing a parent’s legal rights without a trial or even a hearing.  Dr. J. Ronald Lally described the primitive protective urge found in the adults of most species as an overwhelming motivator for the behavior of those who care for infants and toddlers. Protecti...

  We are starting a new verse in the song of the Free Speech Movement. When I look at the side by side photos UC Berkeley posted to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, I am struck by the difference of expressions between the photo of Mario Savio and the one of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Savio, the student leader of the Berkeley protests that brought the Free Speech Movement to our national consciousness is smiling, and looks almost giddy, like he has just said something that has been validated by the crowd and he appreciates that they share his sense of humor. He flashes a peace sign in a casual way. Dr. King hails the crowd with his hand raised up like he has recognized a true friend in the crowd but if he is smiling, it is mostly an internal expression.       Both of these individuals helped to move the story of justice forward in the last century, and the legacy of their contribution cannot be summed up in a side by side compar...

"We the People" have a queer responsibility to uphold the rights of a person to identify themselves and the people they come from in their own way. I took one of my children to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to see where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America was debated and signed. I have a photo of them in the very room where the document was ordained and established with the rights we still have today if we exercise them. I would show you the photo here, except the story does not belong entirely to me. My child has a right to their privacy, and a right to decide whether and when the photo might be used as part of a story we write together sometime in the future. A true Learning Story involves multiple voices and perspectives on what is being noticed and recognized, and what a person or family might be ready to learn about next.   Complete and honest reporting requires me to mention that if I remember correctly my child was n...

Each of us has a heartbeat that measures out the rhythm of our days. We may know more about how our interactions change the actual structure of each other’s brains, and even alter the expression of our DNA to affect the future more than ever before, but the most enduring question remains. What kind of people are we? If we come from people that hurt us, or failed to understand what we needed as children, then hurt and failure are part of who we are, but they are not the whole story. They are simply the part of the story that provides a basis for the real story to unfold because any story that means anything involves a transformation. Without the heart’s desire, there is no story.     Consciously or unconsciously, we are each the hero of our family story. Learning Stories are a hero’s journey that may start with one generation, but the spiritual heart of the family is the hero. Parenting and childhood are the methods of transformation. Nobody has to remain a hero or a villa...

It is a common question for somebody suffering from amnesia in the movies, and part of the Mental Status Exam administered by physicians in real life too. “Who is the President of the United States?” The question attempts to explore an even deeper reality.  How attached is a person to a single thread in the fabric of history? They may not remember who they are, or their own name, but if a character could name the current occupant of the White House we knew they weren’t lost beyond time and space. I imagine the same is true today, but it may depend on how you ask the question. From the interviews I have seen so far, even good people who deny the results of the most recent presidential election affirm the fact that Joe Biden lives in the White House.      There are two ways to rewrite your family story. Both ways involve repeating the same story over and over again. Those are the basics of identity formation for young children the world over, and for families an...

Before I was married to my children's mother I lived with midwives. Then I married a midwife and started a family with her. There is a saying among midwives when a woman has gone into labor and developed a steady pattern of labor with regular contractions to indicate the birth is imminent: "We have lift off." In 2020 the global pandemic brought families closer than they had been for centuries. While their elders formed tribal groups with alternate versions of reality and how to respond to the challenges of the "new normal," the children watched. As the idea of the truth itself became subject the subject of suspicion , a new era of blind faith in authority figures and mass media manipulation emerged. Fingers were pointed. Shame and blame made our collective trauma seem like a hopeless nightmare. Once the vaccine started to become available, families wanted to get back to normal when what they needed was a new way forward, a better version of themselves than the...