GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

  The days of miracle and wonder never cease. First the moon landing, then " We have lift off " in the labor of transforming our family Learning Story, and now Zoom Family Court Hearings. This is good practice for the trial. Practice listening for what is being asked for. Let’s say you are getting the shaft. The system produces the shaft according to the rule that either everyone has to agree or somebody has to be a loser. Turn the shaft into a staff. The Shaft of the System becomes the Staff of Teaching and Learning when you accept responsibility for transforming your family story. You are being asked to take responsibility.  Show up and keep showing up. That changes the algorithm of what future generations will think is possible. Let’s say that there was a father who for one reason or another did not show up when they were blamed for the family trauma in a previous generation. From that time, the story was that fathers don’t show up. The expectation was that mothers and chi...

“Americans, terrorized, flee to Denmark to be married in a time of war - keeping hope alive.” That was the original angle for the human interest story where I was married to the woman who would become the mother of my children on Danish national television. Looking in the rear view mirror on our way back to the train station the day after the story aired, the taxi driver recognized something different about us. Denmark is known by Americans as the “Las Vegas of Europe” for its wedding industry . We chose the “Top of the Line” wedding in Vejle from a brochure. Arriving by train on a Wednesday, we registered with the authorities and were married on a Friday. The law was, we had to be in-country at least 48 hours before we could be legally wed. There were other American couples, and also couples from other parts of the world. We all thought the modern package was the way to go, as compared to a castle wedding,  or a country wedding, or any of the other options available. All but one c...

  Being gay has been a mystery to me as long as I can remember. When I was a boy, people constantly warned me to be careful about the way that I spoke, or people might think I was, you know… what? I wondered. What does that even mean? I didn’t get it.    I learned from other children that the way that I talked and moved my body made it seem like I might be faggot. The girls did not seem to mind, but other boys would either tease me in good fun or earnestly counsel me about how to sit or stand or talk without raising the wrong kind of questions. From what I understood, the appearance of swishiness and flamboyance was to be avoided.     My parents were of a generation that the news media at the time seems to have credited with starting what was referred to as “The Sexual Revolution.” Before the 1960s, the story I heard was that sex was something people didn’t talk about. The young people at the time, my parent’s generation, thought that sex was natural and th...

The new frontier is in the realm of relationships. The challenges of the 21st century will be overcome by people who will no longer contend with each other to maintain old grievances, but focus instead on self-transformation. Refusing to claim their rights as victims in the blame and shame game, the new pioneers will take responsibility for healing our world by focusing on interactions that reveal the strengths in each other, and settle their family feuds.   The spiritual dimension in relationships has been denied by aggressive masculine positivists, and subsequently ignored by passive feminine paradigms of social science research. Our institutions of education are like factories producing research that focuses on people’s lived experience without an ethical framework for ensuring that the research is not contributing to the problem it seeks to understand.  The toxic waste resulting from research that problematizes what previous generations would have no patience for is b...