GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

If she were still alive, my grandmother Mildred Joyce Webster Cole would have been 101 years old today.  I remember eating in a little diner with her after church in her adopted home of Reno, Nevada when I was not yet double-digits of age. As I recall, she had taken me to the store to purchase a card for my mother. We sat together at a booth in the diner while I wrote what I wanted to say. I misjudged the space available, and wouldn’t you know it I ran out of room to write an entire word in the space there was. Grandmother put me at ease and introduced me to a trick that I remember to this day, which was the use of a hyphen. If you ever run out of room to write what you want to say, you can add one of those dashes, preferably at a break between consonants, and everything will be fine.  It has been a little while since I posted anything on social media because I have been preoccupied with all the transformations going on around me. The world has been changing so rapidly that I ...

I was baptized in the Methodist Church when I was eight years old. At the time, I received a faux red-leather copy of the Good News Bible. It contained the same books as the King James Version of the Holy Bible, but it was worded a bit differently and branded with a new title to emphasize the neighborly teachings of the historical Jesus Christ. The good news that Jesus shared with us reminds me of the words of another teacher, Raghavan Iyer, who writes, “Life is no cruel burden imposed upon human beings by some capricious external power, but rather a festival in which there is continual learning and living and loving. But these cannot occur without unlearning, unloving, undoing the excess and illusion of the past.” Our institutions of government and religion are corrupted by the excess and illusion created by our repeated efforts to achieve some sort of status in the world of appearances at the expense of those who are voiceless and disregarded. Today and every day we have the opportun...

  I am feeling like there is nothing I can do. I look out my window to the world, and I look at the flowers blooming in our time, and I wonder. Am I able to really see the flowers for what they are, to experience the potential in each bud to release their fragrance? In the words of Bob Dylan,  “For them that must obey authority/ That they do not respect in any degree/ Who despise their jobs, their destinies/ Speak jealously of them that are free/ Cultivate their flowers to be/Nothing more than something they invest in.” I believe there is more to be experienced in the beauty of this spring day than what can be seen with the eyes, or experienced with the senses, but we have to start somewhere. Ask anyone to tell you what is actually happening, and the chances are if something seems to prevent them from living the life they imagine is possible they will give up describing what they actually see at the point where they sense that the world they describe is limited compared to the...

  People always ask me... what’s the best way to overcome alienation in the court system?  Here's my answer: In the world of parental alienation, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that the only way to overcome alienation is to prove the cause of alienation.   However, we forget that there is another option that is actually more effective, and more honest. Lawyers are paid to argue. Since the causes of things are usually invisible, arguing about the cause of alienation is the perfect way for lawyers to get paid. It never has to end, and nobody will be the wiser.  Child psychological abuse is the term used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders to describe the behavior commonly associated with parental alienation. Any competent clinical psychologist can describe the effects of child psychological abuse, but they can only guess about the cause.  Without measuring the results of court intervention in behavioral terms, alienation beh...

Exchanging marriage vows on Danish Television after 9/11. Talking about the Power of Love. We made a family together. We conceived and gave birth to three human beings, and let me tell you a lot changed in those 11 years after 9/11, but the one thing that did not change was that feeling terrorized and alienated is no reason to give up on family, prevents us from fighting the war on terror is where it matters most, in our own hearts. Alienation is a complex issue that can leave a person feeling lost and alone. For years, I struggled to navigate the legal and therapeutic systems to keep father time consistent and available to my children throughout each step of the processes that were supposed to help my family. I spent countless hours and dollars following the advice of lawyers and therapists, only to find their solutions were not working. They weren’t solutions actually, they were focused on the problems of my family instead of our identity, and I was too. But I was following their lea...

This is it. I am paralyzed at the heart level. There is nothing wrong with me. I have a pinched nerve in my back and feel like I am going to die. This is a psychosomatic situation I’m telling you. We have a limited number of days to walk the earth, and breathe the air and be with our loved ones. When we are separated from our people we may experience a profound sense of disorientation. Though never may a day pass when we are not connected to our people in the certain light of single certain truth, and we know that if we remember that things can only get better, we still worry. What if things don’t get better enough? What if I go to court and everything is quite clear about what needs to be done but there is some rule that will not allow the facts of the matter to be entered into evidence? What if, what if? So, with the date fast approaching where I will learn the answer to these questions I find myself unable to do anything but lay here and watch “Close Encounters of the 5th Kind,” a ...

  If you're like many fathers of the future I encounter, you are most likely discouraged that the systems that you would hope could help you guide your family with love and logic really say and do very different things. I am talking about all the systems that run on clock-time brought to America by the colonists — the legal system and the medical system that run on clock time. The science of colonization uses a mechanistic model to divide and conquer nature into its component parts.  We are coming to the end of an era. The family court and the mindset of therapists the court depends on to help families is changing.  You may be discouraged because you are having a hard time finding a professional who is trained in a methodology to resolve the dynamic that erases fathers from families, and perpetuates a doctrine of separation for your family but I am here with a special news flash…. You have to be the one to lead the way. You can get stuck believing that an attorney will he...

  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...

America is young enough to learn from its past, but not old enough to know any better. For years we told ourselves and the rest of the world a story, mesmerizing in the simplicity of it’s allure. We were one of a kind. We invented the lightbulb, skyscrapers, airplanes, motion pictures, and on and on and on.  Now we are not so special. Talk with a young person in Southeast Asia these days and they will shrug their shoulders if you ask them what’s so special about America. Everyone has skyscrapers now.   Our political system, called revolutionary in 1776, was in fact a mash-up of systems borrowed from Europe, and which Europe had borrowed from China together with ideas from the Iroquois Indians and their confederation. We are the inheritors of the world’s political destiny, gathered from the disinherited pioneers of other revolutions in other parts of the world.  We are also the forgotten slaves of political regime change, who paid the price to control the old world ...