Healing America’s Narratives: Freedom, Truth, & Shadow in the 21st Century invites us to engage, recognize, commit, honor, and be willing in these ways:
- engage an unvarnished, good-faith approach to understanding history and current events (HCE). Among the areas we’ll explore are the foundational subjugations of women, Indigenous Peoples, Africans and African Americans, and the poor; the Vietnam and post-9/11 wars; the CRT/DEI/woke/cancel extravaganzas; the dismantling of democracy; addiction crises; generally othering others; and planetary ambivalence
- recognize ourselves as humans, citizens, and primary “instruments” in our explorations and understandings of history and current events, which requires that we explore and engage in good faith at least basic levels of critical thought, self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-compassion, and that we attend to our own development through intentional practice (DEVPRACT). We’ll do this in part through an exploration of questions and statements that include, among others: Who am I, really? Everything is a story. How do I choose to be? What am I missing? What’s my impact & what impacts me? Who are my people? I am going to die. How am I in relationship with all of this?
- commit to finally saying enough with the talking points (ETP), and to doing the work of engaging in good-faith conversation—doing more good than harm, which, while a low bar, is a good place to start nowadays. We may raise the bar as we go.
- honor and engage the essential role of witnessing and testifying on behalf of ourselves and others, whether we are impacted directly, indirectly, or (apparently) not at all (yet) by what we observe—with a specific focus on poetry of witness (PW).
- be willing to do the work of integration—of embracing our own development, what we learn, and who and how we are—in order to bring increasingly comprehensive, inclusive, balanced, and complex ways of being to what we observe, how we assess, what we do, and who we think we are as citizens and human beings.
“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield
to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is
that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”
– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
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Find all the course details—description, if it’s for you, schedule, registration, tuition, and more on a single page—here.
Working Toward Balance & Trust and Acknowledging the Freedom to Fall
Healing America's Narratives 