A snippet from my Wisdom Road Takeaways and Synthesis; a reminder as we head into what will be the most contentious election in our lifetimes: America is not divided in two. We are one American mosaic made up of many different pieces. Powerful forces try to push us into two severed buckets, red or blue, [...]
Renewed greeting, friends; it has been a while. Wisdom Road is alive and well, though into a different stage. The travels completed in the late spring, the book going through edits both large and small, and hoping madly that I have a publishing deal to report before too many more weeks have passed. Even then [...]
The travels of Wisdom Road are 90% complete. I can now start to explore the lessons of this journey: Where we live really matters. Place imprints on who we are. I, a child of suburbia and California, share many values with the people I meet along the way, but there are limits on how well [...]
I head south from Virginia Beach, down the Outer Banks through Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, across Roanoke Island where an early colony of Europeans was somehow lost. I zig-zag through the North Carolina lowlands, skipping over and around ocean inlets crossed with lines of crab pot buoys, and languid rivers that lost their gumption [...]
It is high tide in mid-afternoon, and a full moon high at that, when I get to tiny Tangier Island, a 45 minute boat ride from the Maryland and Virginia Eastern Shore. The paved trails that traverse the island are covered in places with a few inches of water that creeps out of the salt [...]
If you take the interstate across southern Pennsylvania, you miss the chance to stop for a loaf of bread at the Wild Goose Grocery in Intercourse; you probably won’t see the Amish farmer outside the small burg of Bird-in-the-Hand standing on his wooden disk plow, pulled by stout, tawny horses, six abreast; or the 10 [...]
Margie Patlak, in her book about Down East, More Than Meets the Eye, writes: “To be grateful for the opportunity to walk on this earth and be mesmerized by all its ephemeral wonders and mysteries: the thin ribbon of fog suspended in midair; the glittery dance of wind and light on the water; the intricate [...]
Wisdom Road is staying in America, but I secured an invitation to visit the First Nation community at Kitigan Zibi, about 100 miles north of Ottawa. It is way out of the way, but I decided to visit to make a point. National borders are ephemeral lines on a map, drawn by the most recent [...]
As we get ready for the new school year, I want to share this with you in case you did not see it at the beginning of summer. I won't re-state my argument here; just click through to this article that I published in June via Next Gen Learning Challenge. The big question that I [...]
Phyllis Harris was born and raised in Cleveland, the daughter of a single mom who worked at a factory as she was growing up. She realized “at an early age that I was different”, and came out as a lesbian when she was 19 years old. She is the Executive Director of the LGBT Community [...]
