I’ve been a student, parent, teacher, or board member at 6 coop preschools. A coop can be a godsend for young moms, isolated with their kids and unsure of their parenting. Less today where dads and grandads have thankfully become common as caregivers, but when my kids were little, a couple of the coops we … More Unity

New Year’s Day in many cultures is an important moment for self reflection. Secular western culture has sort of whittled this down to having a new year’s resolution. But the holiday that has always gotten to me, of course, is the Judaic Days of Awe, starting with Rosh Hashanah where one begins to examine their … More Atonement, Forgiveness, & Redemption

I have lumped these three into a single post in the past, mostly because the hubbub of Christmas makes it hard to find time to keep up with these daily posts. But also because they became philosophically of-a-piece for me back when I was in college. I’m not one to ever accept a revelation from … More Truth, Love, & Courage

The 6th day of Holly Days focuses on Gratitude. It is amazing how much more we have than we know or can appreciate. It’s going to be 2020, and yet when I was 20, I was pretty certain I would not get to experience the 21st century, let alone the first quarter of it. Somehow … More Gratitude

I have been making these posts for almost a decade now. When I open WordPress, it defaults to its statistics page, where I am somewhat painfully reminded, that despite my ruminations, confessions, and philosophizing, almost nobody will be reading this. Part of me figures why bother, but another part, an odd mix of ego, hubris, … More Generosity

Opening the second trinity, on Christmas Eve, is Hope. Things are much better than most of us think. I go to this theme so often because it really infuriates me. I love what Greta Thunberg is doing, I think she is a hero of millenia proportions. But I can’t agree with this sentiment: “I don’t … More Hope

The logline for Klaus, Sergio Pablos’ delightfully dark and lovely animated Netflix holiday feature, is: “A simple act of kindness always sparks another, even in a frozen, faraway place.” It is a fanciful Santa Claus origin story, that is funny and touching, as well as stunningly beautiful, with a visual arc that brilliantly matches the … More Kindness

Sadly, there are psychopaths among us, and sadly they are often the most successful among us. Ignoring the welfare of others, and putting one’s own above all others happens to be a path to dominance. We are in some ways crippled by our conscience as it attenuates our desires for self gratification when they run … More Compassion

Each year since the election, this first principal has gotten harder and harder to imagine. In fact, my lifelong faith in the power of truth and love and their power to tear down barriers between us has been deeply shaken by what I see and hear among my peers. Of course what I see and … More Unity

My Holly Days agenda has always been both secular and spiritual. I believe that the key challenge of the modern age is fundamentally spiritual. Evidence of an innate cognitive bias for religiosity is now ubiquitous, as laid out in Shermer’s Believing Brain, and seems clearly an important factor in the doctrinaire zeal among the tribes … More Truth, Love, and Courage