Since this is the time of year when we indulge in this kind of stuff I’m going to join the fray. We are now ten years into the 21st Century (and the 3rd Millennium of the “Common Era”). As a person who has always been a big sci-fi fan and focused on the future, my anticipation of the “21st Century” (through the last forty years of the 20th) was always filled with thoughts of great forward-looking human achievements and a human race focused positively on the future and leaving behind much of the crap from the past. I must say I was disappointed as things unfolded in 2000 with Bush’s election, the events of 9/11/2001 soon after that, and much of what’s transpired in reaction to those events since. (more…)

At my suggestion, our daughter Emma read Marian Zimmer Bradley’s epic feminist reframingAt my suggestion, our daughter Emma at age 14 read Marian Zimmer Bradley’s epic feminist reframing of the oft-told Arthurian legend and was profoundly affected and inspired by its story, scope, and deeply drawn heroic but flawed characters. It was a much more sophisticated tale than most, because it was not about good and evil (with characters falling obviously into one of those two categories), but rather a story where a number of compelling characters wrestled with doing their duty and following their heart in a highly challenging transitional and high-stakes context. (more…)

So a UU Facebook friend alerted me and the rest of our circle yesterday that Garrison Keillor had published an editorial rant, “Don’t Mess with Christmas”, on Salon.com directed at Unitarian-Universalists and their penchant for revisionist hymns and carols. My friend’s few sentences were full of anger and denouncement of Keillor as unworthy of making such a criticism, and were very uncharacteristic for my fellow UU’s usual demeanor. His words had definitely pushed her buttons somehow. (more…)

It was 26 years ago yesterday that my partner Sally and I had our wedding ceremony, officiated by our friend, fellow feminist activist and mentor Toni Carabillo. Toni read the vows Sally and I had written, but added her own poem at the end, “Holding Close with Open Arms”. At the time, I saw the verse as good advice for our budding partnership. 26 years later I see that same thought more broadly as a positive path forward for our entire human civilization.

The piece’s title, at least in the most concrete physical terms, presents a contradiction. How can you hold someone close without wrapping your arms around them to secure their proximity which is bound to constrain their ability to move? Metaphorically, that contradiction is a challenge to maintain a difficult equilibrium; to have intimacy and share love and support without limiting the liberty of your partner to grow and become that unique person they can continue to become. (more…)

My partner Sally and I made the decision to get married in May of 1983 after living together for half a year and talking through how we wanted to define what we both knew (pretty early on in our cohabitation) was going to be a life-long partnership between us. Initially, the primary discussion was whether to subject our relationship to the conventions of marriage, and all the patriarchal assumptions that might go with those conventions. Having resolved that, whether to have children was also part of those initial discussions, but at the point of our decision to marry we had only agreed that we were not precluding raising a family and would continue to discuss that option in our path forward. Finding “a mother for my future children” was not one of my motivations!

At the time of our decision to marry I was 27 and she was 34. We were both feminist activists who had committed most of our waking hours the previous couple years to the goals and efforts of the National Organization for Women, which at the time was focused on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting women’s reproductive rights. It was that shared commitment to feminist values that was one of the key bonds between us, along with a profound sense of ease around each other. (more…)

My mom had a great love for everything that had to do with Christmas, and particularly the figure of Santa Clause and what he symbolized in terms of celebrating and honoring children. She believed in God (unlike me) but also felt that organized religion was one of the great scourges of human history. Given that, she still enjoyed even the Christian celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus, and the bestowing on him of great gifts, seeing it as a metaphor as to how all people should greet and treat our children with an abundance of love.

Though they lived on a new college professor’s modest earnings, my parents made every effort to make Christmas time the most wonderful time of the year for me as a child. They perhaps more than most parents of the 1950s understood the value of play in the development of a young person and researched and bought me wonderful toys – like Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, wooden trains, plastic soldiers and dinosaurs – that they wrapped and placed under our Christmas tree, sometimes as much as a week or two before the big day, fueling my anticipation of this yearly event. Add to this great anticipation, we would sometimes do our Christmas celebration back east at my mom’s folks house in Binghamton, a journey usually taken by train in a sleeping compartment, one of my young life’s most memorable adventures. (more…)

It is interesting that some of us, including yours truly, are bitten by the travel bug while others of us don’t seem to be into this sort of adventure at all, even when blessed with golden opportunities to do so. As I learned from my dad, life at its best should be an adventure, maybe not always fun or easy, but a compelling narrative to experience and share with others. It was that principle that motivated me to plan a three-month European backpacking odyssey with one of my close high school friends. It was also that principle that inspired me to keep going when my friend and travel companion decided to bail on our European adventure and head back to the United States. (more…)