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History’s Teachable Moments

Most of what happened in Uncle Ollie’s all too public life also resonated through his private transformations.

S/he became perhaps the first ever U.S. Secretary of Education without so much as a lowly Teacher’s Certificate in his/her bio, but was tapped more or less on the strength of her Certification as a Permaculture Designer, which s/he had ecologically mapped onto the Political Sciences of PostMillennial Taoism, in her text bearing that title.

In the early weeks of her tenure as Secretary (0)-Liver Glory, s/he now appearing only as Ms, if someone really needed a gender label to use, “…or how about Trans(0)Liver?” S/he often threw seeds toward the wind, but not all caught—that came along a little after her time with us.

Uncle Ollie agreed to speak on the topic of educational priorities during a National Governor’s Conference. S/he said, after her remarks went viral, that she didn’t realize she was to address the entire assembly, much less anticipate CNN and other media attention.

Thank you for your warm welcome here in Texas. The last time I was here I was at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport walking barefoot on the grass for a minute or so before a remarkably outraged Texas State Police Officer informed me I would be arrested if I did not get off the grass immediately.

I looked and listened to the chemically enriched grasses speak their sterilized voices, as best they could, and found no complaint from there. So I asked the Officer why would I be arrested for standing on public Texas soil.

For trespassing. Can’t you read? The signs say “Keep off the Grass.”

So, anyway, namaste for not greeting me with Keep off our Grass. I am slowly learning that, if thinking of landing in Texas, it is best that I am first invited, and second, I carefully follow written directions.

You asked me to say a few words about educational policy in the U.S., presumably because of, or even despite, germane remarks published in Political Sciences of PostTaoism as PermaCulturing Design and Healthy Education Development.

 In Pronia, Rob Brezsny writes “As long as we give up our control fantasies, we’ll always get what we want.” (p. 174)

Yes, Mr. Brezsny, but is what we want also what we need for good health, for mental health, for healthy absorbent listeners and productive consumers of Earth’s richly communicating history?

I am not so new to the Department of Education to have retained any control fantasies.  Yet I am still new enough to remain awed by learning what people most want to learn, to have more abundant, happy pursuits of contenting peace and political with economic justice.

What do we most want to learn? Are these reflected in our pedagogical priorities, in our learning environments, our mental health facilitation gestalts, in our Positive Psychology?

 And, should this primal question of learning to live within our healthiest best integrity not remain our highest and best global educational priority?

Healthy learning outcomes for individuals, families, communities,

biosystems and ecosystems,

co-mentor healthy learning,

polypathic intentions, plans, designs,

program implementation and post-coital evaluation.

 

In Permacuture Design

and in Taoism

and other mindfulness-rooted ecotherapies,

we begin healthy learning with focused (0)-zone bicameral listening

to co-arise deep learning

what and why and how this healthy information,

communication,

where and when and why these cooperatively therapeutic civil eco-servants

can and will learn from each other

our self-governing evolutionary proclivities and preferences of healthy intuitive mind

and DNA-norm-rooted body development,

polycultural maturation,

consumption co-arising productive vocational rebalance,

political relationship and economic transaction as ecological coherence,

integrity of polypathic prehension through comprehension,

deep personal as public sectoral healthy ecoconsciousness,

listening-learning cooperative education,

co-mentoring co-messiahs,

revolutionarily inclusive multicultural non-verbal co-mentors,

evolving cooperative listening-learner co-mentorships

within loving life families, and schools, and communities.

 

Healthy,

contented,

happy minds in bodies

most want to learn how to perpetually mature,

reiterate and propogate,

resonate and resolve as recreate,

regenerate this deep learned and learning history of enculturing health,

and dissonant pathology.

 

I believe healthy extended families,

extending across all this Milky TaoWay of History’s Revelation,

yet especially within our EarthTribe’s polymorphic healthy Truths

as tastes-good Beauty,

and further extending back through time

to our still-emerging (0)Riginal BlackHole Tipping Point

of  this our sometimes civil SelfEducating-ReGenerating Universe,

now further extending forward

toward health-regenerative educational deep learning priorities,

within vast RealTime as SpaceTime frame,

we, invested in governing,

remain most polyculturally-multiculturally ideal for experiencing,

noticing,

reiterating,

reclaiming,

remembering,

reincarnating educational health

as ecologically self-governing,

deep-learning wealth of Earth’s temporal dialects and seasons.

 

Healthy deep learning listeners

co-mentor health as wealth of polypathic education planning,

implementing,

assessing CQI healthy education outcomes.

Not quite a mantra,

perhaps an outline

as mutual Secretaries of Education as Deep Learning CoMentoring Vocations.

 

But, this Secretary would very much appreciate hearing now

from you.

As you listen to your students,

as you have yourself become a student,

as you continue pushing through as a student,

at least of your own evolutionary development,

what is most important to learn,

and therefore to teach,

if it is not how to cooperatively love healthy relationships

and eco-normic transactions?

How and where do we already focus within narrow cusps

of doublebound NOW,

where Yang’s truthing powers

and Yin’s dipolar coarising harmonic function

swim and fly,

sometimes walk too heavily Yang,

and sometimes struggle against rather than with each Other.

 

Yet ultimately we evolve Earth’s MidWay CoArising healthy love

of learning through cooperative

evolutionary

mutually-subsidiary education,

rooted way way back

in aptic Basic Attendance co-empathic listening,

absorbing, ingesting,

breathing Yang air in  Yin’s wet flowing atmospheric frequencies out

among Earth’s co-arising Tribes.

 

Please use all our microphones to share with us

your own hopes for the future of learning priorities on Earth,

because all lives matter,

or life itself does not matter

because it cannot sustain healthy internal and external climates—

deductively reducing ourselves to timeless future regenerating investments of dust.

 

Secretary Glory,

while I think I see where this heads,

facilitating pedagogical health environments

and interpersonal relationships,

I remain concerned,

especially as Governor of Texas,

that even Lone Star states continue too much ineffective response

to remedial learning situations facing growing numbers of life’s students.

Especially those not prepared to become students,

adolescents not aware of integrities possible for becoming healthy adults,

PostMillennials who are better prepared to co-mentor abuse and neglect,

boredom and depression and chronic stress,

hyperactivity,

LeftBrain attention deficits

and death-row watches.

 

To discover or recover personal and public health

do we need to invest more in Anger Management

and NonViolent Communication?

Perhaps I am too addicted to my control fantasies,

but how do we get from teaching bored,

disinvested,

alienated,

angry,

frightened,

too-often bullied,

if only by ignorance and general neglect of healthy curiosity,

consumers of historical-cultural information

within pedagogical gestalts designed for happy healthy positively engaged

co-mentoring investors in learning

these hows and whys of healthy personal,

social,

political,

economic,

and ecological development?

 

I appreciate and share your question, Governor,

share your concern

and hope your question addresses all assembled here today.

 

And, while your question does not ask,

who is responsible for setting a healthy stage for learning

personal and public distinctions between healthy interests,

rather than pathological ruminations of egocentric stuckness,

co-mentored collective addictions to anger and fear management,

this is a question that I also find within my Taoist way

of understanding regenerativity as healthy balance,

wherein yin political responsibility for learning relationships

remains equitably shared, at least normatively,

within our sense of justice and fair cooperative play,

with yang’s default authority,

responsive relationships as voiced response

co-arising yang/yin self and social,

personal as also public,

responsibility within authority blending culpability for consciousness,

knowing as co-learning,

expecting actively co-operative open communication,

especially within remedial fissures and foaming fulminations

of anger and fear management,

where love might thrive as co-operative peace co-mentoring development.

 

Where lies this moral culpability,

where our sense of responsibility emerges predefined

by grey-limned authorities?

Cooperatively intended political sciences

produce cooperative economies

within communication’s healthy v. toxic responsibilities.

 

If innocence is absence of culpable responsibility,

could ignorance evolve through educational neglect of culpable authority?

Learning health emerges most apparent, vivacious,

where yang’s truth authority, empowerment,

conjoins yin’s collatorally symmetrical co-mentoring responsibilities

for learning from informing functional behaviors,

verbal with non-verbal,

thought with feelings,

positive as doubly negative,

within as doubly without,

folding as doubly unfolding.

 

Both innocence and ignorance are drawn to mystery,

medicine,

health

rather than stagnant pathologies,

as comprehension seeks wisdom,

as animus eroticizes agapic anima,

as love seeks life amongst ourselves,

as health seeks regenerative abundance,

multicultural learning outcomes

through active evolutionary cooperativity.

 

Perhaps our educational priorities are now already evolving

to teach one integrative polypathic regenerative story,

through diverse paradigmatic lenses.

Leaves with stems are icons of dynamic economic-nutritional health systems,

as seeds and eggs emerge ecological regenerative research

through embryonic revolutions of healthy learning fertility.

As I watch the CNN replay, a pregnant pause emerges from Secretary Glory’s abrupt, yet potentially fertile, end. A pause increasingly ambiguous and momentous, even as I sit before Uncle Ollie’s kitchen table, late this night, knowing how this silence must unfold.

Later, (0)-Liver sends a follow-up letter addressed oddly to the “Governors of these Yet-Uniting States”:

I am aware, in hindsight, that you, public sector Governors, and hopefully private sector healthy self-governors, may share my own curiosity about ancient, still-evolving, histories of social and economic governance.

When Earth’s self-educational story did not yet include the self-awareness resources of DNA,

when all Earth’s Tribes were RNA rooted in composting soil,

what did we learn

to personally,

and more politically and economically,

more public sectorally,

regenerate self-governance of life

through safe and healthy principles of development?

 

In this, our PostMillennial Era,

we discover a profoundly historical-evolutionary question,

with implications for educational priorities,

yet also for biosystemic and ecosystemic self-governance,

thinking more inclusively,

as a forest of networking root systems might co-arise

Trees of LeftBrain Economic Truth as RightBrain Political Beauty.

 

The PreMillennial distinction

between Moose “power”

and Owl “medicine”

goes on back toward the origins of the PermaCultural Agrarian Era.

In this time,

“power” more or less translated into what we might call therapeutic,

or health-power.

 

Power could not yet be a tool distinguishable from self-identity.

Rather power was most widely experienced in the context of “power with Other,”

regardless of who or how “Other” was perceived.

Power with Other to procreate,

to hunt together,

to demonstrate building of fires and planting of seeds,

co-mentoring communications,

all cooperatively functional,

competitively dissonant and dysfunctional.

 

This blend of therapy and power,

according to Julian Jaynes’ evolutionary theory,

emerges from Elder Right hemispheric roots

to dominate language cultures

as the correlational ability to perceive “not me”

as core identity of what later became encapsulated in “therapy-positive”

and “pathology-negative”

and both relational,

indistinguishable from “sole-identity power.”

 

The first cultural experience of power

becomes the ability of “self” referencing as “not-Other;”

a “self” that evolves dipolar co-arisingly identifiable from “not-self”

because of perceived,

then learned, further reinforced, spatial-temporal distinctions

deriving from Prime DiPolar CoIdentity Relationship,

distinction between what “self” could unilaterally control,

and what self could not autonomously control.

 

Prior to LeftBrain dominance over RightBrain aptic confluence,

our RNA-Elders, grass and trees and coral reefs,

had no possibility of confused awareness

between internal-univocal yin-power

and bilaterally interdependent, mutually symbiotic,

co-mentoring Yang/Yin CoArising Power.

 

The original “self” awareness embryonically emerges,

continues to emerge,

from time as light’s primal Eulerian infrastructure of “We-ness,”

an ionic,

then ergodic,

then bilateral co-gravitating ProteanYang with DiPolar Elating YinYin elective function,

confluent, mutually-held, synergy between emergent YangEgo

and composting Elder YinEmbryonicOther,

love as LaoTse’s contentment,

as Basic Attendance among our Bodhisattva Occupiers of DeepLoveLearning,

(0)Riginal temporal experience of undifferentiated integrity,

which becomes iconically languaged as Original Intent

of MedicineEarthOther,

a cooperative dipolar co-arising ReGenerative Network,

time as both Yang light c-squared,

and yinyin e-squared fractal-function

of ecosystemic EarthBound RNA/DNA thermodynamic balance.

 

As we compare notes across our public sector governing desks,

each with co-arising responsibility and economically culpable authority,

it seems to me that overall regenerative health evidence of history

suggests deep political learning evolves highest and best-outcome projections

with rich cooperative ecological polypathic co-investments in co-mentoring nutrients,

rather than suboptimizing remedial toxins of anger and fear management

without pro-actively co-invested love and peace development.

 

To believe otherwise,

to act as if learning is nurtured best through competitive words and numbers,

used as tools to outshine the sun itself,

seems to follow the path of  Anger/Fear control fantasies,

rather than actually arriving in the Truth as Beauty co-educational paradise we actually want

with each Other.

Healthy Truth is no more a singularity
than is Beauty
or Wisdom
and Health.

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ReCreating Organic Freedom

We created clients as consumers of education
and called this freedom to learn.

We created competitive,
ranked,
hierarchical,
professional caste-system schools
and called them freedom from unhealthy superstitions of extended families,
freedom from historic threats looming within mysteriously encultured biosystems.

We created prisons
and called them freedom from crime.

We created criminal clients
and called this freedom to enculturate indigenous tensions
struggles between Anger Management housekeepers
and uncivilized crime amongst themselves.

We created corporate ownership
without concomitant social,
political and economic responsibility,
and called it private property,
where once grew healthy therapeutic Commons.

We created slaves to others’ production of corporate wealth
and called us consumers and clients of RealTime,
economic and political competition life.

We created financial wealth
and called it powerful political health.

We created religious culture-fossilized Traditions,
brittle and stagnant absence of healthy evolution,
and called them spiritual-enspirited paths toward healthy vocations.

We created government by popular election
and did not call it survival of the wealthiest EgoCentrists.

We might like to create freedom to learn freedom from anthrocentrism,
to listen to self-governing nutrition-consumers producing co-valued information
about how and where and when we have substituted WinLose shortcuts
for WinWin co-mentoring political,
economic,
ecologically cooperative healthy-wealth of freedom orthopraxis,
organically and spiritually exegetical,
regenerative emergence,
evolving great millennial
and small intimate revolutions
networking Earth’s cooperative consciousness.

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What Are We Learning?

What have you learned from your family experience
that influences your position
on public health and safety,
national health defense
and economic offensives you might propose
for healthier individuals
and families
and nations
and even planet Earth, hopefully?

Could you give me an example
of what might qualify as a politically satisfactory answer
for you?

Well, I parent four teenagers,
three require special support environments and resources
to foster improved learning outcomes.

I have concerns
none of the schools,
from the most elite private
to the mental health specialized therapeutic public,
seems to have deep learned their way into
how to avoid adversely depressing and repressing my kids’ growth potential
into a more polyculturally articulated
and multisystemically accessible
self-optimizing ego-healthy mindbody,
much less an effective communicator,
much less an effective deep ecosystemic listener and learner.

We each seem to start into our learning lives
thinking and feeling deductively and inductively
with all senses listening for dialects of feeling and function
within ourselves,
others,
Earth,
until our enculturing institutions
interrupt with mental-physical health disservice,
suboptimizing with more didactically addicted
quantified
deductive memorization performance outcomes,
thereby missing days and years of lifetime healthy cooperative political
and economic
and ecological
and interpersonal relational communication potential
while investing in competitive excesses
of Left mindbody dominant commodification
of learning how to live into life’s most regeneratively
anthro-preoccupied not-listening opportunities,
we accept unacceptable risks of unbalancing angers and fears
as anthro-supreme species
sharing primal bilateral temporal intelligence
with all DNA/RNA syntaxed living cells
and organs
and species
and bioregions.

We are of and for Earth’s polyculturing cooperative relationships
and transactions
with internally symbiotic dipolar nondual ecosystemic functions
of purpose and deep regenerative meaning.
I didn’t pick that up in school,
nor have my kids found any support for
this way of enculturing holistic health
to regenerate polyculturally optimal outcomes.

Aetna,
a health insurance company,
knows more about mindfulness training,
health and self-care as Earth-care consciousness,
while our schools,
which could be our kids’ healthy-love-of-polycultural-learning assurance incubators,
focus more on anger and risk management.

I’m wondering if anything like this comes up from your experience
of how our social
and political
and economic
and defense
and sometimes even our “health” institutions
do not practice basic mindbody health-medicine principles
of cooperative ecoconscious relationships and transactions,
or aspire to regeneratively optimize future cooperative learning outcomes.

Why isn’t human history taught
as our still-evolving language
and nutritional enculturation
and toxic deculturation
ecopolitical healthylove-as-learning
EarthTribe’s re-creation story?

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Mad About Schooling

Why do I feel like school visits
are usually a waste of time,
and mental health visits,
too,
or is it visiting in general
that bothers me?

What I will see
and smell
and hear
and touch
is only what you feel safe to show me.

Your best professional face
when you are in charge of your environment
of yourself,
and all is as it would best be
in your safe and healthy presence.

Yet what I need to see
is how this place,
these people,
this teacher or therapist or mentor,
or would-be lover,
responds
to my child’s anger and fear,
to my own anger about how they have
and have not
been treated in our past,
to your own angers about your past,
fears about life’s future
for yourself
for your kids,
for these other caregivers.

How will you respond
the 99th time my daughter shits on herself
then laughs while you wipe her nasty stinky ass,
berated by her own memories
of past such humiliations?
Hope you too might find humor
in your dialectic co-arising therapeutic intent,
your Positive Psychology presence
in this moment of bicameral empathy.

Just how good might it feel
to give a smack on the ass
of all angry-fearfilled,
chronically stressed
and sleep deprived,
too-often critical-event PTSD
co-victims of human life’s unkind
and in-humane culture and history?

How do you think that choice
would not hurt both of you,
all of us,
where you could choose to live fully
in this bicamerally loving moment
of empathic Right-brained eco-consciousness,
synergetic multisystemic practice
with full-loving intent
when and where most needed
and neglected
and abused.

Abuse of professional love,
reminds of angers about life’s inhumane injustice,
depressing fears of death’s too soon
peaceful resonance.

Visiting schools for therapeutic Present life
has little to reveal about where we PastAnger-FutureFear live
24/7.

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My Perfect President

Open letter to President Obama:

9/17/2015

Two things. A thank you, and a suggestion for our shared global future, confronting increasingly rapid climatic, with concomitant cultural and economic, transitions.

First, thank you for the pleasure of watching and listening to your comparative political and economic sanity for the past eight years. Enthusiastically voting for you twice, although you are not my “perfect” candidate, was such a relief and pleasure. And, your performance in what appears to be a largely thankless and hopeless position, has been graceful and sometimes even respectful of honest differences in priority. When comparing our financial investment in your presidential campaigns, and the cost to your personal integrity, to any positive health and well-being return, I see where this may have made sense for the rest of us, but I find it miraculous that you so generously accept your losses, along with your wins.

Second, my suggestion moves toward optimizing political and economic potential for addressing what we have labeled “climate warming,” but is actually the multisystemic problem of over-heated climate change. You seem to see the difference, and recognize the awesome scale of this challenge, especially during the already-shrinking projected normal life spans of our children, and grandchildren. So the requisite motivation to recognize and accept climate change as our most profoundly significant “well-being” global rights issue, as well as a national issue, you already have in your pocket.

No doubt you have noticed by now that even the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the United Nations, perhaps those two positions even more so than for all of us regular folks, daily confront a huge gap between what you are motivated to do and what you are powerful enough to accomplish. With political empowerment comes greater global and cultural and socioeconomic responsibilities, and aspirations. If you are any good as a person at all, I think you step into this larger-scale of consciousness, and you and your family do appear to be very good people indeed.

Perhaps helpful, with regard to our political “stuckness”, I am also noticing a considerable growth and refinement of two paradigms that appear to be co-arising toward nonduality, which, if you are familiar with Buddhist and/or Taoist philosophy, is the kind of evolution that has a way of becoming revolutionary, in a positive way. These two paradigms are Permaculture Design (and Development) and New (Feminist) Economics.

Each of these paradigms analyzes Business As Usual to point toward our urgent need for cultural and economic local-scaled cooperative-nurturing systems (including healthier ecosystems) to replace our current messiness. Business As Usual includes Win-Lose Game Theory, Left-brain dominant deduction, competition, economic and evolutionary cultural dynamics of entropic-trending dysfunction and over-specialization.

Since retiring from grant and program development for Connecticut human service agencies, I have been reading economics as presented by Riane Eisler (The Real Wealth of Nations), John Michael Greer (The Wealth of Nature), and Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics). Each is brilliant and together they shape an economic dipolar pattern contrasting Received View financial growth as economic wealth with a newer, more cooperative-centric economics of health, positive nutrition:

  • healthy production balancing consumption, and
  • polycultural health as root-value measure of wealth regeneration within eco-logically cooperative systems that today emerge from our current exponentially-growing global consensus that well-being has already begun trending toward decomposition.

Permaculturists, from Laotse through Buckminster Fuller and on to today’s booming industry of healing Earth and residents thereof, take as much interest in the ecological balance of regeneration and decomposition as economists invest in expanding v. contracting economic health of production/consumption systems.

Eisenstein (2011) calls the New Economics “sacred” economics, but, boiled down into natural system language, his sacred might be translated with Buckminster Fuller’s synergy; a positive-trending cooperatively-evolving dynamic integrity of health trend systems design and development. Further, Eisenstein seems to interpret “divine,” as contrasted to profane, as integrity v. deductive-reductive-redactive competing identities and independently eisegetical understanding. It is a profane Business As Usual culture assuming oppositional either-or Win-Lose evolutionary strategies and logistics, when it is more ectosymbiotically integrative to heuristically hold both-and Win-Win appositional challenges and comparisons and tipping-points, leading toward nondual co-arising strategies and more comprehensive polycultural consciousness.

What are Win-Win cooperative political, economic, and ecological outcomes that are achievable given the current climate in Washington, the U.S., and Earth?

I think we already do agree on, and are united within, one primary concern: How can I (and we)

  • invest in optimizing my health and well-being,
  • assure the right of full healthy development of my dependents, and all I love,
  • continue learning and mentoring wise and natural-systemic discernment, rather than merely learning to produce and consume more efficiently,
  • prudently invest my life exclusively within long-term just-right maturation, by avoiding short-term high risk gains in a sense of wealth that has become divorced from health of life’s intrinsically regenerative value.

We could each and all choose to invest our balancing budgets in cooperative economic industry, vocations, residences, communities, local ecosystems and polyculturally inclusive transformations of monoculturally silo-entropic decomposition, or Win-Lose Business As Usual. This choice of cooperative polycultural development over competitively self-isolating monocultures reflects the permaculturist’s approach to each site for redesign, but also our approach to each day, each life, each word and communication choice, each food and recreation choice. It seems possible to recognize that Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community is equivalent to the permaculturist’s Climax Community and the cooperative economist’s 7-Generation planning for optimal life-sustaining cooperative health-investment networks; where health is interpreted as broadly as Thich Nhat Hanh’s positive nutrition for all the senses, most definitely including aesthetic health, proportion, rhythm, patterns of form, function, and frequency.

If  all life, and future human quality of life in all its diversity of colors and cultures, matters, this new economic permacultural paradigm could be the basis of

  • deep learning theories in public education,
  • taught to every politician entering elected office,
  • every military strategy leader and teacher,
  • every policy analyst and designer,
  • every government employee and volunteer and intern training program, including the Peace Corp and AmeriCorp/VISTA.

Turning public education and public financial investment away from supporting further monoculturally-trending competition, and toward healthy polyculturally-trending cooperative systems and networks, could work for both sides of the nation’s partisan aisle.

This would be an impressive way to both exit as President, and enter as what Laotse would call a sagacious ruler; a permaculturally proficient polyculturist of cooperative economics, natural evolutionary relationships, and ecological well-being. That is what I would wish for you and your family, as I wish for mine.

If you are looking for a permaculturist with systems design and development expertise, I strongly recommend Joanna Macy, in California, sometimes, teaching in the Berkeley area.

Thank you for your response to our still-emerging climate change issue.

Namaste,

Gerald Dillenbeck, MPA, M. Div., PDC

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Notes from, and to, a Grant Writer

Philanthropy is a peculiar form of social investment.  Those of us who have spent many years in this form of human industry often wonder if there is not some better, more humane, more efficient, more hopeful, even more peaceful way to do it.  The following correlated notes to philanthropists, non-profit leaders, researchers, and myself come from what I have learned so far:

To Philanthropists, cc Non-Profit Leaders:

If you are reading a grant proposal written in a grant writer’s office, using language chosen solely by that writer, then stop reading it.

If you are having a proposal review meeting with only paid non-profit staff in the room, walk out.

If you are reading a grant report written by a grant manager, paid by the grantee, using language and metrics chosen solely by that manager, throw it away and make no further investments in that direction.

To Grant Prospect Researchers, cc Non-Profit Leaders:

When you are researching grant prospects, give the highest priority to a direct match in terms of community of intent; the same territory and the same priority for change or maintenance. Avoid those prospects that are not clear about this.  They are, at best, your second-tier prospects because people who really enjoy investing in people give to specific people for specific priorities.

Give third priority to prospects that would be willing to read a proposal, attend a follow-up meeting, and accept a report written solely by and with you and your paid staff, using only internally chosen language and metrics.  People who enjoy investing in people are more likely to give effectively and with great resilience over the long-term.  It is unlikely that investors and investments will build mutually enriching relationships without inclusive communication.

To Myself, cc Non-Profit Human Resource Leaders:

Never write a grant proposal for those who would presumably benefit from a grant; always write proposals with prospective beneficiaries.

Never write a proposal or report that is not part of an intentional and inclusively evolving system: primary constituency, non-profit administration, and the reader(s).

Never work for anybody; always work with prospective beneficiaries, project/program executives, and those who are responsible for wealth investments.  You are the translator across paradigms; not the fundraiser.

Never forget we are all in this together, however difficult it is to remember that some days.

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Moving from “Child Welfare” to “Child Well-being”

I have a project proposal currently floating around at my 3 sons’ high school, in CT.  The basic idea is to bring in a consulting team with Universal Design for Learning training to work with the Social Studies Honors Society students and with High Functioning kids receiving Special Ed support, to design the ultimate “well-being learning environment.”  The project would include developing a budget and comparing cost-effectiveness and learning outcome comparative projections given current trends at Hall High v. implementing their plan.  Their resulting report would provide the National Science Foundation the basis for years 2-5 funding.

I do this stuff professionally and am in the process of retiring so I have time to work on projects that I care about.  That’s why you are hearing about this now, and not 5 years ago when we moved into this community.

If I have not already over-reached your willingness to engage in this Thought Experiment, I also have another schooling/learning idea, about which I would love to get some informal feedback.  If it resonates with other parents, I could do some research to see if there might be a way to get some money to fund it.

In summary, as few as 60% of adolescents in the U.S. are projected to receive a high-school diploma, or that is Ken Robinson’s projection anyway.  It is lower within highly stressed neighborhoods, about 50%, trending more recently toward 40%.  Of those who have opted out, some unknown percentage, perhaps about 5%, and growing by about 5%/year, is pursuing a different pathway to learning.  They are going right from home schooling, producing above average SAT scores, and matriculating right into college and/or information technology mentoring programs.  Over 75% of colleges and universities have established policies for processing applications from home schoolers; probably more than a coincidence that their SAT scores average somewhere between 15 and 30% higher than public school applicants.

Imagine what it would be like for you if you had an option for your special needs kids that you do not now have.  You go to her/his PPTeam Meeting and discover that you have an option to continue receiving education/therapy services as currently delivered, or you could use the educators and/or therapists assigned to your child as consultants and trainers to back you up for services you would deliver as a parent in your own home, to your own kid(s).  If you choose to deliver the services yourself, you will receive a small home educator stipend, representing the savings to the school system roughly comparable to not having to provide transportation and hire a 0.5 classroom aide–probably somewhere around $200/week–with the school system having an assured net savings (not to mention the environment–reducing carbon emissions, burning of fossil fuels, etc.).

If you are still with me, many of us also have insurance-paid home-care service providers to help care for our kids. So, what if we also had an option of continuing to receive services through a private-care provider, or to provide self-care, with training/consulting/case management support from the school nurse.  The school system could bill Medicaid and other insurance 3rd-party payees based on an approved client home-care services plan (just as private home-care service providers do), pay their school nurses for their supervisory/training/case management services out of that revenue source, and pay the parent choosing to provide her/his own services at the rate of a home health-care aide, for the number of hours stipulated in the service contract.

For my situation this is 54 hours/week, at $12/hour.  This would not have been an option I would have chosen before retirement, but, had it been an option about 3 years ago, I probably would have been able to retire earlier and invest full-time in caring for my kids.  This year, finishing my retirement transition plan, it would be a very compelling option for me.  Research indicates that the learning/health outcomes are highest when the nurturing relationship between the primordial caregiver and the child is strongest.  So, better for my kids, more affordable for my family, more affordable for society, and better for the environment.  I don’t see the down side, so long as self-care remains an option for those parents who CHOOSE it.

Given the current “drop-out” rate, current research indicating high pay-offs to society for re-investing in primordial caregivers, and comparatively high learning outcomes for home schoolers, it seems like our educational system is already trending in this direction anyway.  Why not make it work for us more cost-effectively, adding choice, and investing in healthier nurturing caregiver relationships?

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Are you with me?

The human species is the only species that does not necessarily assume we are all in this together.  Julian Jaynes, and others, suggest that our unique “bicameral mind” translates as double-camera.  In the right-hemisphere, we are all united.  In the newer left-hemisphere, the assumption turns into a hypothesis and our species becomes a horde of scientists and philosophers asking what feels like a devastatingly significant question.

When I die, will all that is important to me about being part of this species, about sharing this planet at this time, die with me?  Or, do I achieve the conclusion that I am not only a person with double-hemispheres but also synchronized hemispheres?  Does what goes on inside my head “sync” what is in the environment so that “as without, so it is within” and vice-versa?

Each normally gifted human individual, with sufficient maturity, has the freedom to make that choice–the hermit-isolated bicameral choice, or the synergetic bicameral choice.  No individual of any other species appears to behave in a way that is consonant with the isolated choice, unless they are what we call “rabid.”

If we all were to wake up this morning and decide to make the synergetic choice:  that we are all in this together, then:

1. We would be surprised by the overwhelming scientific and mathematical, as well as theoretical evidence to support that assumption.

2. We would find a lot of evidence to support that the opposite assumption is in fact irrational, with rabid effect on our planet.

3. The fact that everyone else has made the same assumption is a delightfully self-fulfilling prophecy.

4. Now our Universe meets William Thurston’s geometric definition of a “Unique Universe.”  Oversimplifying just a tad, because neither of us has all day:

We have just closed Pandora’s Metaphysical Box; we have just opened Schumacher’s 8-possible geometric Universe in 4 dimensions.  For those of you who may be math hobbyists, a post script:

Now it is not only True that P (for “polynomial time” = “Left-hemisphere”) = NP (for “non-polynomial time” = “Right-hemisphere”) but we have also proven to each other that P=NP, just as Yang=Yin.  Congratulations to us, we just won $1,000,000, payable in two years.  Not a bad way to start the morning, was it?

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