Author: Rick Bellingham

“It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.” Ingid Newkirk Let’s start with a little perspective. There are about 400 billion Milky Way stars and as many as 10 trillion planets orbiting them. On our little planet, there are 8 billion people. Given those facts, how did we come to the conclusion that our planet reigns supreme and that any one of Read More

“This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make.”  —Christopher Alexander “There is an immense, painful longing for a Read More

Dear Annie and Ezra, You are almost 11 years old now, and you are citizens of several communities:  your synagogue, your school, your teams, your town, your state, your country, and the world.  You have responsibilities to all of those communities. A citizen is someone who has rights and responsibilities in a defined group.  Those rights are at risk when we don’t act responsibly.  In your Jewish community, your responsibilities are to learn the Torah, Read More

No justice; no peace!!! That has been the slogan of many protest movements going back as far as the 1986 killing of Michael Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant assaulted by a mob of white youth in Howard Beach, NYC. Since then, it has been a rallying cry for each miscarriage of justice perpetrated on the disenfranchised. It implies, of course, that peaceful action is impossible without justice. I wholeheartedly agree. In this post, I’m proposing that Read More

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the landAnd don’t criticize what you can’t understandYour sons and your daughters are beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agingSo get out of the new road if you can’t lend a handThe times, they are a-changin’.” Yup, the times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan wrote this song in 1964, and change has continuously accelerated since then. For example, the world population, when he wrote the song, was about 3 billion. Read More

“We always belonged to this mystery, and maybe we can begin to find our way back, even if it means following an almost hidden path.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee I just completed a 60 day course entitled “Harmonizing All with All” conducted by Artie Vipperla, a Harvard trained polymath and Ph.D. psychologist who happens to be a Vietnam buddy of mine. The course consisted of two cycles – the first to present and give people an experience Read More

Our small town of Elk Rapids (ER), Michigan is embarking on a bold experiment. We are seeking to find common ground across divides while welcoming healthy conflicts and respectful disagreements—not exactly what we are seeing around the world.  WHY? We want to demonstrate that it is possible to bridge divides in the pursuit of creating healthy, innovative, and thriving communities, and that is possible for multiple community agencies to engage constructively and collaboratively to accelerate Read More

“We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.”  Mohsin Hamid Humans are complex systems – so complex that it is tempting to reduce experience into simplistic dualities.  A great case in point are the conversations about gender fluidity and sexual orientation. It is so easy to confine the human experience into the binary of male and female.  These handy Read More