Author: Rick Bellingham

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

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” Sigmund Freud  Gurdjieff often stated that his mission was to mercilessly destroy the illusions we have about ourselves and the world.  He is getting a lot of help these days from three major disruptions on Read More

“The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman. Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.”  David Brooks Practices and behaviors are simply manifest values.  That’s true on an individual Read More

I spend the first two hours of most mornings reading the New York Times.  It’s a marvelous paper covering monstrous stories.  In order to recover from the depressing pall of what’s happening in the world, I meditate for 30 minutes to ground myself in the current reality and to experience the boundlessness that mediation brings.  It’s a marvelous way to deal with whatever monsters are still lurking in my mind from the morning news.  I Read More

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” Lao Tzu   I just finished watching season 3 of Succession.  It was the culmination of 29 depressing episodes of shameless depravity.  The series is a spoof on the Rupert Murdoch family dynasty and their polluting effect on the news media.  As the title suggests, the plot revolves around the children’s jockeying for power to assume the throne of Read More

“Is your glass half empty or half full?” asked the mole.  “I think I’m grateful to have a glass,” said the boy.”  Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse My family has grown accustomed to me going off on tangents in which no one is particularly interested.  On a recent vacation, as I was thinking about this post, I suggested a game we could play to expand aphorisms related to non-dualism.  Surprise, Read More

In my last post, I wrote about collaborative communities which elaborated on the process for engaging collective intelligence to achieve sustainable growth across organizational boundaries.  I alluded to the fact that creating collaborative communities required a new type of leadership – not the heroic, hierarchical, humorless, and hubristic type, but more of a servant leader type who humbly hosts welcoming spaces and who inspires people to come together, connect deeply, and commit passionately to a Read More

Over the past several years, I have been working with the Grand Traverse Land Conservancy (GTRLC) – an organization whose mission is to preserve and protect the pristine environment of Northern Michigan.  I’ve worked with their Board on Governance and strategy, with its staff on cultural alignment, and with their CEO, Glen Chown, on leadership.  It’s been the most satisfying experience of my entire career.   Their work keeps my hope alive in an increasingly divided Read More

Much has been written lately about the “Great Resignation.”  People who were downsized due to Covid 19 are not coming back to work in the numbers expected; and people who are still at work are quitting in record numbers.   Millions of jobs are open and employers are having a hard time filling them.  It appears that people are tired of jobs that don’t provide decent benefits, a living wage or flexible work options.  In short, Read More

I’m really worried about minority rule – especially when that means the republicans are in charge.  In all of the articles I have read recently, two factors stand out for predicting a republican vote – education and identification.  It appears that less educated and more identified people tend to vote republican.  I think there are several related factors that predict republican voters.  Conveniently and characteristically, they all start with the letter R. Rich:  63% of Read More

I was recently inspired to write a poem after participating in a meeting with our Downtown Development Association and Doug Griffiths, author of 13 Ways to Kill a Community.  We were discussing change challenges and how to deal with detractors and resistors to proposals aimed at transforming our seasonal community to one in which there is a chance for sustainable growth.  In the discussion, a metaphor emerged of the river and the rocks.    This metaphor Read More

At a recent Village Council meeting in my small town, I implored the elected officials to consider, in their deliberations about policy decisions, the differential effects of anachronistic thinking vs. possibilistic thinking as well as the differential effects of interdependent relating vs. competitive unrelating.  I assume that, in pondering the challenge, they came to one of three conclusions: What is this guy talking about? Where is this pompous ass coming from? Hmm, I wonder how Read More

I recently listened to an excellent podcast by Ezra Klein on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He discusses with Robert Wright, the author of Nonzero – a newsletter that examines the assumptions that drive America’s foreign policy – our policy failures in Afghanistan over the past 20 years after an investment of 2 trillion dollars and deaths of over 200,000 people.  Their discussion delves into the deep history of American involvement in Afghanistan, reveals the unacknowledged Read More

My small, hometown community recently sponsored an event called “What Unites Us.”  The event started with free sundaes in the park and concluded with a drum dance on the beach.  People in the community made signs indicating what they believed unified us, and we used those signs to make a pathway from the park to the beach.  Drums (green buckets) and drumsticks were placed in a circle with hula hoops in the middle.  Everyone was Read More