For the past couple of years, I’ve been living more and more like a philosopher, and figuring out a little more each day what that actually means. While this has been true for the past 20 or so years, the most recent chapter since I quit my career and ventured off on my own with Positive Philosophy Consulting has been rich and challenging, at times unsettling, but more often than not, really encouraging. Despite the inconsistency with which I’ve been sharing the process along the way, I have been doing philosophy in ways I could hardly have imagined over a decade ago when I got my doctorate d ..read more

Straddling ever more platforms, I find myself “falling behind” or leaving gaps in what I hope one day presents as an organic archive of my process. Maybe when I die (or before…why not?) someone will find it intriguing enough to go back and retrace the glimpses of true parts of myself I’ve offered in scattered projects, like some haphazardly designed autobiographical puzzle that hangs together on sheer faith in the mysterious longevity of the Internet and its secret machinations of hyperlinked search engine optimization. Despite my best efforts and opinions on the matter, I admit this disconnec ..read more

While my blog has been rather quite over here on *this* website, I have been writing in other places over the past several months. Part of the challenge has been figuring out where to write what, and then how to share it, because I somehow fell victim to the strange idea that “professional” things need to sound a certain way and/or be about specific things. Presumably, because this website is where I have information about Positive Philosophy Consulting (even with a domain that is my literal name), it somehow shifted into being a space for more-professional-things, whereas vulnerable, authenti ..read more

Mourning someone you’ve never met, but whom you’ve read for years and years, is surprising and strange and sad all at once. In this culture, we’re hardly prepared to navigate grief and the loss of anyone, let alone those we hold most dear. But no one ever even told me what it’s like when one of your teachers dies. There are the people who influence you. And then there are those who shape, hold, and make you. I never met bell hooks, but when I first encountered her books she was alive. With some of my other favorite writers, that’s not always the case — I’ve moved through the world accomp ..read more

My Dear,  I mean absolutely no offense, but I cannot keep worrying about you when I’m trying to pour all my energy into getting good with myself. I’m over here trying to play, trying to heal.  Practicing self-care as a priority. Rolling the emotional waves of everyday mirror-gates while trying to break psychological trappings of a system which compels against everything that would help us embody radical, transformative change. That requires focus. Discipline. Mental stamina. Moral and political acuity. The kind of honest self-awareness that finds ugly interestin ..read more

you may have been inquisitive an aspiring electrician curious about internal wiring an existing structure the frame, its knotted veins a building in progress in neighborhood streets, viewed as a violation on familiar sidewalks, stalked as a target did you know the trees? did you recognize the truck? all white everything White Men White Family White Rage White Violence White Supremacy hunted, chased, cornered from a jog to a fight shot three times and still swinging broad daylight strange how strangers like you become haunting stories and gut-wrenching scenes a modern-day lynching and yet most ..read more

“The political struggle then becomes: to find a better way of answering questions, ways of questioning the questions, so that the world that makes some beings into questions becomes what we question.” – SARA AHMED (LIVING A FEMINIST LIFE) “Where are you from? And where are you from?” As a fourth-generation, biracial Asian American whose racial identity is frequently read as ambiguous, my answer to these questions is often met with perplexity. “I’m from Idaho.” “No, I mean, where are you from?” “Idaho.” “But where are your parents from?” “They’re from Idaho, too.” And so it ..read more

Colleagues, We know in our hearts and minds that we need to do things differently. Whatever shifts we implement, whatever change we create, since we seek to do the deep work of social justice and liberation, we know we must do it together. Our bodies carry tension every day and our complicated emotions mirror the conditions that surround us. We are tired, frustrated, and perhaps even cynical. And yet we know what we know, and we believe more fervently than ever that things can and should be better. This has been an exceptionally challenging year on many levels, not just for us as a country, b ..read more

Hi friends, From my position as an administrator leading equity and inclusion efforts in higher education to the depths of my own reflections as just one more person trying to live through 2020, I’ve been wrestling (and sometimes really struggling) with the gravity and complexity of issues we are all collectively called to navigate. Over the past seven months, since COVID-19 disrupted all of our systems here in the United States, I’ve done a lot of thinking and feeling, especially in light of the heightened social and political awareness regarding the need to change how we do things – on every ..read more

“What are you doing to cope?” This question was asked today in a small group, and since I spend pretty much every day reflecting on every day, I had a ready answer.  A couple weeks before the start of quarantine, my relationship ended. What would have been our anniversary passed in a weekend, and the summer move-in we anticipated won’t happen. I only mention my break up for additional context. It throws a little extra grief into my emotional landscape and yet another layer of disruption onto what had been my normal routine of significant engagement with another person. Since the start of ..read more