Category: Illumination

Throwing Myself into the Realm of the Greater Good

by Vanessa Bertozzi I never thought I’d run for public office. I’m a pretty private person. I have no background in politics. No thirst for power or grandstanding skills. But here I am—an elected official of the most hyper-local form of government, a Village Trustee in Rhinebeck, NY. How did this happen?  When Trump was … Continued

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Retaining and Restoring Ancestral Jewish Land-based Ritual

by Lila Glenn Rimalovski [Photo: Eight fire menorahs on the final night of Hanukkah, a practice designed by Justin Goldstein and ignited by the community of Yesod Farm+Kitchen (taken on ancestral Catawba and Tsalaguwetiyi land)] I’m standing before a row of blazing fires, eight of them, each encircled in rocks from the land that I … Continued

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Motivation, Action and Calming the Outrage

By Corinna Borden When you spend the night in the hospital, the techs like to take blood around 4:00-5:00am to have results for when the doctors come in to do their rounds.  Recently, the metal rings of the curtain jostled me from my Valium doze. “Hold on, I need to put my mask on.” I … Continued

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Rondout Riverport 2040

A Post Carbon Gateway to the Hudson Valley and the World by Andrew Willner Rondout Riverport 2040 is a comprehensive plan for remaking and transforming the Rondout Creek and Hudson River Working Waterfront, including the transportation of goods and people in a carbon-constrained future. It proposes a pragmatic, positive, and prosperous vision for the near … Continued

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Just Kindness

By Shawn Berry The withholding of kindness must be one of the greatest tragedies, for it benefits no one. Much worse, it serves to isolate and divide us into smaller and smaller groups. Can we get any smaller than the nuclear family? Some have pushed further into living alone! Isolation has severe health impacts on … Continued

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Elephants and Aspirations

by David McCarthy With the pandemic, we have all been in a period of some degree of isolation and reflection. Perhaps we have learned some things about ourselves. In my own case, especially till mid-summer this year, I’ve been staying very close to home. As it happens, I have three broad areas of personal discipline … Continued

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The Sacred Cows of Capitalism

By Hélène Lesterlin I am starting to see that racism and capitalism are bedfellows. I encountered the clearest vision of this in Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist, where he calls capitalism and racism “conjoined twins”. He says we should rename capitalism, as we know it here in the United States, “racial … Continued

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It Feels Like the Future

by Micah Two years ago, I had the pleasure of going to Detroit for the Allied Media Conference. I had never been to Detroit, never been to AMC, had never even heard about it before, but the schedule of sessions and overall mission looked dope. But I found more than that. What I found was … Continued

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Launching Illumination

Where have you been putting your energies these last tumultuous months? With the stresses of the pandemic, the ongoing struggle for the movement for Black lives, the reality of a summer with no camps and uncertain school plans for the fall, everyone is trying to hold things together as they seem to be flying apart. … Continued

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