Today, a child was born, tiny hands curling and unfurling with the startled shock of cool air on wet skin, oxygen flooding into newly-opened lungs as she cries upon entering this strange new world. This child will likely live to see 2100. The date hangs, inconceivable, futuristic, but now within the span of a single […]
Make Memorial Day About Peace
Make Memorial Day About Peace We live in a war culture. Let’s change it to a peace culture.. The rumble of 20,000 motorcycles roars up the highway to an annual festival across the mountains. It’s Memorial Day Weekend. The dual anthems of US militarism and consumerism are playing across the country. Meanwhile, I’ve got the […]
Great News! Ari Ara Wins A Second Silver...
Ari Ara Wins Silver Nautilus Award!Desert Song is the second novel to win this social justice fiction honor. Great news! Desert Song has just won a Silver Nautilus Award – the second book in the Ari Ara Series to be honored in this way! The Nautilus Awards are for socially-engaged fiction and I’m tickled pink to have two of […]
Ditch the Draft, Once and For All
It’s outdated. It’s dysfunctional. It’s hated by most of the populace. No, we’re not talking about the line at the DMV. We’re talking about the Selective Service and the military draft. For decades, young men have had to register. Now, congress is considering expanding draft registration to women. Here’s a better idea: let’s abolish the […]
Visionary Inspiration and Practical Stra...
By Marissa Mommaerts “Winds of Change,” the third part of the trilogy that began with The Dandelion Insurrection, is so rich that I simultaneously want to share it with every visionary changemaker I know, while at the same time rereading it over and over until I absorb every drop of wisdom, hope and strategy into […]
Maine Farm Girl & Kansas Grain Farmer Ta
A young Kansas grain farmer and I were riding on a train through Iowa when the subject of the climate crisis came up. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a multigenerational Midwest farming family. I’d grown up on a potato farm in Northern Maine. Both of us spent our teenage years in overalls. We […]
A Blizzard. A Power Outage. A Failure of...
A continent-wide snow storm swept across the United States last week. From Seattle to Baton Rouge and from Dallas to Minneapolis, people grappled with road closures, shutdowns, power outages, and freezing temperatures. From sea to shining sea, ordinary people stepped up to take care of one another. My brother volunteered to snowblow the Seattle offices […]
8 Magical Stories Of How Peace Literatur...
8 Magical Stories Of How Peace Literature Changes Culture – And Lives By Rivera Sun Four hours per day, six days per week, I take action for peace. It may not look like your typical nonviolent action – I don’t hold signs or block the gates of military bases. The way I wage peace is […]
The Scale of Loss: 400,000 Dead
Image via Today, “Could The COVID-19 Memorial Become Permanent?” Four hundred lights stretch along the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Each represents one thousand people in America who have died of COVID-19. It is only in their absence that we have space to acknowledge the dead–there is not enough space beside the pool for that […]
After The Fireworks – Winds of Change
This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.You can find it here>> It was a time of giddiness and babble, when the world seemed hopeful and lost all at once. Possibility lurked on the edge of each moment. Disaster loomed across every horizon. With humanity at a crossroads, the […]