And so it begins...

I have come to understand something about myself that took years to surface, and even longer to name. I am what researchers call an implicit learner. I absorb patterns before I consciously understand them. I wrote the word elephant as one of my first words before I even knew what an elephant was. My mind processes structure before meaning catches up, and it always has.Most people learn by moving…

#spilledmilkMilk on the counterbreathing its faint animal heatand the body already tighteningalready remembering the old refusalthe ancient nocarried in the gut like a buried drum.White in the glasswhite in the fistwhite in the mouth that cannot taste its own lie.The body foldsA churn under the ribsa small storma truth with no patience for ideology.White hands lift their glassesas if lifting a…

My mother asked us to bring her bananas from Costco. A small errand, nothing charged. Checking my phone at the house, I learned Fernanda’s profile had been taken down, and it hit me hard. My mother saw the tears gather and told me I was being too emotional, that only blood relatives deserved that kind of grief. She lifted herself up as an example of composure. I told her that wasn’t true. I added…

Suddenly, the same peoplewho scream about their gun rightsdecided his didn’t count. Funny how the Second Amendmentgets real quietwhen the wrong person is holding it. Their arguments spinaround the gun,circling it, scrubbingat the blood on their hands. They say he is a terrorist.They won’t call him an ICU nurse.They won’t say he tended to the dying.They won’t say he was a legal gun ownerwith no…

She was 37 and alive,a mother, a poet once praisedfor dissecting what it meansto be humanOld Dominion taught her versebefore Minneapolis taught her fear. They told you to believe itthat she turned to harm thembut the footageshows her SUV moving awayher hands steering clearfrom conflictnot into it.while agents shouted“drive… get out… stop…”their words clashing over her head. And here,where…

I have two birthdays. One is July 14th , and the other is October 21st. One marks when I entered the world, and the other marks when the world decided I belonged to it. Both speak for me in different ways. July 14 belongs to the Serpent. It has followed me all my life. I see it in symbols, in patterns, in the quiet spaces between moments. The Serpent comes as a reminder of change, of…

Luna and I sat inside the labyrinth, the place I had once buried my beloved Eggy, spirit of the garden. We talked softly, the way people do when they are holding something fragile. I told her about my aunt, how I chose to stay home instead of visiting her one last time at the hospital. How I did not recognize her in recent videos and photographs because my memory had kept her young, bright, full…

Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk, and other conservative figures have strategically redefined empathy as a weakness, arguing that it compromises moral clarity, enables manipulation, and undermines personal responsibility. Because their rhetoric relies on emotional insulation, they reject empathy in order to preserve control. Instead, they elevate sympathy, which prioritizes emotional detachment over…

subject: kirk / evergreen / zarutska / huntington beachpriority: narrative cohesionstatus: volatile public sentimentrecommended frame: selective outrage, racial leverage, political utilitynotes:charlie kirkterminated mid-speech.high-value asset.immediate elevationto martyr status.deploy “radical left”blame protocol.amplify civil war rhetoric.suppress shooter identityunless ideologically…

This morning I felt like a writerbecause I carried a dream too heavy to float away.I was giving one of my sons a housebut he chose a shack in the middle of the streeta lonely island.He stripped it of chairs,replaced them with benches,black and white,as if to say there are only two ways to sitin this lifeI helped him line them against the walls,a kind of order,even as he broke some agreementwith…

Imagine a world where systems are stripped of identity and hierarchy, but individuals keep identity and pride as cultural expression. That could: Remove the root causes of most wars and systemic oppression. Make democracy more authentic (based on values, not parties). Make work more egalitarian (all contributions valued equally). Allow culture, faith, and identity to flourish, but only in…

Every story carries our hopes and our fears, and examining narratives through different lenses can reveal unexpected insights. In Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Kino discovers what appears to be a lifeline for his family only to realize that this gift can destroy everything he loves. The pearl becomes a mirror in which we can explore a structural and moral parallel to the history of Israel . Kino’s…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the essays I used to write in high school, and I decided to take another look at one for John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. It was on the reading list for the leadership program I joined, and when I first read it back in high school, I never thought about it in that context. Revisiting it through a leadership lens has turned out to be a surprisingly interesting…

When I was in kindergarten, I wrote my first story. I don’t remember exactly what it was because I either gave it away or it got lost somewhere in the blur of childhood. What I do remember is the feeling of making something from scratch and wanting to share it. This version is my attempt to recreate the kind of story I might have written back then, but with a little more care from the me who is…

In Ray Bradbury’s The Flying Machine, a man invents a kite that can lift him into the sky. When the emperor sees it, he does not marvel. He sees walls being flown over, cities bombed from above. The sentence is swift: “Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together” (Bradbury, 1953). It is an act of total precaution. Not just destroying the thing, but the mind that made it,…

I wanted to share some reflections on my experience at this year’s Great Innovate competition at Process Palooza. I’m not sharing this to call anyone out, but to process what happened, and maybe make sense of why it affected me more than I expected. It started off okay. I had done this before, so I had a sense of how to move through the Lean Six Sigma steps. I offered a framework using SIPOC and…