DerykStauder

Northwood Sacred Ox: 5/30/20 Jean Stimmell�2020 To Buddhists, the ox symbolizes the ultimate, undivided reality,  which is the ground of all existence.

Cannon Beach OR: 9/9/13 Jean Stimmell�2013 Getting Real I�ve written previously about not being able to shake my formative experience as a child, reveling in being outdoors and working with my hands, which lead to my first career as a stonemason. Perhaps I needed that hands-on, physical release because, like many men of my generation, I was divorced from my feelings. I loved theories and ideas, living in my head most of the time. I needed the physical escape of lifting rocks in the here-and-now to release the pressure of countless competing thoughts, swirling in my head. Due to occupational infirmities as I approached 50, I enrolled at Antioch New England Graduate  School to learn a new trade as a psychotherapist. This experiential program, discounted my 1950s-male, analytical mind in favor of opening up my body, starting the process to teach me how to feel. It goes without saying that this was a necessary adjustment: Joining with a patient in session requires being in the here-and...

Seapoint Beach, Kittery Maine Jean Stimmell�2014 No more excuses! Forced into isolation by the pandemic, we now have the time and space to �to think what we are doing.,� as Hannah Arendt long ago urged. Arendt, perhaps the foremost political philosopher of the 20 th century, observed that  in the past we didn�t have to think:  �tradition, religion, and authority told us how to behave and defined our moral options of right and wrong, the mass of humanity did not need to think for themselves�� However, nowadays, she wrote, its a free-for-all, with no guard rails on how we should act. �Adrift in a world in which everything and anything is possible, thinking is the only activity standing between ourselves and the most heinous of evils. ?1 � Today, many different worlds exist, depending on which lens we look through.  One lens,  promoted by the medical and health professionals,  sees our first duty is to protect our community, the body politic.  Under this view...