Inclusion Starts With I Quotes

Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.

the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see.

Poetry is the mightiest vessel for philosophy, Poetry is the mightiest vessel for science. Though I started out with prose, I went through the poetic morph. Now all my science is poetry, all my poetry is philosophy.

I believe being forced to use preferred pronouns promotes reality distortion and a lack of basic respect for biology. Since I started advocating for women’s sex-based rights, I began to realize that even when I tried to be what I thought was kind and inclusive and used preferred pronouns, it wasn’t enough. Unless we undoubtedly believed men could turn into women and experience all the same things women do while not daring to question it, then you were showcasing transphobia. I was fully embracing fiction in the guise of showing respect.

Let’s talk about ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers for a second. You’ve definitely seen them around. They’re those blue strips with white lettering that assemble a collection of religious icons and mystical symbols (e.g., an Islamic crescent, a Star of David, a Christian cross, a peace sign, a yin-yang) to spell out a simple message of inclusion and tolerance. Perhaps you instinctively roll your eyes at these advertisements of moral correctness. Perhaps you find the sentiment worthwhile, but you’re not a wear-your-politics-on-your-fender type of person. Or perhaps you actually have ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers affixed to both your Prius and your Beamer. Whatever floats your boat, man; far be it from us to cast stones. But we bring up these particular morality minibillboards to illustrate a bothersome dichotomy. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of (a) the people who flaunt their socially responsible “coexist” values for fellow motorists, and (b) the people who believe that, say, an evangelical Christian who owns a local flower shop ought to be sued and shamed for politely declining to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding, the resulting circles would more or less overlap. The coexist message: You people (i.e., conservatives) need to get on board and start coexisting with groups that might make you uncomfortable. It says so right here on my highly enlightened bumper sticker. But don’t you dare ask me to tolerate the ‘intolerance’ of people with whom I disagree. Because that’s different.

Rosalie!’ said I one evening. “‘Your servant, sir?’ “‘You are not married?’ She started a little. “‘Oh! there is no lack of men if ever I take a fancy to be miserable!’ she replied, laughing. She got over her agitation at once; for every woman, from the highest lady to the inn-servant inclusive, has a native presence of mind.

I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option. "Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. "It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth." "It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'original form' of myth can be separated from its miraculous elements. 'Wonder is only the first glimpse of the start of philosophy,' says Plato. Aristotle is more explicit: 'The lover of myths, which are a compound of wonders, is, by his being in that very state, a lover of wisdom.' Myth encapsulates the nearest approach to absolute that words can speak.

So here are my questions and my appeal to you as we talk about a healthy soul. Are you intentional about your friends? Are they helping you? Do you fit together? Yes, I think we should live big. We should draw big circles, be inclusive, be forgiving, and be kind—but we can’t be intimate friends with all seven billion people on this planet. We can’t be close friends with a few thousand people. Probably not even a few hundred people. Realistically, we might be close, intimate friends with only a dozen people. Maybe a few more or a few less, depending on our individual capacities and personalities. So we had better choose those people intentionally, carefully, and prayerfully.

When everything – not just everything – when the whole existence is included in you, only then you are liberated. In exclusion, you become separate. There are methods of exclusion that lead to ultimate inclusion; that is different. That is the neti, neti, neti process that we are doing – I am not this, I am not this – excluding yourself from everything. Probably the word “exclusion,” in that sense, would be mistaken and misunderstood. It is more about dis-identifying yourself, starting with your clothes, body, house, family, every cell of your body, your ideas, thoughts, education, culture, everything, and saying, “I am not this, I am not this, I am not this.” Once you are dis-identified with everything that is not you, you become all inclusive once again.

Bitcoin is not a currency. Bitcoin is the internet of money. As a technology, it can bring economic inclusion and empowerment to billions of people in the world. I’ll give you one example of a specific application that is going to fundamentally change the lives of more than a billion people in the next five to ten years. ​ Every day, an immigrant somewhere cashes their paycheck and stands in line to wire 50 percent of that paycheck back to their home country to feed their extended family. Here in the US, 60 million people have no bank accounts, yet they cash their paychecks and send them abroad. Overall in the world, $550 billion is transmitted every year as remittances from first-world countries. Much of that money is sent to five major destinations: Mexico, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and China. In some of these places, remittances represent up to 40 percent of the local economy. Sitting on top of that flow of $550 billion are companies like Western Union, and they take, on average, a cut of 9 percent of every single one of these transactions out of the pockets of the poorest people of the world. Imagine what happens when one day one of these immigrants figures out they can do the same thing with bitcoin — not for 15 percent, not 10 percent, not 5 percent, but for 5 cents. Not a percentage; a flat fee. What happens when they can do that? They can, right now. There is a startup company that is handling remittances between the US and the Philippines. They’re doing a few million dollars right now, but they’re going to start growing. There’s $500 billion sitting behind that dam. When you’re an immigrant and you can change your financial future by not paying 9 percent to send money home, imagine what happens if every month, instead of sending 91 dollars home, you send 100 dollars home. That makes a difference. There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

I rail a lot against passion, because I feel like passion can be very exclusionary, and very elitist, and it can leave a lot of people feeling like they don't belong... I'm much more interested in allowing people to follow curiosity, which is a much more gentle impulse that doesn't require that you sacrifice your entire life for something. It's more of kind of a scavenger hunt, where you're allowed to pick up these tiny beautiful little clues along the pathway. It's more of a tap on the shoulder that asks you to turn your attention one inch to the left. Oh that's a little bit mildly interesting - what is that? Okay now I'm going to take that clue... I'm going to take it another inch, and I'm going to take it another inch. Rather than this idea that the symphony is born whole, because you sit down and you're struck by lightening and then you start to create. Curiosity I think, is a far more friendly way to do creativity than passion." ...this is why I say the path of curiosity is the scavenger hunt, because it took my probably three years between "gee it would be nice to put some plants in my backyard" to here I am in the South Pacific exploring the history of moss and inventing this giant novel. You know I think everybody thinks that creativity comes in lightening strikes, but I think it comes with whispers. And then the whispers can grow thunderous over time if you are patient enough to explore it, almost in the way that a scientist would. Be open to - you don't need to know why you are interested in this, it will be revealed if you continue to investigate. That's all that curiosity asks of you. Passion asks you to throw it all in the bonfire. And curiosity is way more generous in that it just says - give me a little bit of your time and let's see what we can do. Fear is part of our make-up, it's something that's inherent in us, it's a protective device. My experience with fear is to permit it to exist and then to figure out how to work with it. And to me working with fear is what courage is. I've never started any project that I wasn't afraid... during the entire thing.And the conversation that I have with fear is not to say you are the death of creativity and I can't be creative because you exist, but rather to say: "You are part of the family of my consciousness. You are one of the emotions that I possess and I hear your complaint. I see your anxiety and I see everything you are putting before me about how this is going to be a disaster, and how I'm going to die and how everyone's going to mock me and how I'm going to fail... and I thank you so much for your contribution, but your sister creativity and I are going to go off on this journey now and do this thing but you are allowed to be in the car. We're going on a road trip, but I don't expect you to not come." And once you allow fear to just be present it seems to quiet down and go to sleep and then you can go about your work. But it's never out of the picture and I don't waste my energy trying to kick it out of the picture because that feels to me just like a colossal exhausting waste of energy. Whereas a radical kind of inclusive self acceptance seems to be a way to create a lot more.

How do I love campuses? Let me count the ways. I love the coffee shops and reading rooms where one can sit and talk or browse forever. I love the buildings with no addresses that only the initiated can find, and the idiosyncratic clothes that would never make it in the outside world. I love the flash parties that start in some odd spot and can't be moved, and the flash seminars that any discussion can turn into. I love the bulletin boards that are an education in themselves, the friendships between people who would never otherwise have met, and the time for inventiveness that produces, say, an exercise bike that powers a computer. Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.

Then one day I realized that all our talks were basically about lovingkindness. The point wasn’t to give a perfect performance, it was to connect with the people gathered to listen and to extend a sense of inclusivity and care to them. My ability to share my insights with more freedom came about when I started to connect to myself and to that space of care from within. I shifted my attention away from self-protection and needing to be perfect and focused instead on giving what I had to offer. It was a big shift in intention, a move away from the lonely self to a space of connection. And when I came to this recognition, I found my voice.

Jade doesn’t care about inclusive storytelling any more than Loretta did. She cares about starting controversy. She isn’t interested in what I have to say as a writer; she only seeks to tokenize me.

Poverty abolitionists seeking a different kind of community, a more open, inclusive community, need to start showing up at Tuesday evening planning board sessions. We need to rise from our seats and tell our local officials: This community’s long-standing tradition of segregation stops with me. I refuse to deny other children opportunities my children enjoy by living here. Build it.

When Calls A Promise: I made a promise to someone that I would protect humankind with my life - that I would let no savagery, no prejudice, no sectarianism tear my people apart - that I would spend every breath of my life in uniting my people - the people of earth. And my very existence is the living manifestation of that promise. Don't make promises that you know not whether you will be able to keep, but once you do make a promise, keep it at all cost, even at the cost of your life, which is exactly the kind of promise I made - to give my life in the unification of humankind. Initially I thought I would achieve that by erasing the religious barriers amongst people. Hence, in the beginning I wrote ceaselessly on religion, but as I kept studying the tenets of the society, I came to realize that the barriers amongst people have invaded every aspect of life and society, much beyond the mere traditional bounds of religion - they have invaded the very lifeblood of society and have been tearing the society apart from inside out. I came to realize that the religion of the future is not going to be christianity, islam, judaism or any such traditional system, rather, the religion of the future is going to be social justice. And the best way to shape the future is to envision it early on and start manufacturing it today. Thus, though initially the primary premise of my work was religion, eventually it acquired much wider and diverse societal roots. My purpose remains the same, that is, to unite you all, to unite my seven billion sisters and brothers of earth, but I had to make a few changes to my approach based on the need of the time as I kept evolving with my work. I started off as a scientist, but the needs of the society turned me into a reformer. Society needed not yet another scientist, it needed a reformer scientist, so I became one. All my life my need has been to serve the need of the society - need mark you, not desire. There is a difference between what the society desires and what it really needs. Society may desire for more bigotry, more segregation, more rigidity, more separatism, but that's not what the society needs - a civilized society needs humility, not bigotry - it needs inclusion, not segregation - it needs reason, not rigidity - it needs assimilation, not separatism.

To that, I say this: a few may not agree, but one of the greatest men to have walked the earth in my lifetime is Nelson Mandela. He and his people suffered tremendously under the apartheid regime, but when he took over the mantle of governing South Africa, he did not vindictively return the favour to the opposition, which would probably have sent South Africa into chaos and terminal decline. Instead he charted a way forward that started with forgiveness and inclusiveness, bringing about a smooth transition instead of possible revenge and bloodshed. Maybe some folk in cricket administration can learn something from the great man.

Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!)

But the question that tugged at me, and I asked over and over was: What was that “it” that was being sustained? I needed to know because I wanted to bottle “it” and share “it.” Nothing, it seemed to me, would be more useful in this age of accelerations. Having returned home to reconstruct what had worked in the past to make my community an inclusive place that could anchor and propel many of its citizens, I wanted to understand what was still working today—and that is what this chapter is about. I eventually concluded that the “it” starts with the fact that Minnesota, and even little St. Louis Park, has and had a critical mass of leaders who year in and year out came to politics and power in order to govern.

Another step came when, starting in 1314, the Venetian state began to take over and nationalize trade. It organized state galleys to engage in trade and, from 1324 on, began to charge individuals high levels of taxes if they wanted to engage in trade. Long-distance trade became the preserve of the nobility. This was the beginning of the end of Venetian prosperity. With the main lines of business monopolized by the increasingly narrow elite, the decline was under way. Venice appeared to have been on the brink of becoming the world’s first inclusive society, but it fell to a coup. Political and economic institutions became more extractive, and Venice began to experience economic decline. By 1500 the population had shrunk to one hundred thousand. Between 1650 and 1800, when the population of Europe rapidly expanded, that of Venice contracted. Today the only economy Venice has, apart from a bit of fishing, is tourism. Instead of pioneering trade routes and economic institutions, Venetians make pizza and ice cream and blow colored glass for hordes of foreigners. The tourists come to see the pre-Serrata wonders of Venice, such as the Doge’s Palace and the lions of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which were looted from Byzantium when Venice ruled the Mediterranean. Venice went from economic powerhouse to museum. I

I know because I made her sign a contract with clear inclusions. Birth control was one. Monthly testing was another. I also made her sign an NDA. They all had to sign that. I took every precaution to protect you.

KEEP IT SIMPLE Offering to close a story loop is much more simple than you think. Even the inclusion of smiley, happy people on your website is a strong way to offer the closing of a story loop. People want to be happy, and those images promise your product will deliver. If you sell rugs, a successful resolution might be a beautiful floor or a room that finally feels finished. If you sell ice cream, a successful resolution might be a rich, creamy taste of heaven. Camping gear? An adventure to remember. While I’ve been slightly philosophical in this chapter, try not to overthink it. What problem are you resolving in your customer’s life, and what does that resolution look like? Stick to basic answers because basic answers really do work. Then, when you get good, start diving deeper into the levels of problems your brand resolves. The important idea in this section is that we need to show repeatedly how our product or service can make somebody’s life better. If we don’t tell people where we’re taking them, they won’t follow. A story has to go somewhere. Have you told your customers where you want to take them?

Worship of Chains (The Sonnet) Enough with the worship of chains! Enough with celebration of selfishness! Time it is to shatter the altars of separation. Time it is to be the ravager of primitiveness. Let us hang all our sectarian gods and idols. Let us start a new worship of love and liberty. Let us be prophets and messengers of harmony. Let us be disintegrated in realization of inclusivity. Let us go insane and kick all prison-gates down. Let us burn locks to ashes with flames of heart. Let us call upon the vigor eternal from within. Let us hunt down the last trace of inhuman dirt. Let us draw a noble anatomy for civilization. Let us lay ourselves as cornerstones of ascension.

In schools, where inclusion matters, competition is not equal. A focus on competition inevitably results in an overemphasis on rewards. I have sat in on too many awards ceremonies, year after year, where 1% of the students get 100% of the recognition. Olympic values are great, but introducing intense competition in a school means that the children who are going to lose know they are going to lose before they even hear the starting gun.

Let us hang all our sectarian gods and idols. Let us start a new worship of love and liberty. Let us be prophets and messengers of harmony. Let us be disintegrated in realization of inclusivity.

As a little girl, having a mixed background didn’t allow me to have a life as my classmates. I simply didn’t fit in, and was already starting a pattern that would follow me for most of my life.

Now that our argument is completed as an investigation, let us review it in another way. We started from the fact of Error. That there is error is indubitable. What is, however, an error? The substance of our whole reasoning about the nature of error amounted to the result that in and of itself alone, no single judgment is or can be an error. Only as actually included in a higher thought, that gives to the first its completed object, and compares it therewith, is the first thought an error. It remains otherwise a mere mental fragment, a torso, a piece of drift-wood, neither true nor false, objectless, no complete act of thought at all. But the higher thought must include the opposed truth, to which the error is compared in that higher thought. The higher thought is the whole truth, of which the error is by itself an incomplete fragment. Now, as we saw with this as a starting-point, there is no stopping-place short of an Infinite Thought. The possibilities of error are infinite. Infinite then must be the inclusive thought.

A lot of people will see you as enemy because of your conviction of inclusion and equality, but do not move an inch from your conviction, especially when the very fate of humanity is predicated on that conviction of yours. Let me tell you a story which my father used to tell me when I was a kid. There was once a reformer in Bengal, the place I was born in. One evening he was walking by the river with a friend of his. Suddenly someone at a distance started shouting at him using curse words. The friend asked - why is the man cursing you, aren’t you going to say anything? The reformer replied, let them shout, it only means that perhaps I am actually bringing some change in the society.

The first step of good democracy is to choose a good leader, or more importantly, to not choose an animal as a leader - yet we made that ghastly mistake in 2016 by electing the most non-presidential creature on earth as the leader of our United States of America. There are good presidents, there are not so good presidents, but the unique problem with the president that we chose in the previous election was that it was not even a civilized human to begin with - it was an "it" not a he or she or they, and even after being handed over the very lives of the people that savage beast showed no sign of accountability whatsoever. Thus, we broke our democracy in 2016, but with sheer determination and conscientious persistence we have succeeded in fixing that mistake. Yes, I am filled with joy unspeakable to say out loud, that we have corrected our mistake and fixed the democracy into its usual imperfect but functional state. I say imperfect because democracy by nature is not perfect, but the problem we created last time was that we took things too far, and in the process turned a somewhat functional democracy into an absolutely dysfunctional one - in short, we broke it. And had the leader we chose been a smart one, that is, if that idiot had been not an idiot, but an actual cunning dictator, we wouldn't be celebrating our victory as a civilized people today, instead we would be mourning the burial of democracy. Fortunately, the insane ravings of a brainless, spineless and heartless maniac will no longer have to be considered as the statements originating from the sacred office of the President of the United States of America. We have fixed the broken democracy - yes - but the problems that existed before the maniac came to power still exist today. Therefore, we may cherish the restoration of our democracy as much as we want, the real work begins now. Choosing a proper human as a President doesn't magically make the problems of our nation disappear - those problems still exist - and they'll continue to give us chills time and again, unless we as a people stand accountable, both the government and the citizenry alike, and start working on those problems. Remember, the United States of America is not the responsibility of merely the President, the Vice President and their administration, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us whose veins carry the spirit of liberty and whose nerves carry the torrents of bravery. We have won the battle of making the White House human again, but the war has just begun - the war against systemic racism, against misogyny, against homophobia, against islamophobia, against gun violence, and against post-pandemic health and economic crisis. So, though we may celebrate the victory for a short while, we mustn't lose sight of the issues - we must now actually start working as one people - as the American people to heal the wounds on the soul of our land of liberty. It's time to once again start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream - the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension. Never forget my friend, AMERICA means Affectionate, Merciful, Egalitarian, Responsible, Inclusive, Conscientious and Accepting.

…someone has to be the antithesis to whatever cucking, shucking and appeasing pop material for the mainstream why not me… I didn’t start this company to be a subordinate or compromise my masculinity in my art. Besides without them…there’s no me I can’t be an antithesis without the duality. Niches are important not everything can or should be inclusive to society. Exclusivity is important and it holds a special value I never cared about the general public they aren’t my audience…

Once I started reading up on the third Person of the Trinity, I discovered how many theologians were ahead of me.2 The feminine pronoun is not as important to all of them as it is to me, but the idea of divine multiplicity is—the idea that one God can answer to more than one name and assume more than one form. Even if Christians will not go higher than three, the case is made: unity expresses itself in diversity. The One who comes to us in more than one way is free to surprise us in all kinds of ways. This is especially meaningful to people like me, who mean to hang on to our singular Christian identity with one hand and our love of many neighbors with the other. Within the community of the Trinity, the one and the many do not cancel each other out. They lean toward one another in eternally circling, mutually inclusive love. That is the image in which the rest of us are made.

the disability community is not a monolith. But I started having more conversations with friends, doing podcasts, and engaging with corporate partners about where we could begin to talk about disability inclusion and allyship. And I started thinking more about what it would look like to move from a disability-negative culture to a disability-positive one, phrases I have adapted from

The first problem with the word “diversity” is the word itself. Who is diverse in relation to whom? The way diversity is often framed in institutional domains implies that some people are diverse in relation to others. That some need to learn diversity while others have it and bring it to the table. This framing, I argue, has from the start driven a wedge between a significant percentage of marginalized and disadvantaged white people and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups—groups that should naturally be allies, not enemies. The only group that benefits from this divide is a small percentage of privileged whites who use the structure of whiteness to their full advantage. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

Accessibility is Humanity (Sonnet) I wanted my mind to be accessible to everyone, so I started translating my core ideas into as many languages as I can phonetically make sense. I wanted to be visible further beyond the eyes, so, lacking braille, I started recording my voice. I have a scientist brain, sufi heart, and a monk spirit - I don't need to outsource any faculty. I am capable, I am incorruptible, I am alive - I need no one's charity to uphold my humanity. No backing, only backbone. No benefactor, only brain power. No industry, only integrity. No contract, only character. Exclusivity breeds jungle, inclusivity makes society. Vip access is for animals, accessibility is humanity.