Remember pet rocks? Did anyone try to teach their stone to talk? Was there any point in listening?
An homage to Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk.
© Copyright 2026 John P. Healy
“Three sages, three worldviews, and one pet rock. An cinematic answer to Annie Dillard’s ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk,’ exploring how the language we use to approach the Earth dictates whether it answers with a goodbye, a hello, or a thank you.”
My personal word of the year is demonize. But …
A commentary on how “we are using our free time” … an ongoing “cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”
• AP News > “How to sum up 2024? The Oxford University Press word of the year is ‘brain rot’” (December 2, 2024) – chosen by a combination of public vote and language analysis by Oxford lexicographers, it beat five other finalists: demure, slop, dynamic pricing, romantasy and lore.
Continue reading ‘Brain rot’ – word of the year 2024
[Draft 11-7-2024]
We supposedly live in a secular society. And yet, sacred speech dominates our polarized politics. The righteous mind is alive and well. Private & public piety pervades our identities, our virtues and values. Dogma still divides. History has lessons which remain unheeded. Social media (and money) amplify an illusion of majority voice. We drift into a divide over the future of our democracy. The role of reason is in retreat.
Can heads, hearts, and hands find common ground to move forward?
Continue reading Puritan praise & pride – a legacy of conflated piety
Fables were part of the moral fabric when I was growing up. Perhaps yours as well. Especially some of Aesop’s Fables. (Yet, I was suprised that this was not the case for many of my middle school students, when a public school teacher.)
There’s one fable, in particular, which social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discussed in a 2012 interview (noted below) about his latest book (at that time): Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper.
Continue reading ‘Politics is about sacredness’ – overlapping moral orbits
My personal word of the year is kayfabe. But …
Otherwise, in the wider, mainstream buzz: AP News, NPR, CNN, CNBC, …
So, in an info-verse awash in fake info, misinfo, disinfo, Merriam-Webster’s word for 2023 reflects erosion of the line between “real” and “fake.” And as traditional news sources are replaced by social media, presentation is everything – performative charm displaces deeper character [2].
Continue reading Authentic – word of the year 2023[M-W article below] Authentic is what brands, social media influencers, and celebrities aspire to be. … Ironically, with “authentic content creators” now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, “authenticity” has become a performance.
midstream
I
we are suddenly
one that needs care.
germinating in a culture,
located within a history,
of lives living midstream,
even as we do
Well, sort of …
• Matter
• It matters
• What matters
• Mattering – you matter
• YouTube > University of Queensland > Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial > FLICC – The Techniques of Science Denial Part 1 (Mar 9, 2020)
And then the worldly context of any discourse:
It was a time of hope, it was a time of fear,
it was an age of science, it was an age of ignorance,
it was an epoch of climate change, it was an epoch of disbelief,
it was a period of dreams, it was a period of politics,
it was a spring of recovery, it was a season of collapse (1)
The notion that the battles of prior generations are “won” for the next – just doesn’t happen. The battles over civil rights, women’s rights, … realizing the dream of the Constitution. A long slog, a forever journey. An evolution of minds, hearts, … and habits.
And sometimes conflicts are not so much won as just left behind by succeeding generations (without necessarily any linear progress either).
Continue reading Generational battles