Posts By: Andrew Sullivan

Go to a public place either in the morning or afternoon, and spend a half hour there with the mindset that your thoughts and feelings are as significant to the world as your actions.  Imagine that your true, good, and beautiful thoughts and feelings are deeds that can by themselves invisibly promote healthy world evolution. … Read more »

Are you holding out hope? Damn right you are! If you’re a human being, and you’re honest with yourself, I can almost guarantee it, at least for something, say for your own improbable success or perhaps for humanity’s continued survival. As much as this may sound strange, holding out hope or being hopeful, is a… Read more »

A very good morning to everyone gathered here on this auspicious day, but especially to this distinguished and idiosyncratic group of graduating seniors, a group of soon-to-be golden diploma-wielding novice geniuses, a group who has honored me well above my merit pay-grade with this opportunity to speak today. Thank you. Though I am a great… Read more »

Free means open (vulnerable, even), not in control nor out-of-control, for out-of-control is really evidence of remote control.  What stars are to a crown of starthistles no cause-and-effect mechanism can ever answer, but the free person can.  From three parts suffering and one part grace you can spell “free,” and with the remainder, make up… Read more »

All of what we do takes place, has a place, and creates place as much as it merely happens in a place.  Our freehoodship approach sees, experiences, and establishes place as temple, jungle-gym, lab, studio, and wilderness, each of these place types with its attendant human way of being: reverence in the temple, play on… Read more »

In the summer and fall of 2011, I wrote a poem, which I ultimately ended up calling “A Little Reality Music.” The poem is noteworthy for two reasons: first, almost every word in it has the word “it” or the sound “it” embedded in it. Second, it seems to be the last output of a… Read more »

My friend, high school teaching colleague, and fellow freehoodship leaf-catcher, James Meier, died quite suddenly on February 19 — he was 58 years old.  I would like to share the elegy his students, fellow teachers, and I created for him.   Elegy for Mr. Meier He was never small: too many liters of majesty, cubic… Read more »

Every so often I feel as though I need to reestablish (or establish anew) the principles of the Freehoodship, which means getting not merely at the principles, but at the principles behind the principles, to the deepest layers of human motive and action, where even the subtlest residues of duty and compulsion dissolve and the… Read more »

Google, Apple, and Facebook are known for the unusual interview questions they ask prospective employees, ostensibly hoping to distinguish the especially creative and hardworking from the rest of us.  When I create my behemoth tech company (the freehoodship), I will subject prospective employees to a ritual meeting with death like the one I briefly describe… Read more »

First trying used to be so easy, then I had to try to try.  Now I welcome myself without expectation to the age of crushed expectations.  My first mission there?  To accept as true Kant’s “thing-in-itself”?  Ouch, but doable, because there’s always something I don’t know, like some unknowable “thing-in-itself.”  To finally concede that the… Read more »