Pitches from Wind and Wall

Mindful Living

What I Learn Hosting a Supper Club

In March of 2023, I started hosting a monthly Supper Club. Having lived in Atlanta for 2 years, feeling the isolation of newness to an area and age (in my 50’s, connection remained as complicated as it always is), I reached out to our friends, who reached out to their friends. A group of around 10 gathered that first evening. Since that night, once a month for the last two years we have gathered at different restaurants across the city. This article will explore the experience of hosting Supper Club. It will review the literature focused on the value of connection. It will draw upon case studies of connection to illuminate what we gain when we connect. It will distill the lessons I have learned hosting this monthly gathering.

Read entire Mindful Living pitch here.

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The Point

The Point of Paying Attention

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver

Paying attention hurts right now. It is easy to solely pay attention to the broken, cruel, and over whelming and miss joy, beauty, and delight. We often find what we seek. Lived experience is composed of it all — the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the falling apart and back together. Paying attention to it all has never been more important. If we are to imagine a future better and beyond what we are living, paying attention is the point.

Paying attention is the pulse of wide-awakeness. Wide-awakeness is not my idea. Philosophers, scholars, and artists have been exploring it for generations. I was so hungry to understand it, I focused on it during my Ph.D. and founded the Wide-Awakeness Project committed to living it. At heart, wide-awakeness is about the inand of experience — where attention and imagination live. Where our work is our project. Where we create and invent. Where we connect and grow. This essay will make the point that paying attention is worth thinking about, especially in these difficult times. It will explore the contours of the existential experience that arise when we pay attention. Ultimately, it will connect the value of paying attention — and telling about it — to establishing social proof of goodness in our world.

Read entire Point pitch here.

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Common Good

What Good Is Gratitude?

As an applied researcher focused on arts-based learning for a long time, I have followed our understanding of the neuroscientific implications of creativity. From increasing brain neuroplasticity, to developing positive personality traits, to improving cognition, studying creativity has been an important throughline of my work. My research has connected creativity and gratitude. Over the last decade, I have conducted “gratitude conversations” with more than 20 people — including Best-selling Authors, Pulitzer Prize Winners, Professors, Researchers, Yogis, Military, Business Leaders, and others.

The working thesis for this piece is that the distance between revenge, forgiveness, creativity, and gratitude is not long. Gratitude as fruit of the spirit. Gratitude as informal virtue. The piece will incorporate interviews, source work, philosophy, and “hard science” to explore gratitude’s depth and contours. The piece fits into Common Good’s pages as it will explore research about the mental and emotional benefits of gratitude, investigate the way in which brain science interacts with gratitude, and make the case for everyday gratitude.

Read entire Common Good pitch here.

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