Reckonings

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, political, economic, environmental, poetic. Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as we... ll as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality. The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over about 15 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location. Now, in 2015 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when I was living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, my fortuitous and wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna, John and Jim, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua ...Read More