In this edition:
Opening Article
Amanda Jacobs
Health in Action – * Unknown Article *
by Linda Park
Fire and Ashes
by Steven Johnson, DO
How COVID Shaped a Resilient Generation of Kids
by Lauren J. Young – Scientific American
How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools
By Olivia Reingold – The Free Press
How to Move Beyond Outrage Toward Understanding
by The Daily Good – News that Inspires
The Effect of Medical Freedom, RFK Jr and the MAHA Movement on the Future of Health
by Kimberly Lewis
Wild Clocks
by David Farrier – Emergence Magazine
Opening Article by Amanda Jacobs
Fire and Ashes
by Steven Johnson, DO
I had the great privilege to attend an Indian Ceremony just after the spring equinox. A group of us surrounded a ceremonial fire on a windy Spring afternoon. A ceremony of offering was generously gifted to our Camphill community medicinal garden by descendants of the local Mohican Indians whose ancestors had once walked these very lands. This was led by their leader Storm Hawk. They joined us with their families now expanded to include Indians of the Brazilian amazon forests who had bound their fates together through destiny and love for the land.
They were there to help us ask forgiveness of our transgressions to the land through the cutting down of beautiful trees to build a building for medicinal work and to house the activities of a diverse community that included people with special needs…a building we assumed we had permission to build.
How COVID Shaped a Resilient Generation of Kids
by Lauren J. Young – Scientific American – Published on March 11, 2025 (link)
As COVID surged and schools across the U.S. shuttered in March 2020, Jamie Wyss, an elementary school counselor at the Virginia Beach City Public Schools system in Virginia, vividly remembers quickly assembling paper packets on social-emotional learning to hand out to parents. She initially thought students and staff would return in a week, maybe two. But neither parents nor students would come back to the system’s campuses for the rest of the school year.
“I promised them that I would always be there for them,” Wyss says. “Honestly, it felt like I abandoned my students.”
Nothing could have prepared Wyss or her fellow educators for what came next. Health care facilities were quickly overwhelmed, and governments around the world enacted stay-at-home orders, or “lockdowns,” as millions of people became infected with the COVID-causing coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. As of today, COVID has claimed more than seven million lives globally. Amid this devastating loss, children grappled with sudden social isolation, emotional distress and new academic pressures involved in learning remotely. Teachers, suddenly pivoting to online instruction, were thrust into unpredictable territory. Parents had to balance surviving a deadly pandemic and raising their kids in a massively altered world.
How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools
By Olivia Reingold – The Free Press – Published on 12/30/24 (link)
This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows they’re linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental illness. This January, just over two million students will return to phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.
How to Move Beyond Outrage Toward Understanding
by BY SAHAR HABIB GHAZI – Greater Good Magazine – Published on Mar 3, 2025 (link)
Many of us are outraged today. We dig in our heels around our beliefs on abortion, vaccines, immigration, or gender. We believe we are morally right and the other side is wrong. And the other side also believes they are morally right and we are wrong.
Kurt Gray believes shifting our thinking away from right and wrong, black and white, to instead focus on concerns about harm could be the solution to our chronic outrage. Gray is a professor of psychology and directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on how we have a harm-based moral mind is explained in his recent book: Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.
The Effect of Medical Freedom, RFK Jr and the MAHA Movement on the Future of Health
by Kimberly Lewis – kimberleylewis.com
Disclaimer: “The Foundation for Health Creation (FHC) feels it is important to stay abreast of the many changes going on in the healthcare field. With this in mind, we thought everyone should be aware of the Kennedy Newsletter and why many parents are supporting MAHA and suggesting what some people see as radically changing views regarding medical research. As an organization, FHC stands for the freedom to pursue all sources of health creation and therefore, from time to time, we will share opposing viewpoints which don’t necessarily represent the diverse views of the individuals behind our foundation. In these dramatic and changing times, it is important to stay informed, to challenge what we think we know and to find our individual path to health.”
The future is already planted in today’s soil. We know an acorn can only become an oak, and an oak can only manifest if the conditions are right for it to grow. So too with the future of healthcare. The seeds for this future have already been planted. As long as good seeds are planted and nourished, we will enjoy the outcome. But of course this is Luciferic thinking and impossible. We live in a world with many forces and the seeds of sad and unfortunate healthcare have also been planted, along with the good. This is the conundrum of being human.
I will explore these two streams. The first is what I’m looking forward to in healthcare because of these “good seeds”, and this is where so much of my hope lies, and most of this article. And second, what I am NOT looking forward to in healthcare because the “bad seeds” have already been planted, and this is where my angst lies.
Wild Clocks
by David Farrier – Emergence Magazine – January 23, 2025
Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.
In every living thing, there ticks a clock. “Lodged in all is a set metronome,” wrote W. H. Auden: when May comes round, birds “still in the egg, click to each other ‘Hatch!’” and “October’s nip” is the signal for trees to release their leaves.
Once, these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn. But as climate breakdown takes hold, more and more species are struggling to keep time as they once did. Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray.