Nora Holzinger

I won't bury the lede - building community is at odds with modern life. I don’t mean in the sense that many of us are working multiple jobs, with long commutes, for little pay, raising children without much support, without even the prospect of retirement to comfort us - all of that matters too. I mean in the sense that our beliefs about how we and others should be in and move through this world are not conducive to building community.  Community is how humans survived the past 300,000 years and how we have come to inhabit nearly every corner of the earth.  Yet it’s only taken 75 years for Americans to lose it.  Many of us know little about the people who live next door to us. We don’t attend church, belong to civic groups nor social organizations, nor do we volunteer.  As Marc Dunkleman notes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor”, Americans today mainly keep in touch with their closest friends and family members, and have very little interaction or relationship with ...

I peer at my too-bright phone screen, knowing I should be asleep – depression insomnia at an all-time high.  A young woman with perfect glowing skin in a perfectly manicured modern living room tells me that I just need to change my “self-concept” to achieve my goals and become “the woman of my dreams”.  If I just change my identity to “a person who eats healthy”, I will have no problem turning down the office breakroom doughnut or the ultra-processed food-filled girl’s night. I’m just not the kind of person who eats that stuff.  “Your mentality creates your reality.”  Well I guess my mentality created a reality where my job is a dead end, my skin is a mess, the earth is rapidly heating, I’ll never get out from under my student loans, and I’ll never lose the last ten pounds I gained after moving in with my partner.  I close the app and roll over. The next day, sitting in meditation a realization floated across the open sky of my mind.  What she was explainin...