by johnnoltner
I was a Marine. For six weeks. As a journalism student, I believed I should try to understand as many different perspectives as possible and I knew nothing about the military. So when I returned to my dorm room one afternoon and found a flier in my mailbox that said, “You could be a Marine,” I called the recruiter. At the time, their officer candidate program allowed you to dis-enroll at any time without a commitment. I read that fine […]
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by johnnoltner
I’m not a pacifist. I believe it’s vital to resist evil in the world, and sometimes force is required. But I also believe we use it poorly. Syria’s Assad has little legitimacy as a leader and the alleged use of chemical weapons in his country is indefensible. I would have preferred Obama to have acted early in the conflict to find a resolution before so much human suffering occurred. But I don’t believe our country’s missile strike early Friday will […]
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by johnnoltner
At the School Redesign in Action conference for the New England Secondary School Consortium, we asked participants, “How do you ensure equity and excellence for all learners?” Some of the responses can be found below…a full collection can be found in our Facebook gallery.
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by johnnoltner
This morning our friends Jen and Greg started hiking 8.8 miles uphill toward Amicalola Falls in Georgia. When they reach the falls, they’ll keep going. Another 2,181 miles. If things go according to plan, sometime in the middle of October they will stand on the summit of Mt. Katahdin in the middle of Maine’s Baxter State Park. If things go according to plan, they will hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. Yesterday, Karen and I hiked a section […]
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by johnnoltner
In the summer of 2008 our family backpacked on an island off the coast of Maine. A small boat dropped us off, motored away, and retrieved us three days later. Our kids, Brenna and Jordan, were 10 and 13. We spent our days picking wild blueberries and wandering the rocky shoreline, imagining we were castaways, with really nice gear from REI. We watched the waves roll in and searched tide pools for signs of life. We weren’t quite alone. There […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: backpack, crab, family, growth, island, maine, marine biology, molting, peace, shed, wilderness
by johnnoltner
At the end of our dinner presentation at the Center for Transforming Communities, we closed with one final exercise. After hearing many of the inspiring stories from A Peace of My Mind, people are ready to dream big. We ask everyone in the room to take a piece of paper and finish this phrase: I wish…. They can finish the phrase any way that they like…we encourage them to aim high, and they often do. Everyone in the room feels […]
Categories: Blog, Uncategorized • Tags: art, commitment, community, listen, memphis, peace, transformation, wish
by johnnoltner
Chuck Richter is a lobsterman from Orr’s Island, Maine. He says life on the water is hard, unpredictable, dangerous, and tiring, but there is nothing he would rather do. He appreciates living in a small community where “everybody’s got your back,” and speaks of the challenges when outsiders come in and try to change things they don’t understand. “I’ve learned through counseling that if something upsets you, you don’t count from 10 to 1 because 10 to 1 is countdown to liftoff. You count from […]
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by johnnoltner
“When I was getting into horsemanship, a great cowboy and horseman, he said to me, if humans were like horses, there’d be more peace on the earth because you just take a wild horse, a feral horse and it’s being chased by a mountain lion, it’s going 100 miles an hour and the mountain lion gives up and lets it go, the horse just doesn’t stop and go back to grazing, but the horse stops and gets on the ground […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: cowboy, horse, Las Vegas, Maldives, Montezuma, New Mexico, patience, peace, transition
by johnnoltner
I’m excited to announce a new website for A Peace of My Mind. It’s amazing what long days at the kitchen table with a laptop and a pot of coffee can do. Oh…and a crowd of WordPress Happiness Engineers on the other end of a chat line. Most of the bugs seem to be worked out, so it’s ready for viewing. (That being said, I’m sure something has slipped through the cracks…I will gladly crowdsource corrections, so let me know […]
Categories: Blog, Project Updates, Uncategorized • Tags: a peace of my mind, APoMM, art, dialog, peace, photography, social justice, stories, website
by johnnoltner
For the past month I have been editing through three years of transcripts, refining the stories for A Peace of My Mind’s next book. That stack of binders in the photo needs to whittle down to about 80 pages of text and I’ve been making steady progress every day. The gems of wisdom abound, but there won’t be room for all of them in the pages, so there is a long process of decisions and judgments to be made. […]
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