Hasta La Gadget!

Sister Tesa Fitzgerald is devoted to motherhood. As a nun in the order of Saint Joseph of Brentwood, she lives and works in Queens, running the organization she founded, Hour Children, to serve as a halfway house for women emerging from prison. The mission is to help them become the kind of mothers their children need. Hour Children’s services are clustered in Long Island City through a network of apartment buildings and communal homes, thrift stores, a day care center, food pantry, mental health services, job-training, and a home for mothers on parole. Nearly thirty years ago, this 67-year-old embarked on her calling by shuttling children for visits with their imprisoned moms at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She has been expanding her organization and her skills ever since. She realized that to help these children most effectively, she had to help their mothers care for them once they got out of prison.

With each passing decade, she gets better at doing just that. Last year, she was able to construct an apartment building with the help of $9 million in public funds. Personally, she keeps none of the money she raises for herself. She eats, sleeps and works under the same roof as former killers, embezzlers, drug dealers, and prostitutes, helping them find a place in the world in order to care for their children.

Last year, after CNN named Sister Tesa one of its “heroes”, the Wall Street Journal documented her successful campaign to transform the 8,000 square feet of a defunct nightclub in Queens — Studio 34 — into a thrift shop to benefit the women in her care. Recently, the New York Times profiled her remarkable efforts, located mostly between two of the nation’s largest housing projects: Ravenswood and Queensbridge. With her vow of poverty, she essentially owns nothing, wearing and using only what’s donated to her organization, and living in the same communal housing offered to everyone she helps. Yet what’s fascinating is that Sister Tesa thinks and acts like an entrepreneur. In other words, she’s a nun who puts her innovative imagination to work for society’s outcasts, offering them renewal and redemption by finding ways to draw money to her mission. Her devotion may be spiritual, but she knows how to run an organization: her thrift shops now collect more than $400,000 in annual revenue.

At Hour Children‘s website, you’ll find the story of Luz De Leon, a woman who emerged after a decade in prison for manslaughter and found a job through the Hour Working Women Program. (The name refers to crucial hours in the life of the children it helps: the hour a mother is arrested, the hour for visitations, the hour of her release, etc.) It assessed De Leon’s aptitudes and helped train her with basic computer skills. Once she knew the ins and outs of Microsoft Office, Hour Children gave her a computer. Luz took on responsibilities as a group leader in an advocacy program to prevent domestic violence. Finally, early last year, one of the organization’s thrift shops, The Attic, hired her and she rose into a paid role as supervisor at Hour Children’s newest thrift shop. Last summer, she moved into her own apartment with the help of New York City Housing Authority’s Section 8 provisions.

Tesa Fitzgerald grew up in a poor family of Irish immigrants in Hewlitt, Long Island. She wore thrift-shop clothing, living in circumstances not that far removed from those she helps now. Though women represent only a small proportion of the U.S. prison population, their ranks are substantial: around 100,000 in state and federal prisons, on average. That’s six times as many as there were in 1980, according to The New York Times. Most of them are mothers of young kids.

Sister Tesa’s skills aren’t simply administrative. She’s a persuasive, quietly impassioned persuader as well. The Times reports that when one neighborhood opposed the proposal to put a halfway house on their block, Fitzgerald brought two of her women to a board meeting and let them speak about their lives. People in the audience were in tears. The protest fliers came down from buildings and no one raised a voice against the home, after that. She works from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day of the week, including Sundays–occasionally paying a visit to her own family, which includes eight nieces and nephews and 13 grand-nieces and grand-nephews.

Though she’s only 67, and I’m now at an age when I can say “only” in that context with sincerity, she’s strategizing about how someone else can take over the program in her absence. But that’s not her focus. Right now, she’s trying to grow Hour Children into the most effective organization possible. She’s been thinking of buying the entire block that surrounds her latest apartment building and put it to use. All she needs is $1.7 million. I suspect that doesn’t seem like an obstacle to her.

—

Peter Georgescu is the author of The Constant Choice.

ATLANTA (AP) — The investigation of a toddler’s death in a hot SUV in Georgia hinges on a key question: Was the boy the victim of a horrific accident after his father simply forgot to take him to day care, or did the man know the child was inside when he left him strapped in for seven hours?

A newly filed arrest warrant supporting the murder charge against the father states that 33-year-old Justin Ross Harris stopped with his son for breakfast and also returned to put something inside his vehicle around lunchtime while the child was inside it. Harris has told police he was supposed to drive his 22-month-old son to daycare but drove straight to work on June 18 without remembering the boy was strapped in his seat until the ride home. After spending the day at work, he pulled into a shopping center parking lot and hysterically asked for help for his son.

Harris was being held without bond Wednesday. Jail records didn’t list an attorney for him.

The new warrant filed late Tuesday also downgrades one charge Harris from first-degree child cruelty to second-degree child cruelty. First-degree cruelty to children requires a person to “maliciously” cause “cruel or excessive physical or mental pain,” while second-degree cruelty to children is caused by “criminal negligence” under Georgia law.

Harris put the toddler in a rear-facing car seat in the center of the back seat of his Hyundai Tucson after eating at a Chick-fil-A restaurant the morning of the boy’s death, the new warrant says. He then drove about 10 miles to work and left the child strapped into the car seat when he went inside, the warrant says.

At lunchtime, Harris returned to the vehicle and opened the driver’s side door to place an object inside and went back inside his workplace, the warrant says. It does not explain how the officer knows that.

Around 4:15 p.m., Harris left work and, soon after, pulled over at a shopping center and asked for help with his child, the warrant says. The child was left in the vehicle for about seven hours, the warrant says. The temperature that day was 88 degrees at 5:16 p.m., according to the first warrant in the case, filed the day after the child died.

An autopsy has been completed but the cause of death hasn’t been released. The warrant says Harris caused the child’s death by leaving him in the hot car.

Prosecutors may opt for the harshest charges available and then scale back in felony murder cases, said Jessica Gabel, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

“They’re definitely going to look at how healthy was the child, the family’s previous history, whether dad was usually somebody who was very responsible,” she said. “And the defense, if this reaches a trial, will be collecting their evidence that he was a good parent, a fit parent.”

Neighbors and acquaintances of Harris and his wife described them as loving parents.

Their landlord, Joe Saini, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the couple were “very, very nice” people who were in love with their baby.

“Everything was going right for this couple,” Saini said. “They wanted to buy a house so they could have some space for their child to run around the backyard.”

___

Associated Press writer Kathleen Foody contributed to this report.

Whoa. Talk about a David and Goliath story.

We’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s rare to see an escaping chipmunk turn tail and run — straight back to the cat that captured it.

But this tiny ninja won’t stop till it gives the cat a piece of its mind.

Don’t worry, the video has a happy ending. The brave little chipmunk eventually makes a break for it while the cat takes a minute to reflect on its life choices. Watch the video above to see the full exchange.

As I know it, being “Indian” — as indigenous People have been called in the West — means being deeply aware of one’s relationship to everything. Knowing that an unseen force appears when we live this way. One begins to understand that the divine lives inside of relationship — which means that everything you are in relation to is sacred.

While difficult to practice in every moment, just striving for this ideal creates a better world.

So what has disrupted the indigenous way of being in relationship?

Here are two quotes that may be clues:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu

Something happened to us humans. Something that changed how we feel — or don’t feel — about the things we’re in relation to. We started to feel smarter and more powerful than nature itself. Nature can be harsh. We learned how to tame it. We grew crops that allowed us to live through the winter. Nature became something outside of ourselves that we could control…it had power we could use.

Over time, we internalized this idea of dominion over things. Because we could harness the power of the seasons, we marveled when we learned to harness the power of water and steam, electricity and the atom. Animals were domesticated and harnessed. People were harnessed as well.

All these things continue today, but in the last 500 years we have also been surprised and impressed by our ability to create artificial versions of the natural world. The horse became the automobile…firelight became the LED.

Science tells us that plants, fish and insects have been on earth for the last 300 to 500 million years…birds and flowers and animals for about 150 million years. From what we know so far by digging around, humans like us have been on earth for about 200,000 years.

If doing things for a longer time makes you better at it…it’s clear that rocks and trees and bugs are a lot smarter at living on earth than we are.

I think everything needs a purpose…a reason for being. So in this sense, the rocks and trees and bugs have definitely got it figured out. A stone is not trying to be a beetle. When a seed of corn is planted, a rose doesn’t come out of the ground.

As humans, we often seem to question our purpose. We keep trying to “figure it out” even as other species appear to have reached their point of perfection.

Maybe we just haven’t been around long enough. Someday maybe I’ll feel as sure of why I’m on earth as my cat seems to.

Our purpose seems to be measured by progress — and how it’s defined.

Over the last 150 years we’ve made great strides in science and art… farming methods and education…how markets meet demand…All of these achievements seem to, at least in part, reflect an intense desire to create a better world for more people. Especially as the global human condition becomes interconnected and visible.

But many people — in the name of progress — have lost their sense of purpose.

In America, when the country was formed, nearly everyone was a farmer. We all basically understood each other — and our purpose. Life for most has changed very dramatically since our great-grandparents were children. Our sixth president regularly bathed naked in the river near the Capitol Building. Can you imagine that happening today?

Time may be the most radically changed thing of all. 150 years ago we had no sense of a common time. Other than our agreement of where the sun was in the sky and what phase the moon was in at night. Phase… that word is common to me from audio recording. It’s an aspect of a cycle or musical vibration. For nearly all of our existence on earth, our time was deeply connected to the natural rhythms of the planet, cosmos and the small community we were a part of.

But with steam and electricity came time. The need to be “on time” became necessary for things to happen with regularity that machines — or men with machines — seemed to dictate.

Over time, progress had to turn a profit. What was better had to be new.

This is where time and the machine must be reconsidered…as do the quotes above.

To many, there is something that feels unnatural about what’s happening in the world today. Many people don’t “fit in” in some way. Or life just seems a lot harder than it should be. Or worse, people feel completely disenfranchised — unseen and unheard. People considered “mad” or “crazy” are most likely missing their “indigenousness” the most. Like the canary in the coal mine…they’re telling us that something in the culture is getting too toxic and too unnatural.

There are various antidotes that our culture offers to forget these feelings of separateness. But where does the indigenous disruption begin?

When boys — and girls — are told to not feel their feelings or that their feelings shouldn’t matter, they start to forget what feelings feel like. That creates the opportunity to make false impressions of feelings seem real. Like playing a game in virtual reality. Many of the sensations that surround us are processed and amplified in an attempt to recreate natural phenomena — but hyped to hypnotize.

Imagine it this way. There are many foods that have been grown; picked out of the ground and then processed to last a very long time or travel a very long distance. The original flavor is lost. In its place, science has discovered natural and unnatural ways to create a flavor that make the food taste good — or acceptable to many. It fills our stomach, but what the plant had to offer our system, blood, muscle, organs and bones is gone.

As children grow up in a world that has become “processed” — the same logos on every street corner, more apps than toys and parents in debt, they enter a world of transactions and not relationships.

As we remove our children from the natural world… fresh food… elders that bring out the child’s innate wisdom, the more they forget what being in relationship means…what it feels like. As they get older they forget what happens when time slows down and connection…meaning…purpose…begin to show up in deeply profound ways.

We are separating ourselves from each other and the natural world around us — we’ve lost many subtle forms of feeling and communicating. We’ve lost the relationship to our nature.

It wasn’t that long ago that we understood… felt… that we were simply a part of the natural world we inhabited. Nothing more… nothing less.

Through embracing a common understanding of what it means to be indigenous, what has recently become a planetary-wide human relationship can begin to become a tribe.

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. Don’t read if you have not read “A Storm of Swords.”

All men must die, but not all of them have to stay dead.

Season 4 of “Game of Thrones” wrapped up almost two weeks ago and fans of George R.R. Martin’s book series are still upset a certain character was left out of the final episode. Lady Catelyn Stark, the matriarch of the Stark family, made a fatal mistake in attending a wedding in Westeros in Season 3. We all know how those happy affairs tend to end when they take place in the Seven Kingdoms, and after she watched her son fall at the hands of Lord Bolton, Catelyn Stark had her own throat slit by one of his men.

The episode was the most shocking of the show and fans still haven’t gotten over the loss of two of our favorite Starks, so naturally, when talk of Fairley reprising her role during the finale of Season 4 took hold, we got more than little excited. (For anyone who hasn’t read the books, after Catelyn Stark is killed she’s resurrected and becomes the zombified harbinger of vengeance known as Lady Stoneheart.)

Unfortunately for Fairley, and for the fans, it looks like Catelyn Stark is staying where she is: six feet under. Fairley spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the omission of her character in the finale of Season 4 and all but confirmed she won’t be returning to the fantasy series.

“Yeah, the character’s dead. She’s dead,” Fairley said. The actress went on to defend the option to leave out her character’s arc in Season 4.

“You respect the writers’ decision,” Fairley said. “They can’t stick to the books 100 percent. They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of brilliant show.” Which basically means we can say goodbye to any hope of seeing Lady Stoneheart during Season 5.