I think that when we pay attention to our wounded and ask “Why?” we find an agenda for change and even the angry energy to attempt what is necessary for change. And what are we called to do? Celebrate the winners who didn’t get hit, or take care of the wounded that did and see [...]

When asked what typified their experiences while students of the Aspen Community School, graduates responded almost unanimously, “You took me seriously.”
Even if George has been left somewhat broken-hearted with the end result of his leadership work with COMPASS (the nonprofit umbrella for the Aspen Community School, Carbondale Community School and the Early Childhood Center), in [...]

Woody Creatures, as Gaylord Guenin [formerly considered the Mayor of Woody Creek] has named us, love Woody Creek. We love the rural physical beauty of the place, the plethora of wildlife, the streams and mushrooms. And we know and love each other, that’s why we hang out together so much and gossip.
Woody Creek is a [...]

“What I’m trying to do is clarify the trail I’ve left behind. It’s like an elephant leaves spoor, which is broken branches, little turds, trampled things, mudholes, and the spoor remains, but the elephant is eventually, you know…you don’t care. It’s gone,” George says matter-of-factly. If there is a trail, then, it begins at one’s [...]

Thankfully scientists do acknowledge a relationship between the scientific and the literate definitions of complexity – or rather, a relationship between our structural and spiritual lives.
There is a growing body of science about complexity, most of the work originates from the Santa Fe Institute, and the work has gotten far enough that books popularizing the [...]

George (GSS) and I (NBS) sit across from one another in George’s office. It is approximately 10:30 am. We have been speaking for twenty minutes already. George wears an apricot-colored button-down, a brown tweed jacket, jeans and a belt with a silver square buckle monogrammed GSS. I, forty years George’s junior, wear cream-colored slacks, a [...]

NBS: With the speed of communication and the Internet, do you think that people are getting closer or further apart?
GSS: Ah…we’re fragmenting.
NBS: We’re fragmenting?
GSS: I think about this a lot. I think about social structures and I’m kind of a wonk on social structures. So, we have churches. That’s a social structure. Kiwanis. We have [...]

I remember the kindergarten room, or perhaps I remember one event in the room that is so burned into memory that I also remember the room, the venue of that event. The light came from windows on the East and South walls, the entry from the hall was on the West wall, and just to [...]

Betsy was my childhood sweetheart, and perhaps I was hers. We never talked about that amongst all the things that we never talked about. Given some stress, five kids, and a cadre of local disaffected high school students hanging around our house, what did we do? Bring in another kid to pull ourselves back together [...]

There is also the beer business, where the outlaw expresses his bona fide form. And the image behind Flying Dog Ales was trained to embody the amalgamated personas of George, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s trademark illustrator and the artist behind the Flying Dog Ales labels. Flying Dog is the underbelly of George, [...]

I have been pondering Einstein’s blockbuster equation lately. No, really, I have. I am trying to figure out how the human body, namely mass, and its relation to energy and its own spirit, or light, could be applied here. The formula tells us that mass and energy are related to each other by a ratio [...]

Normal sabbaticals in the physics field often involve visiting positions in some of Europe’s finest research facilities. These are professional sabbaticals, but also, for the families, there is travel and exposure to foreign culture. Looking back on it now it kind of surprises me that the family didn’t want to do that, that it didn’t [...]

George has conjured up yet another business idea, and this time it involves me. The idea occurred to him one Saturday evening and by the following Monday I heard the pitch. It was the day of the Woody Creek tour, the day I thought to myself that I had too many projects on my plate [...]

I think I give my power away too easily. I think I let it slide off me, like skin cells dying.
When I bought the ranch from Trudi it was called Saint Finnbarr Farm, I note that my Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t have an entry for Finnbarr. However, I remember Trudi: she was an artist in [...]

The brain is not a post office with little slots holding discrete mail for separate deliveries.
In the folder of personal letters that George has shared with me, the majority of correspondences are either from Hunter S. Thompson or Cynthia Oliver, also known as “Ed” or “Eddie.”
For a couple of years Eddie hung out with Doug, [...]

My husband JP and I threw our daughter Ruby Zypora a party in the park for her first birthday last Friday. We invited a slew of people – some we work with, many we know from the neighborhood. George’s brother Michael arrived with his omniscient smile, professorial beard and garb, and a six pack of [...]

My husband, daughter Ruby and I were invited to George and Patti’s home for dinner the other night. Jay, who is developing George’s personal website, and Jay’s long-time partner Maggie were invited too. Visiting from their home in Rockford, Illinois, Jay and Maggie were staying in the guest house near the barn, about a mile [...]

About town, George is best known, and most loved, for his storytelling. One of my favorite stories so far is one he related during our conversation in June, after his remark about the Civil War and its failure to abolish slavery.

GSS:  Let’s imagine toady’s  black experience, I’m a black in the South, and I didn’t [...]

If you want to develop a cultural creativity, then be careful to harm the least, for a child to develop that will require more than curiosity and will provide pain along with joy. It will require the personality traits of ambition, endurance, perseverance, and obsessive single-mindedness.
I watched a lecture the other day by Walter Isaacson, [...]

I began photographing at age 11 with my  mother’s Leica IIIg and moved through 2 ¼ x 3 ¼, 4 x 5, 5 x 7 and 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ formats through his college years. I was published and exhibited in Engineering and Science magazine, Newsweek, Boston Metropolitan Museum, Toledo Museum, and others. Believing [...]

Accountability is the beginning, of course. We need to be accountable to ourselves and to others for our lives; anything less is a dereliction, a refusal to engage life fully. And to be accountable one must have a way, a path, or a plan.
In many ways, then, accountability is the opposite of depression. It is [...]

It is so quiet here. Besides the snow sucking in the white noise, the absence of television creates more silence than were it merely turned off. When my parents, who live twenty-five minutes away, and my brother, a University of Chicago sophomore, visited for an hour or two over the weekend, I could feel their [...]

Takoche [Toke] was born on [my] ranch, son of a big wall hard man named Cov and a Sherpa porteress. They had met on a winter trek we made from Namche Bazaar into Island Peak next to Lhotse. We were going in to climb, she was the porteress called The Tall Slender One whom we [...]

My mother loves her home, her place. It’s in Perrysburg, Ohio, a village when I grew up, a town, nearly a city now, about ten miles up the Maumee river from Toledo, and just across the river from the town of Maumee. The Battle of Fallen Timbers was fought in the area, Fort Meigs has [...]

It is a New Year. Already. The mountains outside my window don’t care much for time. I wonder when the revolution will come. Feels like it’s brewing. Like a landslide, clearing the brush, making new tracks, slopping off the weak. What an imagination I have! Armageddon is a story man wrote, which may be proof [...]

A few months ago a family friend insisted I meet someone he has admired for years: a generous and accomplished author, Sidney Hyman –  94 years old, as charming as a prince, with all his regal tools sharpened, and chock full of personal tales that should be recorded in history textbooks (like how Joseph McCarthy, [...]

10/31/2001
Hi Dear George + Ben,
Happy Halloween.
I have a ECT first of November. Still hearing voices. Doing better but there are some bad times – couple weeks ago the foster care head person thought I should go to the hospital. This hospital ward was full up, asked me if I wanted to go down to Ludington. [...]

I seldom go to bed hungry or cold, oh I’ve done it voluntarily, camping in the Rockies or trekking in the Himalayas. It’s not so bad if you know it’s not going to be your whole life and you have no choice. In fact it’s kind of spiritual this chosen temporary denial of comfort. I’ve [...]

O ye of little faith…O ye of little faith…this is the refrain I hear in my head lately…O ye of little faith.
In a fifth grade chemistry apprenticeship I learned that the words “Aitch Two Oh” were just the way we said out loud the chemical formula H2O, where H stood for Hydrogen, O for [...]

We’re a few months short of a year working on this project together, and I can’t say I know that much more about George than I did before. Our People’s Press meetings at the new Woody Creek Community (“Commie”) Center (aka WC3) with Mirte Berko Mallory, Daniel A. Shaw, and now Carrie Click Kallstrom (an [...]

George – It has been my pleasure to know & work with you the past many years. Every time I chat with you, you always challenge me to expand my thinking. Sometimes it works & sometimes it doesn’t, but you always force me to think. I guess this is what teaching is all about!!!
Happy Birthday,
Jim [...]

I want to know if it’s the illness that forces me to be selfish, or my selfishness that brings on the illness. It is an awful sin – selfishness, but necessary, I suppose, for survival. It’s tiring too, this self-absorption. And terribly uninspiring.
These past couple of weeks have been difficult. I really didn’t think that [...]

My maternal grandmother was a formidable woman. I remember a three hour canoe trip down the Ausable where, as passengers and myself as perhaps fifteen, I elected to teach her how to shoot craps. She listened to my explanations of the rules and my rudimentary understanding of the probabilities associated with the game. She agreed [...]

At any Level in an organization there are at least these two functions that are ancillary and essential to the day to day work of that level: Governance and Communication.
The other day, in one of our People’s Press meetings, an accountant in from Oklahoma and associated with the bookstore asked George to summarize his life. [...]

In case you didn’t know, Woody Creek is a lightly charted area centered eight miles Northwest of Aspen, downstream on the Roaring Fork River and therefore of more temperate climate and mood. For those who know, Woody Creek always includes the Trailer Park, The Tavern and the Store and Gallery as the heart of downtown, [...]

“Don’t let anyone make you eat shit.”
-    George Stranahan, quoted on the Flying Dog Ale website
———-
March 3, 2003
Most of us, if we know a word or two in a language foreign to us, know the word for shit. Merde, scheiss, …Should we end up in one of these foreign countries we could at least begin [...]

At our most recent tete-a-tete, George brought along his photo of Eddie (Cynthia) from the last time she had visited him in Woody Creek. She is topless but wearing jeans, chest down lying in the grass, cheek against the ground, long hair hides her face, at peace, perhaps asleep, yet there is no denying an [...]

A place to grow means, to me, a place to try things, to make mistakes, to be forgiven.
An organization such as the Community School is a many body system. If it is to be emergent, capable of self-organization, adaptive, and to be “alive”, it needs to operate in its’ own state of complexity; and that [...]

Woody Creek is fiercely territorial; we love our community and have strong protective instincts. The active Woody Creek residents tend to be workers and worker bees that have been here a while and solved their own housing problems in the past. They understand and support affordable housing in principle. They feel that Aspen has created [...]

Here is the primary need for the mentally ill: counseling to handle life-long chemical dependence. Bouts with self-induced withdrawals from prescribed drug therapies are a common symptom for the mentally ill. So is self-medication, of which I am both guilty. The marijuana transforms my negative thoughts into glorious ones – filled with self-gratitudes, epiphanies, clarity. [...]

These bottomlands and mesas of the Rockies now under assault by humans for recreation, lifestyle and homes were once a quite different ecology in a vastly different human economy. Standing on a mesa, now either an abandoned hayfield or one hayed for reasons other than profit from the hay, one can look up, first at [...]

It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to write. My free days have been dedicated to People’s Press. I’m not sure how I fell back into administrative work, why I agreed to take on that kind of responsibility again. Not that it doesn’t have meaning – it does at times, but that it takes me [...]

The business of science is discovering rules and regularities about the subject under study; the more broadly the rule applies, the better the rule. The more exceptions to the rule, the less useful. The work of a scientist is to invent rules that might be useful and then to explore for the exceptions, if any. [...]

Seven months since I last wrote a chapter for George (and for me). In the meantime, I was pregnant and then terminated the pregnancy at 19 weeks on December 19, 2008. Most believe I had a miscarriage, a spontaneous abortion.   On most days I have come to peace with my, with our, decision, because I [...]

This past weekend JP, Ruby and I visited a goat farm forty miles from Redstone, over McClure Pass, in a town called Crawford, just past Paonia. This region is second only to California in producing organic goods, as the farm manageress informed us.
On this warm, early spring day we saw young goats, kids, one [...]

Fear is a great teacher; it is known that adrenaline is a powerful neurotransmitter that forms new brain synapses. An individual’s fear is the emotional signal that all is not well, something is not safe. It should trigger a cognitive effort to analyze the situation and choose something to do about it. It is human [...]

Long before the invention of money there was trade. The sandal maker would trade a pair of sandals for a sack of barley of a certain size with the farmer. And both regarded the transaction as “fair.” In fact, other sandal makers and other farmers traded sandals of the same quality with barley sacks of [...]

Jesus died on the cross to cleanse me of my sins. I wrote my sin on a slip of paper last Wednesday night and hammered it onto a wooden cross in a church auditorium. This was my Passover celebration of sorts. I didn’t have the energy to prepare a Seder meal for just the three [...]

Everybody in my neighborhood knows Big Ed. And the first thing you notice is that he is indeed big, second only to Shorty Wilcox, the tallest person my son Ben has ever seen. A basketball star back in his Iowa college days, Ed is usually soft-spoken and chooses his words carefully and with the squirrelly [...]

[An Aspen Community School staffer] was describing an interview with some parents and their child who wanted to come to the Community School. The family lived on a ranch on Capital Creek, and Dad really looked like a rancher. [Someone] asked the parents, “And what do you want for your son?” Dad thought a second [...]