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BUT WE STILL DON"T GET IT

By:Danica S. Miller
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BUT WE STILL DON'T GET IT.  And before anybody misunderstands me, let me be very clear: I am not angry because people are helping children. I am angry because I am afraid we have forgotten how to see everybody else. And underneath that anger is grief. There is genuine sadness in realizing that we can look directly at people who are literally living in the trenches of poverty, homelessness, housing insecurity, mental-health crises, and social isolation—and somehow allow them to disappear from our collective field of concern. I don't want to stop anybody from giving a child a backpack. Give the backpack. Give the school supplies. Help the single mother. Support the family. But then look up. Look around. Because the children aren't the only people in our communities who need us. Our elderly neighbors need us. Our homeless and unhoused neighbors need us.  People struggling with mental health need us. Working people who cannot afford housing need us. Families one missed paycheck...
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CELLS-N-CELLS: When the Systems Around Us Become Part of Us

By:Danica S. Miller
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There is something unsettling about the word cell . We hear it in biology and think of the microscopic structures that make life possible. We hear it in prison and think of confinement. Same word. Two very different realities. CELLS-N-CELLS lives in that tension. The visual begins with a person standing behind prison bars, but the story quickly becomes larger than physical incarceration. Inside the body, another world is unfolding: DNA, blood, organs, energy, cells, and a glowing biological network connecting everything together. Above it all is the question: “Is this the ‘biology’ of our society, or is our society affecting our ‘biology’?” That question is the heart of the piece. The Cell Within the Cell Biology teaches us that cells don't exist in isolation. Cells form tissue. Tissue forms organs. Organs contribute to systems. The individual parts become something larger. Society works in much the same way. Individuals become families. Families bec...
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Title: She Was Waiting in the Box — What My Baby Self Taught Me at

By:Danica S. Miller
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I've been thinking about what it means to receive yourself as a gift. Not a version of yourself that's been polished and perfected. Not the you that's figured everything out. But the original you — the one that existed before the world got its hands on you. That's what this birthday brought me. Picture it: a gift box, tied with a ribbon. And when the lid comes off, there she is. Baby Danica. Tiny hands holding a birthday cake bigger than her ambition, eyes wide and waiting — not afraid, just ready. Reaching up. Saying in that wordless, ancient baby language: Happy 50th Birthday. Come get me. And something in me broke open in the best way. Because that baby didn't know about the hard years. She didn't know about the nights when I questioned everything, the seasons of starting over, the times I wondered if the vision was too big or the road too long. She just knew. She arrived on this earth already carrying the fullness of who I was meant to be. And sh...
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