This section of Tribe was inspired by the Celtic Tree of Life. When a tribe cleared the land for a settlement in Ireland, they always left a great tree in the middle–known as the crann bethadh (krawn ba-huh), or Tree of Life–as the community’s spiritual focus and source of well-being.

Beneath this tree, the community held its assemblies and inaugurated its chieftains so the new leader could absorb the tree’s power from above and below. We all have wisdom to gain along the road of life, and perhaps we can learn from the sacred trees how to live in harmony with Earth and her inevitable cycles of seasonal change.

Oracle is our Tribe’s center, the life source of our online Community. Here we celebrate with you the breadth of the highly sensitive person’s gifts. Derived from the Latin “oro” (meaning to speak, argue, entreat), oracle has come to mean a person or a place of serious words, of wise counsel.

Tribe’s Oracle offers you a safe place to present your opinions, insights, and wisdom. Oracle’s varied forums encourage you to share your unique viewpoints; review books, art, and music; discuss issues close to your heart; and even submit articles and columns for publication in Tribe magazine.

Oracle’s Conversation Cafe! is your place to chat with friends, and Upcoming Events gives you the opportunity to provide information on gatherings and activities of member interest. Members can even use the Marketplace to promote their blogs, newsletters, websites, and arts and crafts.

Our complete submission guidelines can be found on How to Submit to Tribe.

Select contributions to the Oracle forums are featured below:

Book Review

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
By Daniel H. Pink

I don’t know if Daniel Pink has ever heard of the highly sensitive person (HSP); but I do know he’s created a guide for non-HSPs that can help them develop more HSP-like awareness. A Whole New Mind is a long-running New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller that has been translated into eighteen languages.

Written for the business world, A Whole New Mind argues the future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, and storytellers–creative and emphatic “right-brain” thinkers. Sound familiar?

A Whole New Mind is a light-hearted approach to a very serious change that is taking place in the world. Drawing on a variety of research, Pink outlines six fundamentally human abilities he believes are essential to professional success and personal fulfillment in what he calls the “Conceptual Age.” Gone is the age of “left-brain” dominance. As the title suggests, the future requires a “whole” new mind where “right-brain” qualities will be needed to flourish.

As an HSP, you’ll be encouraged by the book’s premise. Perhaps Pink’s Conceptual Age will be a time when it will be easier to be an HSP. An age when we’ll not only gain a little understanding, but enjoy a higher value both professionally and personally.

After outlining his idea and making a case for the forces that are driving the change, Pink defines the six essential abilities needed to succeed in the Conceptual Age: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Each of these “Six Senses” is given its own chapter; then at the end of each chapter is a portfolio–a collection of tools, exercises, and further readings to help sharpen that particular sense.

To me, it’s these portfolio sections that are most interesting. They take A Whole New Mind beyond the traditional business book and make it ” The Non-HSPs Guide to Thinking Like an HSP.”

If you’re an HSP, read it to be encouraged. Then share it with the non-HSPs in your life to give them some insight into what it’s like to be you.

Pink has authored a trio of bestselling books on the changing world of work, including Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself and his latest, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Opinion

Fractured Family Tale

Blood is thicker than water. Right? Those who are blood-related are more important to each other than to others, than to outsiders. Right?

Family generally means bloodlines–those inherited traits that connect us to one person, but not to another. That shared DNA has provided the building blocks–golden and leaden–of human dynasties and social class structures for eons.

Emperors, sultans, kings, tsars, caliphs, moguls, maharajahs, and khans are among the ancient architects who built and lost civilizations through their bloodlines. Carpenters, brick layers, cooks, and field workers also built and rebuilt those civilizations based on their bloodlines, which defined their station for generations.

We have one biological mother and father; our siblings are unique to us, as are our grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Skin, eyes, hair, cheekbones, voice, mannerisms–we look for them in our family members to feel connected. Our society tells us that we must keep those familial relationships, make them work, never lose them, no matter the difficulties. And those adopted children and siblings? Well, they often search for their lost biological connections in order to find their lost social connections.

In the twenty-first century, do we make too much of blood? Oh, yeah. Blood does not make a great parent. Blood does not make a loving person. Blood guarantees nothing in life, especially not a happy, healthy family. Just ask anyone who was adopted into a well-adjusted family. Just ask anyone from a seriously dysfunctional blood family. The caring heart and loving soul is not a bloodline. Right?

Let’s take this twenty-first century reality further. What of our other brothers and sisters–those that stretch the meaning of “adoption” to the humanocentric breaking point? What of the trees, the rocks, the oceans? What of those that fly or breathe water or slither?

Many indigenous cultures recognize family in all the living systems of Earth. Various tribes acknowledge an original oneness in tongue and being with all life in their creation stories. They tell tales of greed and fear and distrust that turned us away from each other, caused us to stop recognizing each other’s voice, and left us with the world we have today. A family fractured beyond all recognition.

Can we rebuild the family? It takes desire and trust and honest effort. Sometimes it takes a profound crisis for us to look at each other with the loving, carefree eyes of our youth. It takes belief in the meaning of family. Acceptance that we are all of the bloodline of Earth.

Now that’s a dynasty worth building.

Minus the whole despot-slave thing.

Are we there yet?

Share your opinion. Join the “Fractured Family Tale” conversation here.

Meditation

A moment of calm in an overstimulating world.