.jpg)
We Have A Relationship To Every Living Thing....And Affection Is The Essential Principle of All Relationships In The World
Remember: The choices each of us make ~ affects all of us in the end.
If we don't get back to being more compassionate, and loving and kinder people, we're all going to be like boats without paddles. The extensive continuing apathy, neglect, and wrongdoing that has resulted from Hurricane Katrina has the potential to create a disintegration of humanity. It would be extremely beneficial for the whole world if all those who are "lying" would STOP. Non-truth only leads to more non-truth and nothing that's built on lies ever lasts. If only all those who have to be so loyal to their associates ~ could extend that loyalty to their fellow man as well. What you "relate to" is, in the long run, a much better bench-mark of who you are than your titles and credentials...because if you were judged on what's really important as a human being, it would be your intentions.
"An Old Man, A Young Man and The Last Great Lesson"
(excerpt)
"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love and to let it come in....Let It Come In! We think we don't deserve love. We think if we let it in, we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, 'Love is the only rational act.' " ~ Morrie Schwartz
from Mitch Albom's book: "Tuesdays with Morrie"
.jpg)
Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
(excerpt)
"Over the last two or three centuries, a heartless culture-crushing mentality has incremented its progress on the earth, devouring all peoples, nature, imagination, and spiritual knowledge. Like a big mechanized slug, it has left behind a flat, homogenized streak of civilization wherever it passed. Every human on this earth...African, Asian, European, Islanders, or from the Americas...has ancestors who at one point in their history had their stories, rituals, ingenuity, language, and lifeways taken away, enslaved, banned, exploited, twisted, or destroyed by this force. Now what is indigenous, natural, subtle, hard to explain, generous, gradual, and village-oriented in each of us is being banished into the ghettos of our hearts, or hidden away from view onto reservations inside the spiritual landscape of the Earth Body. In shamanic terms, our minds are being taught to believe whatever we can think is actually the center of a person's life, just like a conquering culture, or a modern culture which thinks with the mind, not with the ancestral soul. Meanwhile, our natural souls, which are like....rare waterbirds, know that our souls should be working together to maintain or replaster the crumbling heart of life. Instead our indigenous souls are being utterly overlooked and pushed aside in the bustle of the minds' competitive activity, until our true beings feel just like a tribesman in a big, trafficky city: unwelcomed, lost, and homeless....We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones lies an ancient singing couple who just won't give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won't end if we can find them."
from the book "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village" by Martin Prechtel
Nonviolent Redemptive Goodwill
" I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will will proclaim the rule of the land." ~ Dr. Martin Luther King
"To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves." (Gandhi)
"Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization." (Daniel Webster)
"When I was a kid, I had an aunt and uncle who had a dairy farm. I remember all the wondeful things about farm life...the richness of the food ....just the way the milk tasted when it came right from the cow. There was something really wonderful about that, to be able to grow up with more of nature around, more of an idea of what the whole cycle of the earth was about." (EmmyLou Harris)
"We eat every day, and if we do it in a way that doesn't recognize value, it's contributing to the destruction of our culture and agriculture. But if it's done with focus and care, it can be a wonderful thing. It changes the quality of your life....People have always foraged during the seasons for what was closeby. They picked it and brought it to the marketplaces, and they sold it to people in the neighborhood. People brought it home, cooked it, and ate it with their families. It's a....sacred ritual....around the world." (Alice Waters)
"If you get a tomato that's grown with care ~ the difference is profound." (Dave Matthews)
"The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content...." (Walt Whitman)
~ selected excerpts from the book: "Farm Aid: A Song For America"
These Mountains
.jpg)
The Rocky Mountains
"The whole Western world is,
in a sense, but
an expansion of these mountains."
~Walt Whitman
The Deaths of 12 West Virginia Coal Miners
This week's slow torcherous deaths of 12 West Virginia coal miners trapped and unable to be rescued 2 miles (1300 feet) into the earth ~ should give us pause to reflect on the fact that hard working coal mining families have to risk their lives to give us energy derived from coal which is a dirty, non-renewable and potentially deadly source for energy. We have to come past this archaic way of fueling power that endangers the health and lives of dedicated workers and which is also a component that adds to the pollution of our environment.
Earlier in American history there was little choice. But, today it is different. The senseless loss of life, generation after generation, for coal does not have to go on forever, anymore. The clean, renewable, safe, above-ground energies of wind and solar are readily available to become major fueling sources as soon as we wish to make it so.
My heart goes out to the coal miners in West Virginia and coal miners and their families everywhere.
Limitlessness
.....is when you are, for a short time, in a space and time that feels like endless peace.
You Must Be What You Are Seeking....and You Must Seek To Be What You Understand
I understand transcendence through beauty, love, kindness, limitlessness, and peace.
Opening up to more healthy experiences in the area of transcendence increases the joy in life ~ no matter what our individual paths may be. These simple things can be found anywhere when you plug into them. They happen when you are with nature, and when you are with music, and when you are with the dance of life. Beauty, love, kindness, limitlessness, and peace ~ are found in everything that is in harmony with the flow of life.
By looking in the right direction, all of life has the potential to improve. Let's make the year 2006 the year of transcendence through a whole lot of good things. ~ Patty Ann Smith
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
