Trying to reinstate the ‘94 ban after Sandy Hook attracted 12 fewer votes in the Senate than Feinstein had mustered to renew it in 2004.
See the photo Emmett Till’s mother wanted you to see — the one that inspired a generation to join the civil rights movement
By Jerry Mitchell Mississippi Center For Investigative Reporting
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted the world to see “what they did to my baby.”
His body looked monstrous, as if the 14-year-old had absorbed every blow of hate delivered by his killers — a photograph that ran in Jet magazine and many other African-American publications, but never appeared in the nation’s mainstream publications.
As a result, many Americans have never seen the photograph.
It is time the world did, his family members say.
In his book, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, Juan Williams concluded that decision by Till’s mother “without question … moved black America in a way the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation could not match.”
“It is insane that we let an 18-year old go in and buy an AR-15. What did we think he was going to do with it?!” A furious Beto O’Rourke railing on TX gun laws after interrupting The Texas Governor’s presser.
[Reporting from Garrett Haake.]
AXIOS
Speaking to reporters after publicly confronting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott today, a furious Beto O’Rourke rattled off four “solutions” to the mass shooting epidemic that he said have “broad bipartisan support right now”:
“We could get that done if we had a governor who cared more about the people of Texas than he does his own political career or his fealty to the NRA. And if you need any proof of that, check the schedule for the NRA convention this Friday, right here in the state of Texas.”
— Beto O’Rourke, Democratic candidate for Texas governor
‘When you vote ask yourself, who running for office has publicly stated that they’re willing to do anything & everything to protect your children from the criminally insane # of guns in the U.S.?’ -Stephen Colbert
From Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
“Deeply saddened by the news of the murder of innocent children in Texas. Sincere condolences to the families of the victims, the people of the US and President Biden over this tragedy. The people of Ukraine share the pain of the relatives and friends of the victims and all Americans.”
New York Times front page for Thursday, May 26th.
“And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” — Isaiah 1:15
The front page of Thursday’s Uvalde Leader-News.
~
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen with Krista Tippett from 2005 and posted again in context of the latest mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas.
This is the story of the birthday of the world. In the beginning, there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. Then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident. [laughs] And the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness in the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light. And they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.
Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people; to lift it up and make it visible once again and, thereby, to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times — that we heal the world one heart at a time. This task is called “tikkun olam” in Hebrew, “restoring the world.”
Ms. Tippett:Is there a connection between the story of the sparks and tikkun olam in Jewish tradition? Are they bound together?
Dr. Remen:They’re exactly the same.
Ms. Tippett:I did not know that those two come together.
Dr. Remen:Tikkun olam is the restoration of the world. And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world.
And that story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you.
Dr. Remen:Well, I don’t want to talk politics here. I’m not a person who is a political person in the usual sense of that word. But I think that we all feel that we’re not enough to make a difference; that we need to be more, somehow, either wealthier or more educated or, somehow or other, different than the people we are. And according to this story, we are exactly what’s needed. And to just wonder about that a little, what if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world? I think these kinds of questions are very important questions.
Rachel Naomi Remen is founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), clinical professor of family medicine at UCSF School of Medicine, and professor of family medicine at the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University. Her books Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings have been translated into 24 languages.
We belong to one another and we can do so much better
I dropped my kids off at school today for their last days of kindergarten and 2nd grade. In a couple of hours, I will go back for a little kindergarten promotion ceremony and party for our Stella. She wore a hand-me-down dress with a suit vest over it—her own transcendent definition of “looking fancy.”
Maya is beyond excited because we are having a playdate this afternoon with her two best friends—Layla and Misgana. They have dubbed themselves the MALS and written an original song, choreographed an original dance, and of course, created the requisite secret handshake. This is a layered expression of their devotion for one another, a sentiment I remember so well from being that age and falling madly in love with my friends and the feeling of belonging to a few people.
The 21 people who were murdered yesterday by someone carrying an AK-47 belonged to so many people. The 10 people murdered last Saturday belonged to so many people.
As I oscillate in and out of being able to think and feel this morning, I keep reminding myself: the 19 children murdered yesterday are no less real than my two girls. Their caregivers are no less real than me. Their teachers—two now dead—are no less real than Ms. Galvin and Ms. Price and all the other teachers I have come to respect so much.
If I sit with that—our equal and shared realness—I feel like a Redwood, burned out from the inside, like I’m here, but there is nothing left inside of me that can be solid in the face of that level of real loss. I imagine what it would be like if I were the mother of one of the murdered children. I can only imagine I would be in a coma—spontaneously or by some kind of medical intervention. I know people survive profound loss, and yet, I am incapable of imagining myself opening my eyes ever again if one of my daughter’s was murdered, much less my heart or my mouth.
And then I think of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims—how they did, somehow, manage to open their hearts and mouths again. And how this day must feel to them.
I think of the teachers—the trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma they have been shouldering. The absence and outburst and tears they have been meeting with resilience and unconditional love and an eternal commitment to learning.
I think of the first responders who had to walk into that school and witness those little bodies, into that supermarket and witness those innocent victims. What will they do with those images burned into their minds?
I’ve been trying to do my work this morning, which I can justify has some linkage with building a better world, a better country, but part of me just feels like we should all be lying in the streets right now, refusing to move one more muscle, toast one more waffle, tweet one more tweet, until our kids can expect to live through a day at school and our aunties and uncles to pick up groceries without fearing for their lives.
Some people in this country, as I understand it, are preparing for a kind of war. A race war. Maybe a war for their own sense of superiority in a country with a changing demographic, their sense of control in a season of so little of it, their sense of invincibility when we are all objectively so vulnerable.
I am preparing for a long-awaited after school play date between three girls whose families come from different countries, speak different languages, and yet their love for one another is evident in hand slaps and coordinated spins. I am preparing to hear 25 five-year-olds sing this song, which may, in fact, prove too tender on a day where I am so excruciatingly tender already.
Which is to say, I am preparing for love and care and a fierce resistance to anybody who tries to normalize this level of loss. Death comes for all of us. We have a lot of work to do in acknowledging that vulnerability.
But death by AK-47 need not come for any of us. We have a moral mandate, long neglected, to make that truth undeniable. If it takes donation, walk-out, laying down in the street to make that clear, whatever it takes, I’m there, beside you, tender as hell.
Take care of yourself today. Gather with others. Rely on your rituals or make them up. We belong to each other.
~
And a beautiful letter to our collective compassion from faith healer, author, and documentarian Valerie Kaur.
Oh my loves.
What does it feel like in your body? For me – like a primal scream that won’t stop. When the death toll in Uvalde climbed to 19 children, I knew I had to wash the tears from my face and go downstairs and hug my babies and get them to bed. I wondered: Is the heart big enough to hold this? All this grief. All this rage. All the joy in their faces. My ancestors said: Oh my love, Yes. That is the heart we gave you.
That is the heart they gave us.
If you can’t function, it’s OK. If you can’t feel, it’s OK. If you can’t find your breath, it’s OK. Your breathlessness is not a sign of your weakness; it’s a sign of your bravery. It means that you are awake to what is happening right now: that the violence in our country is getting worse, the hate violence and the gun violence. And that the only way we will survive this – the only way we will change this – is together.
So let’s begin with a breath —
Let it come. Hold for four counts. Let it go.
Here’s why I believe we can change this:
Ten years ago, I worked on the ground in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in response to the horrific white supremacist shooting at a Sikh gurdwara. It was the largest massacre of Sikhs on this soil. I remember looking into the open caskets of people who looked like my family, and feeling like I was going to fall into the abyss. Then the doors of the gym opened, and people started to flood in for the memorial. Thousands of people. They didn’t even know us, but they showed up to grieve with us. You don’t have to know people in order to grieve with them; you grieve with them in order to know them. And because they grieved with us, many stayed to organize with us. And together, we changed federal hate crimes policy within the year.
After months in Oak Creek, my husband and I boarded a plane home to Connecticut. I was relieved to go home and ready for rest. But as soon as the plane touched the ground, my phone blew up with the news: A shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We didn’t go home. We went straight to a church in Newtown to grieve with people we did not know. I had left the site of one mass shooting only to go home to another.
In one massacre, the gunman hated us. In the next, the gunman hated himself. Both men had cut himself themselves off from humanity, others and their own.
This week – the same pattern. The news of Uvalde broke an hour before I was about to speak at an event about solidarity in the wake of Buffalo. Once again, we were all hurled from the site of one mass shooting to another. The gunmen in these shootings weren’t even born when many of us began this work. What do we do with when the violence is generational – and firearms are making killing more efficient?
#1 We need gun safety legislation absolutely. The majority of Americans want background checks. A handful of Senators are holding the nation hostage. But we are not helpless. Other countries have taken dramatic steps to save lives after mass shootings. So can we. Scroll down for immediate actions.
#2 We need to build beloved community where we are. We need a shift in culture and consciousness, block by block, heart to heart. I believe we can make every school, every house, every workplace, every community a place where we where we leave no one outside our circle of care, where we help one another be brave and whole. We can become the medicine that stops violence at its root. We can do this by putting love into practice.
What is your role right now?
GRIEVE: What is the shape of grief in your body? If you feel the primal scream in you, this is the time to make space for healing. Let yourself touch the sorrow, rest and breathe. Don’t isolate. Show up to a healing circle at your school with parents and teachers. Organize one if needed. Go to vigils. Be with people who make you feel safe. Let in softness and love into the places that ache. Make space to just to stop — and feel this together.
RAGE: What is the force of rage in your body? Notice where you are constricted, tense, or numb. Now move that energy – curse, scream, shake, dance, run. Don’t choke down your rage. Or let it fester. Be with people who can honor this rage and process it in safe containers. Your rage carries information – what is it telling you? You have something to fight for. You have a role to play, and no role is too small.
FIGHT: What courageous step are you ready to take? Do not swallow the lie that nothing can be done. You have a sphere of influence. Every choice we make – every word, every action, every encounter – co-creates culture and shapes what happens next. Will you use your voice, your art, your story, your money, your power, your heart?
REIMAGINE: What is the world you want? What does beloved community look like, feel like? We can only live into what we imagine. Protect time and space to dream and dream big. Then take one step toward that dream.
BREATHE: How will you breathe today? This is the work of a lifetime. Our lifetime. Take time to rest, step away from the news, nourish your body and your beloveds. Remember the wisdom of the midwife: Breathe, my love, then push. When joy comes, let it come. In joy, we presage the world to come.
Imagine that one day we look back on this era in our nation’s history with regret that it took so long to save the lives of our children – and relief that we were the ones who finally put an end to the carnage.
I believe that world is possible. Believe with me. Breathe with me – choose one thing above – now push.
In Chardi Kala – even in darkness, ever-rising spirits, -Valarie
Pathos, compassion, and pleas. Please watch, and share.
5.25.2022
Jimmy responds to the tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and talks about 89% of Americans wanting background checks, our cowardly leaders listening to the NRA instead of the people they actually represent, firearms becoming the #1 leading cause of death for American children and teens, Ted Cruz speaking at an NRA event this weekend, the 27 school shootings so far this year in America, and making sure that lawmakers do something about common-sense gun laws. If you can, please support Everytown in their fight against gun violence.https://www.everytown.org/
[8:52]
“To do nothing about this ongoing carnage is a sin.”
-Joe Scarborough
Talk about it, act, in every community, in every state. The politicians, elected, won’t. Have not. Will not. We must.
Background checks.
Gun registration.
Safe storage laws.
Age limits on possessing and buying w e a p o n s o f w a r.
The least, the least, we can do.
And finally, my prayer remains people will override profit in this country for the safety of people and assault weapons will be completely banned, again. Weapons of war should not be on our streets. The ban worked before, it will work again. I b e l i e v e.
To solve humanity’s problems, we need well-functioning brains…eating and living well with kindness and awareness…always compassion…building our brain architecture.
Tending body is tending to the self, and tending to the self is tending community, tending community is tending country.
[On Being]
J
O
Y
“The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
Valerie Kaur
Oh my loves.
“They’re going to keep killing us.” This was my first thought after the news broke about the shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo. Terror and fatigue.
I’ve organized around white supremacist hate for 21 years, since before this gunman was born. The killings have become more frequent, more effective, and more efficient at taking life. I got the news while working on a memorial video on the white supremacist mass shooting in Oak Creek 10 years ago, revisiting all that pain. How to feel fresh grief when we are already in grief? How does the heart expand, instead of shut down?
Revolutionary love is the choice to labor for others, opponents, and ourselves. What is your role right now?
Will you focus on others? Grieve with Black people, show up to local vigils and gatherings, listen to the stories, fight for anti-racist policies, build new relationships of solidarity. Do one thing in your sphere of influence — your school, workplace, house of worship, or home — to stand in love.
Will you focus on opponents? The gunman cited “replacement theory” in his manifesto, a theory that nearly one in three Americans believe. Reach out to the colleagues, neighbors, relatives in your life who subscribe to this dangerous and racist belief. Open a channel for deep listening, share stories, stop the spread of misinformation.
Will you focus on your body and your people? If you can feel how this shooting touches trauma in yourself and in people you love, this is the time to make space for healing. Grieve and rage, wail and scream, rest and breathe. Be with people who make you feel safe. Let in softness and love into the places that ache. Together, we survive this.{And what is yet inevitably to come. -dayle}
[1,000,000 + have died from COVID. 1 in 3 U.S. citizens believe the plague has ended. It has not.]
More from Valerie:
Where do you notice feeling grief in your body? What is the quality of that grief? What is the shape of grief inside of you? If it feels uncomfortable, take another deep breath and stay with it. Breathe through it.
What does your body need to be brave with this grief? What do you need to feel it and to move through this energy? What rituals are you called to? Who do you need by your side.
Who have you not yet grieved with? Whose story have you not fully let into your heart? What community’s struggle have you not fully taken in? Notice what is happening in your body. If your fists tighten, or your heart beats fast, or if shame rises to your face, it’s okay. Breathe through it. Trust that you can. The heart is a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.
What do you need to do to be able to grieve with them? What vigils or marches need you? What houses of worship are you ready to visit? What phone call are you ready to make? You can begin where you are, with a simple text or email, saying to someone “I’m here for you.”
“Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. And so I invite you to honor your grief: it’s a sign of how deeply you have loved.”
-Valerie
Community, then country.
Coronado Times
Meet Brian Trotier
Triangle Project, located in the East Village of San Diego, just across the bay.
“The Triangle Project is a pilot program created to help improve the lives of unhoused people. Brian has been helping out in this area for about fifteen years and has developed relationships with many of the residents. A huge issue has been the trash in the area. The residents, mainly living in tents, don’t have a place to dispose of their trash which is unsightly, unsanitary, and demoralizing for them. Richard Aaron Horton, 64, a longtime resident, started improving the area by picking up trash. Brian Trotier knows Richard well and has expanded the effort by securing funding from the Lucky Duck Foundation. This local foundation focuses on the homeless and has contracted with EDCO for a dumpster to collect the trash.
The concept is simple, and the results so far have been amazing. Brian reported that, as of last week, the Triangle Project had collected in the previous 20 days, 3,794 bags of trash weighing a total of 23.89 tons. It is likely that much of this, including plastic, would have found its way into our bay and ocean. Here is how it works: every Monday and Thursday, EDCO drops off a dumpster at 8 am. Brian brings bags, gloves, and a stack of cash. Volunteers walk around the area greeting residents and asking if they’d like trash bags. For almost all, the answer is an enthusiastic “yes!” Residents get to work cleaning up their neighborhood. For every full bag of trash they bring to the dumpster, Brian gives them $2. The roughly two-block area goes from being very littered to being very clean within an hour.”
“riangle Project’s results are about double what Brian and Lucky Duck projected, and the benefits have gone far beyond a cleaner neighborhood (and bay). Residents express appreciation for being seen; they get along better with each other. “They have a common enemy—trash,” Brian acknowledged.”
“Keeping the Earth clean. That’s what’s happening in the long run. It’s a domino effect.”
My Carbon Footprint: the rise of the nearly new by, Kate Hughes
“So often, being more eco is inaccurately pinned to greater cost, when actually – especially when it comes to everyday buying decisions – the opposite is true.
This widespread, if subtle shift in the way we shop, including the disintegration of the stigma around nearly new, vintage, and preloved may well have some relationship with the climate crisis but make no mistake, this is largely financially led.
What I love about second-hand too, is that it doesn’t preclude us from layering up further planet and cash-saving approaches.
When the old boy on our street moved into a retirement flat the neighbours bought his lawnmower off him. There’s now one lawnmower between five households, saving space, cash and helping maintain and develop lines of local communication and a sense of community.
More than four in 10 of us gave goods away for free locally in the first few months of the year, while half donated products to charity and more than a third even made financial donations despite experiencing hardship.
Free stuff – everything from haircuts to sofas are also on the rise, the site reports.
So go forth and embrace the charity shop, the quirky apps, the leviathan websites.”
HuffPost
Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho
A radical GOP faction, in open alliance with extremists, is seizing power and targeting its opponents with cruelty.
Some wonder: Is it time to leave? (Yes. It is.)
Jennifer Ellis, photographed in her home on April 3, 2022, created Take Back Idaho to push back against the right-wing, extremist views and tactics that have dominated the state’s politics.
‘A lot has been written about both the radicalization of the Republican Party and the decline of democracy in the U.S. — about the country being at a precipice. It’s maybe easy for those warnings to become background noise, or to dismiss them as doom-mongering pieces of clickbait. But in Idaho, the nightmare scenario is crossing into reality, as an authoritarian GOP sets about to create a whiter, Christian nation.
These MAGA radicals have gestured at the future they want: no rape and incest exceptions to Idaho’s abortion ban; no emergency contraception; no gender-affirming health care for minors; the banning of books; the jailing of librarians; and maybe no public education altogether.
I recently spent a week traveling across the state, from Sandpoint in the northern panhandle down through the green slopes and whitewater of Hell’s Canyon to the plains of Ada County, and then across lava rock and sagebrush to Blackfoot. In all these places, Democrats and more moderate Republicans view Tuesday’s primaries as an existential affair. Some are considering leaving the state if MAGA extremists consolidate more power. Others are digging in their heels.
The people I talked to were not all that accustomed to alarmism, which made it striking to hear some of their voices tremble when they talked about what’s happening to their home. Their message for the rest of the country? It’s gonna get bad. The GOP really will go that far.
“They have completely rebranded what it is to be a conservative here in north Idaho, and they have literally excommunicated and cleaned house of any rational, regular conservative from their ranks.”
– Shawn Keenan, local Democratic activist
“As much as I want to point to examples of their adverse impact on the legislative process — and there’s many things to point to — part of me, the social scientist in me, the military veteran in me, wants to, you know, not just hate the player, but hate the game,” said Mathias, who served in the Coast Guard and has a Ph.D. in public policy.
A grading system like the Freedom Index makes the often inscrutable process of legislating more accessible to voters, Mathias said, and the IFF is an outrageous arbiter.
Mathias is intimately familiar with the group. Last spring, he watched state Rep. Ron Nate (FI Score: 97%) and other far-right legislators manufacture a racist moral panic about Boise State University indoctrinating students with “critical race theory.” (It was not.) Nate, using talking points lifted from an IFF white paper, argued for cutting part of the school’s budget.
Mathias says he typically likes to “keep his powder dry” in the statehouse — Democrats are such a minority there, it’s not worth the fuss to debate every proposal — but in this case, both as the only Black man in the legislature and as a Boise State alumni, he felt compelled to speak.
Going to Boise State on the GI Bill, he told his colleagues in a speech on the House floor, pausing to fight back his emotions, “provided opportunities I’d never seen in my life. It changed my life.”
Critical race theory, he continued, simply recognizes that there are institutional biases — in “housing, health, education, wealth, income,” Mathias said — that have existed since our country was founded. “People of color always come out on the losing end,” he added, his voice breaking. “Always. And I don’t think it’s unfair to acknowledge it.”
Across Idaho, the far right has laid siege to nonpartisan positions, some of which require specific expertise, and made them partisan, installing loyalists with sometimes disastrous results.
A recent Vanity Fair piece, for example, profiled members of the national neoreactionary movement, acolytes of a philosopher named Curtis Yarvin, who is a close ally of billionaire Peter Thiel. This movement, which has buy-in from powerful GOP figures, is explicit about wanting to usher in the end of democracy by purging the current government of its enemies and establishing one-party control — or, put another way, authoritarianism.
J.D. Vance — the venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who recently won the Ohio Republican primary for U.S. Senate — is a follower of Yarvin’s. He positively likened this prospective purge to the deadly “de-Baathification of Iraq.”
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” Vance told Vanity Fair. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Vance and Trump might look to north Idaho for inspiration.
‘For never was a horror experienced without an angel stepping in from the opposite direction to witness it with me.’
-Rilke
This is an incredible time where the opportunity to bring in miracles and magic is strong.
Power comes from spirit and your essence and is fed and supported by the elements and energies more powerful than you such as the sun, the earth, nature, the stars, your imagination etc. You can be empowered or allow yourself to be disempowered through a trauma, karma or lessons, but another person cannot truly give or take away your power as they cannot ever truly give you any.
We have a tremendous opportunity to move through this and access the amazing landscape of love.
-Power Path
Krista Tippett reflecting on her time with poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver.
Life had moved forward, as it does. It was now composed of ingredients, as it always is, that neither she nor I would have been able to imagine.
‘We’re in yet another moment in the life of the world where we might unsee the beauty or imagine it overshadowed, defeated, or simply less powerful than what would steal it from us, blot it out. What a gift to re-summon Mary Oliver’s presence for this time. I hope you feel that, too.”
‘Our fears offer us an invitation to engage with the discomfort of the inner places. Will you give your fear a chance to speak to you?
Ask, What is this trying to show me? or What else might be going on? Give yourself some time, and delve into the fear.’
Catastrophization
And it’s exhausting. Catastrophe fatigue sets in, and we end up losing interest and drifting away, until the next emergency arrives.
Catastrophization ends up distracting us from the long-term systemic work we signed up to do. It’s a signal that we care about what’s happening right now, but it also keeps us from focusing on what’s going to happen soon.
The best way to care is to persist in bending the culture and our systems to improve things over time.
‘Now I’m wondering: is there a way to disentangle the story from the information? Yes, we need to take care of ourselves and each other. Yes, we need to stay aware and intentional, particularly considering the most vulnerable among us. But is there a way to do it with less ego and more observing tenderness?
It turns out, the interpretation of life is relentless. The suspension of interpretation, while brief and groundless, can be a sweet relief. I want less ego-building exercises and more compassion experiments in my life moving forward. I want less roller coasters and more clouds. I want less fear and more love’ -Courtney Martin
Courtney E. Martin is an American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist.
Thich
Nhat
Hahn
The Four Elements of Right Speech
‘Loving, truthful speech can bring a lot of joy and peace to people. But producing loving speech takes practice because we aren’t used to it. When we hear so much speech that causes craving, insecurity, and anger, we get accustomed to speaking that way. Truthful, loving speech is something we need to train ourselves in.
In Buddhism there’s a practice called the Ten Bodhisattva Trainings. Four of these 10 relate to Right Speech. A bodhisattva is an enlightened being who has dedicated his or her life to alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
A bodhisattva is someone who can speak with gentle, loving speech and who can listen with compassion.
The four bodhisattva guidelines of the Ten Bodhisattva Trainings for Right Speech:
Tell the truth. Don’t lie or turn truth upside down.
Don’t exaggerate.
Be consistent. This means no double-talk: speaking about something in one way to one person and in an opposite way to another for selfish or manipulative reasons.
Use peaceful language. Don’t use insulting or violent words, cruel speech, verbal abuse, or condemnation.
When we don’t, repercussions are brutal and, sometimes, irreparable. -dayle
‘Our suffering has been trying to communicate with us, to let us know it is there, but we have spent a lot of time and energy ignoring it.
We know that the suffering inside us contains the suffering of our fathers, our mothers, and our ancestors.
Our suffering reflects the suffering of the world. Discrimination, exploitation, poverty, and fear cause a lot of suffering in those around us. Our suffering also reflects the suffering of others.
If we understand our own suffering it will become much easier for us to understand the suffering of others and the of the world.
But unless we can listen to and acknowledge our own suffering, we will not really be able to help.’
On Being.
Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, Brother Thay
‘The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, revered Zen master, teacher, and poet, died on January 22, 2022, in his native Vietnam. Brother Thay, as he was known by his community and students, transmuted what he had experienced of chaos and bloodshed in his country and his life into an ability to speak with equal measures directness and compassion to the many conflicts and bewilderments of contemporary life. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a great teacher of the wonderful practice of “walking meditation.” He taught a way of living to face suffering, fear, and violence inside and beyond ourselves and yet to become “fresh, solid, and free.” Krista sat with him for this rare conversation in the early years of this show, and it has touched many. It is astonishing to re-experience the deep, enduring wisdom this monk leaves for our world now.”
“We are apparently swimming in a reality unfolding moment by moment. The truly good news is that we are together. . . all forms of us.” -Pari Center, Italy, participant
Krista Tippett:
“We are living in a post 2020 world…for the rest of our lives.”
“…got me thinking back to a conversation I once had with Krista Tippett, the brilliant host of On Being. And so today, on Billionaire Space Day No. 2, I share with you this brief reflection about the background ethos of the age…”
July 21, 1969, New York, New York: Rain-soaked New Yorkers watch TV and cheer as they see Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first step on the lunar surface (Getty)
The.Ink
What we do alone and what we do together
On the billionaire space race
This is a story, in some ways, about two rival faiths. A faith in what we do alone versus a faith in what we do together.
These are two parallel and rival spiritual orientations. They are both very strong parts of our culture.
One tradition inspires the celebration of a heroic soloist, capitalist, pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps story.
But that’s never been the only story. We’ve also always had this story of movements. It wasn’t individuals who got rid of the King of England. The most important things we’ve done in this culture have been together.
These two tendencies, what we do alone and what we do together, have always vied for primacy in American life. For much of the 20th century, they lived in a certain healthy tension. And right now the relationship between them is very unhealthy. It’s become a relationship of mutual annihilation, instead of a relationship of adversarial cooperation.
I think we need to get back to a place where we understand both and celebrate both the very real heritage we have in this country of doing things alone and of doing things together, and the relationship that those things have.
Because at our best, we do things together in a way that allows people to do things alone. And people do things alone in a way that creates the opportunities to do things together. These things don’t have to be at war with each other, but they are absolutely at war today.
__
2018:
“This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win” — and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us.’
We Americans revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win” — and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us.” -On Being
One of the goals that is emphasized in our culture is finding answers—solving problems, answering questions, removing doubt. We want to know who, what, when, where, and why—and we want to know now. When we listen, we are trained to listen for the answers. . . .
Reflective listening distinguishes a response from an answer. It is a practice to get to know your inner voice, and it takes time and patience.
“Not knowing what to do is the work for you now.” -Francesca
Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
‘What a world you’ve got inside you.’
A new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has been released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before. In ten letters to a young person in 1903, Rilke touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives — prophetic musings about solitude and relationship, humanity and the natural world, even gender and human wholeness. And what a joy it is to delve into Rilke’s voice, freshly rendered, with the translators. Krista, Anita and Joanna have communed with Rainer Maria Rilke across time and space and their conversation is infused with friendship as much as ideas.
The conversation between both of these writers is one that starts in the artistry of their work and includes questions about the imagination, and power, and about what constitutes liberative transformation. And the scope of history they focus on is wide: “These threats we live subject to… are the grotesque and perverse ends to which a nation founded in shame has gone in order to avoid atoning for its crimes.”
The conversation between both of these writers is one that starts in the artistry of their work and includes questions about the imagination, and power, and about what constitutes liberative transformation. And the scope of history they focus on is wide: “These threats we live subject to… are the grotesque and perverse ends to which a nation founded in shame has gone in order to avoid atoning for its crimes.” -Pádraig Ó Tuama
It wasn’t until I saw an episode from The Watchmen that I learned of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. A dysfunctional childhood took me to 16 schools in nine years, and not one teacher, not one, taught this history. -dayle
For events in Tulsa, Oklahoma beginning on May 31st follow the link for more information and to join virtually.
Greenwood.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will leverage the rich history surrounding the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by facilitating actions, activities, and events that commemorate and educate all citizens.
“The projects of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will educate Oklahomans and Americans about the Race Massacre and its impact on the state and Nation; remember its victims and survivors; and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa generally.”
“Join us for the official unveiling of Greenwood Rising: The Black Wall Street History Center at 11:29 a.m.”
Jun 2, 2021
Stacey Abrams Announced as Keynote Speaker for Nationally Televised Commemoration
“Local Tulsa company, ONE Gas, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in historic Greenwood District through the ONE Gas Foundation. This donation will create a long-lasting generational impact in the Tulsa community, and we could not be more grateful.”
The Tulsa Tribune inflamed the massacre and then wrote a scathing editorial in the days that followed. -dayle
#journalism
#media
Black Wall Street 100 and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
‘On May 25th, The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho and the Idaho Humanities Council welcomed Hannibal B. Johnson, author of “Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples With Its Historical Racial Trauma,” for a virtual conversation about the history and continuing implications of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Johnson was in conversation with David Pettyjohn, executive director of the Idaho Humanities Council, and Jenny Emery Davidson, executive director of The Community Library. The discussion can be viewed at the link.’ [1:05:00]
“Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with its Historical Racial Trauma, endorsed by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and the 400 Years of African American History Commission, furthers the educational mission of both bodies. The book offers updates on developments in Tulsa generally and in Tulsa’s Greenwood District specifically since the publication of Hannibal B. Johnson’s, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District.
Black Wall Street 100 is a window into what distinguishes the Tulsa of today from the Tulsa of a century ago. Before peering through that porthole, we must first reflect on Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District in all its splendor and squalor, from the prodigious entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded it to the carnage that characterized the 1921 massacre to the post-massacre rebound and rebuilding that raised the District to new heights to the mid-twentieth-century decline that proved to be a second near-fatal blow to the current recalibration and rebranding of a resurgent, but differently configured, community.
Tulsa’s trajectory may be instructive for other communities similarly seeking to address their own histories of racial trauma. Conversely, Tulsa may benefit from learning more about the paths taken by other communities. Through sharing and synergy, we stand a better chance of doing the work necessary to spur healing and move farther toward the reconciliation of which we so often speak.” [Amazon]
Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality most of us long to inhabit.
Host Krista Tippett:
‘Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds, with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, I return again and again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up Resmaa’s intelligence anew on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality I believe most of us long to inhabit.’
‘Ever after, when I use the word “we” or “us,” I understand in a whole new way that I do so in a White body … I hold that knowledge together with my clarity that when time becomes history, the generations for whom we are the ancestors will see an “us.”’
‘…enough of us are preparing to be the generation, in bodies of every color, after so many generations of betrayal & blindness, to step onto that long arc of the moral universe—bending it towards justice & the Beloved Community.”
Menakem:
‘When we’re talking about trauma, when we’re talking about historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, persistent institutional trauma — and personal traumas, whether that be childhood, adolescence, or adulthood — those things, when they are left constricted, you begin to be shaped around the constriction. And it is wordless. Time decontextualizes trauma. So when my grandmother is saying that, I need to pay attention to that. And for her, it’s decontextualized, so she doesn’t even have a context for it.
Bodies of culture. That’s right. And so one of the things that happens with the vagal nerve — there’s two. There’s the vagal nerve — I call that the soul nerve — and then there’s a muscle, the psoas muscle. That psoas is a beast, because the psoas, what it does is, it connects the top part of the body with the bottom part of the body. It also — if you’re braced, it also manages whether or not you mobilize or immobilize. And if you’re born to people who are already braced, you pick up in your psoas this kind of locking down, this kind of bracing, decontextualized.
And so what I’ve been talking to people about is, how do we begin to get the reps in with those pieces? So you’re gonna need time to condition your body to be able to deal with the aches, deal with the doubt, deal with all of that difficulty. You’re gonna have to get up against your own suffering’s edge, before the transformation happens. But you need to condition that. Why do we think that when we talk about race, that’s any different — for me to say, “We’re gonna have a white body supremacy talk; deal with the root of this stuff”?’
And then, listen to Krista Tippett’s conversation with clinical psychologist Christine Runyan.
Runyan is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is a certified mindfulness teacher. She co-founded and co-leadsTend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of health care practitioners.
The light at the end of the COVID tunnel is tenuously appearing — yet many of us feel as exhausted as at any time in the past year. Memory problems; short fuses; fractured productivity; sudden drops into despair. We’re at once excited and unnerved by the prospect of life opening up again. Clinical psychologist Christine Runyan explains the physiological effects of a year of pandemic and social isolation — what’s happened at the level of stress response and nervous system, the literal mind-body connection. And she offers simple strategies to regain our fullest capacities for the world ahead.
This conversation is so practically helpful for understanding what’s been happening at a creaturely level inside us for over a year, and for gaining some simple strategies to bring our conscious selves back online, mustering the fullest capacities innate within us for meeting the world ahead.
Viktor Frankl, and he says, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose. And in our choice lies our growth and our freedom.”
In regard to the work Runyan does with health care workers and Tend Health:
“No amount of sophisticated technology can do what health professionals have done these past few months — offered care with uncertain evidence, sat with the dying, comforted family members from afar, held one another in fear and grief, celebrated unexpected recoveries, and simply showed up. We have asked and expected clinicians to show up in ways they were never trained to do. No one has been trained in how to emotionally manage months of mass casualties. No one has been trained on how to keep showing up despite feeling feckless on the job. No one has been trained how to keep regular life afloat at home and anxiety at bay, while working day after day with a little known biohazard.”
We are pretty conditioned to turn away from discomfort and suffering in our society. We are not very good at allowing for grief, which is always on its own timeline, and it’s unpredictable in its own right. And this is a tough one, because it’s not a pinpoint experience. I don’t know what it looks like to have a day of remembering or some sort of ritual around — because we’re still in it, is the other thing. We’re trying to grieve a trauma that is still ongoing. And I don’t have the answer to how to do that, other than one breath at a time — because it’s still here.
I’ve been thinking this week about vocation — from the Latin vocare, callings. Somewhere along the way in this culture a person’s vocation became synonymous with their job title, but I think of vocation as the full range of our callings as human beings. Yes, as professional people but also as family members and neighbors, parents and friends, and members of a body politic. Vocation is not so much about goals and accomplishments. It’s about how we orient our lives and our attention and our passions. At different stages in life, different callings emerge and take primacy — what we focus on and pay homage to with our presence, and what we fight for from the ground of what we love.
To pick up the question of what is calling me and you is one way to begin to walk, each with our own offering, towards a new kind of wholeness in our life together. For there are callings in a time as in a life.
Some of us — many of us — are called right now primarily to get safe and fed and warm, to keep those we love safe and fed and warm. Some of us are called to place our bodies between other bodies and danger. Some of us are called to be bridge people, staking out the vast ground at the heart of our life together where there is meaningful difference but no desire for animosity.
And some of us are called to be calmers of fear. This calling is so tender, and so urgent, if what we truly want is to coax our own best selves, and the best selves of others, into the light. Fear is the primitive, powerful place our brains go when they perceive threat. It collapses imagination, closing down a sense of the possible. It looks for an “other” to blame, and it finds one. The anger that has consumed our life together on every side is fueled by pain and fear.
This is an uncomfortable truth to take in, a fact not about life as we wish it to be but about life as it is. One of the most painful things for me to watch in the frenzy of our life together in recent years was the loss of any capacity to remember that essential contradictions run wild in each of us and are real, too, in whoever our “others” have become. There is a terrible but also a beautiful, and potentially redemptive, complexity at play whenever human beings are involved.
I wonder if now, more of us who are safe enough might feel ourselves called — to invoke Bryan Stevenson — to walk towards the reality that those who confuse and vex us are more than the worst thing we believe they are or have done. We might be called — to invoke an image Frances Kissling once gave me that has shaped my sense of calling ever since — to populate and build up “that crack in the middle where people on both sides absolutely refuse to see each other as evil.” We spend so much time and energy in this culture, so much fierce creativity, wishing to change other people’s minds. But in life as it is lived, we know that’s not how it works. Hearts soften, and then minds open. Pragmatic possibilities appear that our bodies and brains literally could not fathom before.
The show we’re offering up this week is another kind of nod to our complexity — and to how hard a time we continue to inhabit. Even as I write this with passion I feel my body clenching, exhausted by the idea of greater callings. On some level, I’m just trying to get through the days. Katherine May, who I learned about when I asked people on Twitter what was helping them get through their days, reminds me that heeding my clenching and exhaustion is also part of the way forward. She meditatively explores “wintering” as a season of the natural world but also as a place our bodies and psyches need to go, a season that recurs again and again across a life. We cheat and dismiss this in life as we’ve been living it, but it has presented itself insistently in a pandemic year we might reimagine as one long communal wintering.
We can’t move forward without grieving all we’ve lost in the past year. Closer to the ground, this means we have to let in the fact of sadness — a precursor to pain and fear — with some reverence. If happiness is a skill, Katherine May says, so is unhappiness. Winter embodies the strange complexity of reality. It is the bitterest season, we blithely say. And all the while it manages not to be the death of the life cycle, as Katherine May reminds, but its crucible.
Katherine May helps me, and I hope she offers some restorative grace to you.
Krista
Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes, Center for Action & Contemplation:
…the American dream of freedom and equality could be made real through courageous action in a spirit of love, in pursuit of human dignity for all. This dignity includes all who suffer from homelessness, joblessness, purposelessness, carelessness, hopelessness.
Because our needs are so great today, and your care so constant, we know that you are rebuilding the network of compassion around new visionaries who you have assembled for this hour. Surprise us with the discovery of how much power we have to make a difference in our day:
—A difference in the way citizens meet, greet, respect, and protect the rights of each other.
—A difference in the breadth of our vision of what is possible in humanization, reconciliation, and equalization of results in our great city.
—A difference in the way government, business, and labor can work together, for justice and social enrichment.’
Washington National Cathedral is hosting a new art exhibit showcasing thousands of paper doves suspended from the Cathedral’s vaulted, 100-foot-high ceiling through May 2021. The “Les Colombes” exhibit is by German artist Michael Pendry, who has created similar works at Cathedrals around the world, and symbolizes the Biblical theme of hope and optimism heading into the new year after a very challenging 2020.
Every moment and every event of every woman’s life on earth plants something in her soul. -Thomas Merton [changes to gender, mine.]
More from Merton:
Prayer is freedom and affirmation growing out of nothingness into love. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit and of the divine love. Prayer is an emergence into this area of infinite freedom.
~
Keep your eyes clean your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe Gaia’s air. Work, if you can, under her sky.
Dear Friends,
I’ve always called myself a lover of language and of the limits of language. But this week I take no pleasure in how tongue-tied I feel, standing before the disarray and fragility of our life together. It’s hard to put words out into the world right now for so many reasons. That they’re not big enough. That they never tell the whole truth. That we live in a moment so on edge and reactive that someone will take offense, or be wounded by my words, and that feels harder than ever before to risk and to bear.
There is an insanity to our life together right now that is directly related to the tenuous hold on sanity so many of us feel after surviving this past year.
That does not justify hatred or violence.
It does mean that we’re called to be as gentle with ourselves and others as we can possibly, reasonably muster. That sounds like such a modest contribution to the tumult all around and on our screens, but it is not.
I keep coming back in memory, and feeling in my body, to my experience of election night 2020. I observed it as someone who sees our political life together as a reflection of the human condition in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess. But I was also watching as a person who grew up in one of the “reddest” states, who now lives in one of the “bluest.” I felt a panicked sadness — this has remained my primary emotion through everything that has followed — as the cameras zoomed in and out on those maps of our country.
I saw visually what I know in life as it is lived: those maps marked up with definitive reds and blues don’t tell the truth of our alienation and its unsustainable intimacy. The fractures that actually define our nation right now do not run state to state or county to county, but neighborhood to neighborhood, family to family. They run through our dreams for our children on every side. They run through our hearts, and through our lives.
I am so grateful to have received, as I was struggling to write this, an email from Whitney Kimball Coe of the Rural Assembly and the Center for Rural Strategies. There is a whole epic story of our time in what is being gathered and created in the world she’s part of. It is in no way described or contained in a red-blue demographic lens of the “urban-rural divide.” She gave me permission to share this part of her email with you:
“I’m at home nursing my youngest, Susannah, who had a scary fall on Monday night and is now recuperating from surgery. She’s going to be fine, but my goodness, 2021 came in hard. Stream of consciousness moment:You know, our hospital experience put us directly in the path of so many wonderful East Tennesseans. Nurses and technicians and doctors, the other parents waiting in the ER, the parking attendant, the security guard. I’m sure many of them didn’t vote as I did in the last election and probably believe the events of Jan 6 were mere protests, but they responded to our trauma with their full humanity. I’d forgotten what it feels like to really see people beyond their tribe/ideology. It broke something open in me. I’ve been living in a castle of isolation these many months and it’s rotted and blotted my insides. I’m aware of contempt, anger, and maybe even paranoia coursing through my veins, and I wonder if that’s just a snippet of where we are as a nation.
Why is our righteous indignation and disgust so much easier to flame than our compassion?
It makes me realize that there is no substitute for coming into the presence of one another. No meme nor Twitter post nor op-ed nor breaking news nor TED talk can soften and strengthen our hearts like actually tending to one another. We don’t have to ignore/excuse the darkness we all carry, but we have to keep showing up so we don’t lose ourselves to bitterness.”
We cannot conjure up something so aspirational as “unity” by wishing it, and we are in fact impoverished when it comes to “common ground” between our societal trenches.
But if I’ve heard one thing most insistently, with an infinite variety of circumstance and struggle, from absolutely every beautiful and wise human I’ve ever met, it is this: We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us. Yet only if we open to the fullness of the reality of what goes wrong for us, and walk ourselves with and through it, are we able to integrate it into a new kind of wholeness on the other side.
Our collective need for a new kind of wholeness might be the only aspiration we can share across all of our chasms right now.
Longings, too, can be common ground. A shared desire not to be lost to bitterness. A clear-eyed commitment that what divides us now does not have to define what can become possible between us. Questions, honestly asked, about how to make that real.
-Krista
[Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, a New York Times bestselling author, and founder of On Being.]
‘This was the road which Xerxes took, and it was hereabouts that he came across
a plane-tree of
such beauty that he was moved
to decorate it
with golden ornaments and
to appoint a guardian for it
in perpetuity.’
~Herodotus, The Histories
440 BC
We know poetry to be a critical pillar of public life. It rises up when official language fails us. And it gives voice to what is human and what is true, how we connect and what questions we hold.
Poetry has moved to the heart of what we offer on the radio and in podcasts, which is why we’re excited to have partnered with talented illustrators, animators, and directors to reimagine poetry in visual, dynamic ways.
“This is what was bequeathed us” by Gregory Orr is part of our “Visualizing Poetry” series, which features animated interpretations of beloved poems from our archive.
This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Gregorry Orr, “Shaping Grief With Language.”
A celebrated moral thinker and renowned Judaic intellect, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last week at 72 from cancer.
“The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of other—in that sharing of vulnerabilities, discovering a genesis of hope.”
When Krista Tippett, On Being, spoke with Lord Sacks in 2010, he modeled a life-giving, imagination-opening faithfulness to what some might see as contradictory callings: How to be true to one’s own convictions while also honoring the sacred and civilizational calling to shared life — indeed, to love the stranger?
Krista: You’ve made a statement. I think it’s audacious: “The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities, discovering a genesis of hope.” Now as someone who conducts conversation for a living, I love that statement. I wonder how you know that to be true — that the antidote to violence is conversation.
Lord Sacks: Listening gives each of the two parties the feeling that they are heard, and once they’re heard, they can then begin to speak what they really feel. And then they can begin to realize that there are things they still care about in common.
Sometimes I think what would happen if we generated real conversations at the grassroots level between the people whose lives are really affected?
The real conflicts arise when our minds are focused on the past.
I think God is setting us a big challenge, a really big challenge. We are living so close to difference with such powers of destruction that he’s really giving us very little choice. You know, to quote that great line from W.H. Auden, “We must love one another or die.”
So I am full of hope as we face the greatest challenge humanity ever has.
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
-Ruth Bader Ginsburg
When I look back on this year of upheaval I am comforted by so few things. If there has ever been a “one step at a time” year for me… it’s this one. One step at a time in the face of adversity, pandemic, inequity, climate disaster. My heart wants to make quantum leaps toward justice and wellness but my head knows that real change requires one step at a time… every day.
The change you make in the life of your communities is REAL.
We have no idea what this season of autumn will be like, but judging from what has preceded it, it won’t be for the faint of heart. Take heart in your service, your best intentions, and your hard work. It’s one way to honor the epic legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it would probably to help her rest in peace.
Sally Kane, CEO
National Federation of Community Broadcasters
“…the term “white body supremacy” —I’m operationalizing it. The white body is used to hearing things that make it comfortable. And so when you say something like ‘white supremacy’ especially here in Minnesota, everybody goes, “Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.’ And then what happens is, it goes — just the term, “white supremacy,” is a very intellectual term. It doesn’t land in the body.
-Resmaa Menakem, therapist and trauma specialist in Minneapolis who teaches across the U.S.
For all its presumed innocence, this way of life lived by well-off North Americans is both unjust to those who cannot attain this lifestyle and destructive of the very planet that supports us all.
—Sallie McFague
Sallie McFague was an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how we may speak about God. She applied this approach in particular to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the earth as if it were God’s “body.”
‘In this award-winning text, theologian Sallie McFague challenges Christians’ usual speech about God as a kind of monarch. She probes instead three other possible metaphors for God as mother, lover, and friend.’
Center for Action & Contemplation
While we may continue to practice physical distancing from other humans, most of us can still safely spend time in nature. The Journal of Health Psychology confirms what Franciscans and mystics have long known: interacting with nature is a great stress reliever. Just thirty minutes of gardening lowers the cortisol released during stress-induced fight-or-flight responses. Today’s practice, written by poet, writer, and educator Trevien Stanger for the book Order of the Sacred Earth, invites us to make a very specific contemplative contribution by planting trees.
Ethnobotanist, author, and Potawatami elder Robin Kimmerer asserts, “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of [the] earth’s beings.” [1] . . .
I contend that every individual can participate in [the] Great Turning, and that one of the great challenges of our time is for each of us to figure out how and where we plug into this psycho-spiritual current. . . . I, for one, plant trees. . . . In my more recent work as an environmental studies professor at a community college in Vermont, I’ve had a hand in planting just shy of 100,000 trees over the past 12 years. . . .
What happens when you plant a tree? What happens when you wield a shovel in one hand (a human artifact) and a tree (a provisional mystery) in the other? What happens when you dig a hole (a Kali-like destruction) and plant a tree within it (an act of creativity)? What happens when you learn about your local ecology not just as an observer, but also as a participant? What happens when you embrace the wildness of a tree-being and integrate it into the semi-wild streets and streams of your local community? What happens when you crack open your isolated sense of self and plant within your heart this symbol of our ever-branching inter-being? What happens when you consider your actions in terms of your ecological and cultural legacy? What happens when you move beyond your concerns of today and inquire as to what type of ancestor you will be? Nelson Henderson posits that “. . . one true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” [2] Under whose shade do you sit beneath today? Whose shade shall you help gift for tomorrow?
Trevien Stanger, “Tree Planter,” Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action, Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug (Monkfish Book Publishing Company: 2018), 184-186.
Image credit: Legend of St. Francis: 15. Sermon to the Birds (fresco detail), artist unknown, formerly attributed to Giotto di Bondone, c. 1297–1299, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d′Assisi, Assisi, Italy.
“In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.” — Dave Hollis
“Put humanity and earth at the center.” — Jacqueline Novogratz
@onbeing
?
‘I want future generations to say, ‘Look how hard they tried,’ not ‘Look at how blind they were.’
From Father Richard Rohr, Barbara Holmes, and Bill McKibbon:
Goodness is a first principle of the universe. God declares it on the first page of the story of creation. —Barbara Holmes
Creation is the first Bible, as I (and others) like to say [1], and it existed for 13.7 billion years before the second Bible was written. Natural things like animals, plants, rocks, and clouds give glory to God just by being themselves, just what God created them to be. It is only we humans who have been given the free will to choose not to be what God created us to be. Surprisingly, the environmentalist and author Bill McKibben finds hope in this unique freedom. He writes:
The most curious of all . . . lives are the human ones, because we can destroy, but also because we can decide not to destroy. The turtle does what she does, and magnificently. She can’t not do it, though, any more than the beaver can decide to take a break from building dams or the bee from making honey. But if the bird’s special gift is flight, ours is the possibility of restraint.
We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.
So, yes, we can wreck the Earth as we’ve known it, killing vast numbers of ourselves and wiping out entire swaths of other life—in fact . . . we’re doing that right now. But we can also not do that. . . .
We have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless, and we have the fundamental idea of human solidarity that we could take as our guide. . . .
While the lives of our elders, our vulnerable, and essential workers are at stake during the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of millions of us across the globe have been restraining ourselves at home, choosing not to do many things for many weeks in order to protect those we love (and those others love as well). Surely the earth is breathing a sigh of relief for our reduction in pollution and fossil fuel use. This “Great Pause,” as some are calling it, gives me hope that we will soon find it within ourselves to protect our shared home, not only for our own sake, but for our neighbors across the globe, and future generations.
Democracy
How is a huge part of the world organised under a system that has different meanings country-to-country, and could even mean something different to you, and the person standing behind you in the line to vote?
How do we know democracy is broken if we don’t know what it is?
by Patrick Chalmers.
“To my mind, there seems no better starting point for understanding politics than to grapple with the word “democracy”. What does it mean and how should it work?
The word is easy enough to define. It comes from the Greek for people (demos) and power (kratos), translating as people power, or government by the people. Most of us know democracy as something like that. But things quickly get more complicated when we ask what exactly that means in everyday life.
‘…there’s ubuntu, Watch South African Anglican cleric and human rights activist Desmond Mpilo Tutu describe ubuntu in this video clip.the Nguni language word for a humanist philosophy and way of living from southern Africa. It’s most often translated as “I am, because you are”, a profoundly political concept which evokes the connectedness that exists, or should exist, between all people and the planet – a manifesto for inclusive government.’
The distorting – if not corrupting – influence of money helps to explain why elected representatives rarely reflect the societies they are meant to represent but rather their richer members. Consider the representation of women in government. Though their share of seats in legislatures worldwide is growing, they still represent fewer than a quarter of deputies. The same goes for minorities – whatever they may be, wherever they may be. So while, for example, western countries are becoming more ethnically, racially and religiously diverse, their legislators generally haven’t kept pace with these changes. If the current US presidential race is anything to go by, the face of democracy is still pale, male and stale. In parts of the world where people of colour are the majority, male and stale usually covers it.”
As the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension so that, released, it travels farther. For there is nowhere to remain.
Alexandra Stoddard:
Concentrate on seeing all the beauty your soul can absorb but turn away from what is ugly and vile and degrading. The higher your sights, the better your spirits. Everything we do requires us to reveal our inner longings. Identify them clearly and make productive use of them.
Thomas Merton:
There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which men are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today that we have ever had, and yet we are the more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and love than we have ever been. -Contemplation in a World of Action, 1965
A Democratic Pledge
I would like to
become more selective in what I watch and read
become more critically aware of the messages I receive
find new sources information about the things I care about most
participate in local media
create interactions in my community
Living Democracy is emerging within the human services, focusing not solely on individual self-reliance but also on the capacities of people to work together for mutual healing and problem solving. Society’s obligation to help support citizens with specific needs does not have to mean top-down governmental control; self-help and society’s help are mutually enhancing and mutually beneficial.
Listen.
Jacqueline Novogratz
Towards a Moral Revolution
Moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: What are politics for? What is an economy for? Jacqueline Novogratz says the simplistic ways we take up such questions — if we take them up at all — is inadequate. Novogratz is an innovator in creative, human-centered capitalism. She has described her recent book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, as a love letter to the next generation.
‘I think, in this moment of such peril & possibility, we really could build a world like the world has never seen before. If there was ever a decade to do it, it’s this decade. I want future generations to say, “Look how hard they tried,” not “Look at how blind they were.”’
A liminal or threshold experience can take many forms: a time of birth, a transition from life to death, or even a global pandemic that shuts down the status quo and forces us into silence and solitude. Liminal spaces, as Richard Rohr writes in the new issue of Oneing, enable us “to see beyond ourselves to the broader and more inclusive world that lies before us. When we embrace liminality, we choose hope over sleepwalking, denial, or despair. The world around us becomes again an enchanted universe.”
Liminal space is where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. -From Farther Richard Rohr
Hardly anything turns out the way you expected it to, and you’re frequently ready to write life off as too paradoxical and too difficult to endure. Then some indescribable light fights its way through the impenetrable dark. –Paula D’Arcy
There is deep beauty in the darkness, in the unknowing, in the indescribable, if only we can open ourselves to its purpose. –LaVera Crawley
What if we can choose to experience this liminal space and time, this uncomfortable now, as a place and state of creativity, of construction and deconstruction, choice and transformation? –Sheryl Fullerton
Into this liminal realm, between the known and the unknown, we are invited to enter if we are to learn more of the way forward in our lives as individuals and as communities and nations. –John Philip Newell
Without standing on the threshold for much longer than we’re comfortable, we won’t be able to see beyond ourselves to the broader and more inclusive world that lies before us. -RR
Eco-theologian Thomas Berry says the universe is so amazing in its interrelatedness that it must have been dreamt into being. He also says our situation today as an earth community is so desperate—we are so far from knowing how to save ourselves from the ecological degradations we are a part of—that we must dream the way forward. We must summon, from the unconscious, ways of seeing that we know nothing of yet, visions that emerge from deeper within us than our conscious rational minds.
On Being.
Ocean Vuong:
“The great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet, still not know who they are. Our ‘How are you?’ has failed us. We have to find something else.”
Before time.
Writer Ocean Vuong has long noticed how we grow numb to language when it’s ubiquitous, rote, rehearsed — and what’s at stake when we stop examining the words we use. Krista spoke with him at On Air Fest in Brooklyn back in March, just days before the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic. Even then, he said “How are you?” doesn’t go deep enough.
“When you’re using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly, as a bridge.”
Maybe this is one way of asking: How can we choose words that allow us into one another’s lives, especially in a time when language is one of our few remaining ways to connect? Vuong beckons us toward the freshness of tomorrows, just at the tips of our tongues. -Krista Lin, Editor, the On Being Project.
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet, essayist and novelist. He is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. Awards: MacArthur Fellowship, T. S. Eliot Prize, Whiting Awards, Dylan Thomas Prize
“Local Tulsa company, ONE Gas, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in historic Greenwood District through the ONE Gas Foundation. This donation will create a long-lasting generational impact in the Tulsa community, and we could not be more grateful.”
The Tulsa Tribune inflamed the massacre and then wrote a scathing editorial in the days that followed. -dayle
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