Sailing toward peace . . .
It's another Moon Day . . . a slow cooling begins here in Okieland, a week away from the Fall Equinox ...
Today in 1620, English colonists aboard the Mayflower set sail for America, where they founded Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. turns 74 today. The literary critic , professor, historian, filmmaker and host of Finding Your Roots on PBS TV was born on this day in 1950 Keyser, West Virginia
It has been 61 years since a white supremacist’s bomb went off at 10:22 a.m. at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were getting ready for church services. – Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse.
Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. -- St. Francis of Assisi
Our world is noisy. People are stressed out, angry, and scared. Our futures feel uncertain. American monk, mystic, and social activist Thomas Merton summed up this moment well in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander many years ago. He wrote:
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." – posted by Maria Shriver, Sunday Paper, 9.15.24
If our heart inside is feeling happy and peaceful, what other people do is not going to worry us nearly as much. It is because we have this anger inside ourselves that we are not dealing with that makes everyone else an enemy. When we give loving-kindness and compassion to ourselves then naturally this is also going to spread out toward others. – Jetsunma Tenz in Palmo