Joan Borysenko: May the Great Tree of Peace Take Root In Every Heart

Photo by Molly

May the Great Tree of Peace

Take Root In Every Heart

May Respect crowd out the weed of Violence

and Community spring from the ashes of Isolation.

May the stories of our grandmothers and grandfathers

once again nourish the growing souls of our children.

 

May we see the Divine in one another and in nature

that the Earth may be healed and all her children

have an abundance of food, freedom, and loving-kindness

as we give willingly and with heartfelt joy to one another.

 

May the music of shared laughter replace cries of suffering

as the Great Tree of Peace takes root in every heart.

May we offer a renewed and resurrected World

to the Creator with infinite gratitude and thanksgiving.

 

— Joan Borysenko

From Prayers For a Thousand Years:

Inspiration From Leaders and Visionaries

Around the World

Azul Thomé: To Act With Fierce Love

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To Act With Fierce Love 

I am not angry at climate change, nor at the heatwaves crossing these lands and others.

I am not angry at the fires, the droughts, or the beautiful yet destructive butterflies arriving where they do not belong.

I am not angry at the exhaustion in my body. But I am angry at apathy.

I am angry at the anesthesia and the amnesia.

I am angry.

I am furious.

I feel a roar in my ribcage, not because someone is guilty, not because someone must be blamed or punished. That is a very Judeo-Christian reflex.

I am furious because life is threatened.

Because the children of all species are threatened.

And yet beneath the fury there is another voice.

The voice of the Earth herself.

Not condemning us. Not cursing us.

But watching us with the bewildered tenderness of a mother.

“Oh, my dear young children,” she says, “what are you doing?”

Around us, the trees, the rivers, the insects, the birds, the fungi, the animals all our kin are speaking in their own languages.

Perhaps the task is not only to roar.

Perhaps the task is also to remember.

To remember that we belong to this vast family of life.

To remember the Earth’s language.

To remember her deep love for us.

And from that remembering, to act with fierce love

— Azul Thomé

https://www.souland.org/about.html

Nikita Gill: We Are All Closer to Being Refugees

Photo by Molly

We are all closer to

being refugees

than billionaires.

One terrible flood.

One forest fire.

One hurricane.

An airstrike.

A bomb.

And this safety illusion

shatters forever.

And we would be

the ones seeking safety

in strange lands,

hoping the strangers there

know the songs of mercy

better than the cries of hate.

— Nikita Gill

https://nikitagill.substack.com/about

Thích Nhất Hạnh: When We Look With the Eyes of Compassion

Photo by Molly

When We Look With

the Eyes of Compassion

Every time we breathe in and go home to ourselves and bring the element of harmony and peace into ourselves, that is an act of peace. Every time we know how to look at another living being and recognize the suffering that has made her speak or act, and we are able to see that she is the victim of suffering that she cannot handle—that is an act of compassion. When we can look with the eyes of compassion we don’t suffer and we don’t make the other person suffer. These are the actions of peace that can be shared with people.

— Thích Nhất Hạnh 

Pema Chödrön: The True Practice of Peace

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The True Practice of Peace

To the degree that each of us is dedicated to wanting there to be peace in the world, then we have to take responsibility when our own hearts and minds harden and close. We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That's true spiritual warriorship. That's the true practice of peace.

— Pema Chödrön

From Practicing Peace In Times of War 

Forest Whitaker: Juneteenth

Juneteenth marks the delayed promise of freedom, but it also speaks to the resilience of a people who never stopped believing in liberation. It is about reckoning: reclaiming the past, remembering forgotten voices, and reshaping the future.

Juneteenth is more than history; it’s a call to action, a call to healing, and a call to unity through justice. Today, let’s remember that freedom must be lived, protected, and made real every day.

With you, I honor those who fought for liberation and those still fighting for justice today.

― Forest Whitaker

Riane Eisler: New Narratives That Are Integral to Our Human Evolution

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New Narratives That Are Integral 

to Our Human Evolution

Many cultural stories worldwide present the domination system as the only human alternative. Fairy tales romanticize the rule of kings and queens over “common people.” Classics such as Homers Illiad and Shakespeare’s kings trilogy romanticize “Heroic violence.” Many religious stories present men’s control, even ownership, of women as normal and moral.

These stories came out of the times that oriented much more closely to a “pure” domination system. Along with newer stories that perpetuate these limited beliefs about human nature, they play a major role in how we view our world and how we live in it. But precisely because stories are so important in shaping values, new narratives can help change unhealthy values.

Of particular importance are new stories about human nature. We need new narratives that give us a more complete and accurate picture of who we are and who we can be ― stories that show that our enormous capacities for consciousness, creativity and caring are integral to human evolution, that these capacities are what make us distinctively human.

― Riane Eisler

From The Real Wealth of Nations: 

Creating a Caring Economics

Pema Chödrön: The Endless Opportunities Of a Lifetime

Photo by Molly

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

― Pema Chödrön

From Practicing Peace in Times of War

Dorothy Day: As We Come To Know the Seriousness of the Situation

 

As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

― Dorothy Day

Derrick Jensen: We Must Learn How To Think Like the Planet

Photo by Molly

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.
 
All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
 
We must learn how to think like the planet.

— Derrick Jensen 

How Can I Be Happy When There Is So Much Wrong In the World?

Photos are by Molly

 How Can I Be Happy When There Is

So Much Wrong In the World?

A man once asked an old Buddhist monk:

“How can I allow myself to feel peace or happiness when the world is full of suffering, injustice, pain, and chaos?”

The monk looked at him quietly and asked:

“If your house was dark…

would you refuse to light a candle

because the whole world is not yet bright?”

The man stood silent.

The monk continued:

“The suffering of the world is real.

But if you destroy your own peace completely,

you only create one more exhausted and hopeless human being.”

The man replied,

“But isn’t being happy selfish when others are suffering?”

The monk smiled gently.

“A drowning person cannot save another drowning person.

Peaceful people heal more than broken people consumed by despair.”

Then the monk pointed to a pond nearby.

“When the water is disturbed, it cannot reflect clearly.

But when it becomes still, everything becomes visible.”

He looked back at the man and said:

“The same is true for the mind.

A restless mind reacts with fear, anger, and hopelessness.

A peaceful mind responds with wisdom, compassion, and clarity.”

The man lowered his head and whispered,

“But the world still feels so heavy.”

The monk nodded.

“Yes.

And that is why your peace matters even more.”

Then he added softly:

“Do not carry the pain of the entire world in one heart.

Instead…

Be kind where you are.

Help where you can.

Speak gently.

Reduce suffering around you, even in small ways.

A single candle cannot remove all darkness…

but it still changes the room it enters.”

In Buddhism, happiness is not ignoring suffering.

It is learning how to remain compassionate

without letting the suffering of the world destroy your spirit completely.

The monk smiled one last time and said:

“Protect your inner peace.

The world needs more calm hearts, not more broken minds.”

Copied from Buddhism.

Howard Zinn: Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

By Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground. . .Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I. F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/whom-will-we-honor-memorial-day/

Excellent — Mo Husseini: We Will Build It Forward

WOW!! YES! Deepest respect, appreciation, and 

gratitude, as always, to Mo Husseini!

— Molly

Photo by Molly

We Will Build It Forward

We will not build it back. Not to what it was. That was never good enough. What it was was a brochure and promise made to some and promised but withheld from others and selectively enforced and celebrated universally and the distance between the brochure and the real heartbreaking lived experience was always the con-man’s tell, was always the bruised and bleeding wound, was always the thing we refused to look at when we pledged allegiance hand on heart with eyes on a flag that flew over slave markets.

So, no. Not back to then. But forward to a better future. Toward the thing we said we were but have never been. Toward the brochure. Toward the lying vision you sold in civics class and that too many were too comfortable to disbelieve, but brave enough still to take seriously, and if that makes us suckers or marks then so be it. We are suckers. We are marks who will persist and build the things we were promised. We will build forward for the people you never built it for.

For the ones who were here before you “discovered” and who were not consulted or included. For the ones who were brought here in chains and were not included. For the ones who built the roads and tilled the fields and laid the railways and built the wealth and who were told that the building was not for them. For the ones who are told every day to go back to a country they have never seen, by people whose own grandparents came here on a boat.

We will build it forward and we will build it right this time, which means building it for everyone, which means admitting it was never, ever, ever for everyone before, which is the part that makes you lose your minds because your myth is load-bearing deception and the myth is a lie and the building has been standing on a cracked foundation since 1619 and you cannot fix the roof until you dig out the skeletons in the basement and bury them with honor and regret.

Every stone you threw we will lay again. Every wall you gutted we will replaster. Every bridge you burned we will build again. Every door you closed we will open again. And the traffic will flow and the rivers will flow and the people will flow and time will flow and we will blot out your names until they fade into the distance of the unloved of history.

We will build forward the schools and the libraries and fill them with the books you banned and the teachers you muzzled and the curricula you bleached and whitewashed to erase the truth of the histories that make you feel shame and discomfort for your part in them.

We will build forward the hospitals and the clinics and the labs and bring back the scientists and the doctors you fired and attacked and the research you killed and the vaccines you politicized and the public health infrastructures you dismantled because drug-addled morons who think the measles builds character told you to.

We will build forward the courts and take back and rewrite the law and clean out the courts like Hercules in the Augean. We will build forward equality under the law without favor or privilege, for every human being, the boring, ordinary, unglamorous Rule of Law that scares you and that you treated like an optional inconvenience instead of the foundations of the nation.

We will build forward the borders. Not as walls or as cages but as doors that welcome in the tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to break free. We will build forward the gateway at the feet of the New Colossus and live up to the truth of the lies you sold.

We will build forward the agencies and the offices and the phone lines and the people who answer them. The VA, and the Social Security office, and the EPA, and CDC, and NOAA, and the FDA, and every dull and vital acronym you gutted because a ketamine-addled sociopath told you they were inefficient and gutted them while spreading memes and glorifying Nazis.

We will build forward the alliances and the treaties and the friendships and the relationships you gutted because your stupid diapered dotard listens to the flattery of dictators and sycophants who pretend he is strong and manipulate his fragile, short-fingered, pyrite-plated, and vulgar ego.

We will build forward the air and the water and the soil and the regulations that weren’t enough but were too burdensome and unnecessary from your perspective. We will build forward rivers that run clean and children who can breathe and we will give you nothing but the reviling you so richly deserve.

We will build forward the right to speak and the right to march and the right to dissent and the right to exist and the right to hold power accountable whether you are Black, or Brown, or Gay, or Trans, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or poor, or just simply inconvenient.

We will build forward the right to vote and the right for that vote to matter and the right to be represented by people who look and think and feel and care like you. We will build forward the right for the person we elected to take office without mobs storming the building because a thin-skinned man in a terrible combover and a shit-filled diaper told them that math was fake news to protect his ego from admitting his loss.

We will build it forward. Nail by nail. Brick by brick. Law by law. Conviction by conviction, and vote by vote, and day by day, and hand in hand.

And yes. It will not be easy and it will not be fast and it will not be clean and we will fuck some shit up and have to fix it and that is called democracy and it is messy and ugly and slow but it is a million times better than the shit we have to live through with you and your vulgarities and it is the only way to build forward and care about the person at the bottom of the pile. To care about your Jesus’ “the least of us.”

And when you say “make America great again” we will say that America has never been great, not fully, not for everyone, not yet, and we will tell you that not as a criticism but as a dare. Not “make America great again” but instead, Make America Great At Last. At long, long last.

Because even your racist, enslaving, hypocritical founders knew. They dared too. The dare they encoded into their foundational words was “more perfect” instead of perfect. Because for all their faults they knew that the project was not finished and will never be finished and that the act of finishing is the work and that work is the nation.

So we will build it forward. The boring way. The ordinary way. The way it works when it works. Clean water from the tap. Mail in the mailbox. Healthcare for all. Bridges that stay up. Ambulances that show up. Teachers who teach truth. Judges who follow the law without favor. The woman who answers the phone and helps a stranger and does it again and again and never trends and never goes viral despite the fact that the Republic rests on her back and the backs of us all. And those backs do not break.

We will build it forward.

Better than it was.

Closer to the promise.

Further from the lie.

Until the lie is so far we can no longer see it from here.

We will build it.

— Mo Husseini

https://husseini.substack.com/

Anne Lamott: Gold

I love Anne Lamott. I love the beauty and heart and humility and courage and fierce love that flows through Anne and which she gifts as mirrors for us all. Deepest bow of gratitude and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Gold

Half the time when someone announces, “Here’s the thing,” I bristle: Did God stop by their home that morning with a Power Point presentation? Had they contacted Stephen Hawking in a seance?

The other half of the time, I feel a desperate relief that someone is reminding me how appropriate it is that I feel completely discombobulated and hopeless, and yet that there is hope. Yesterday morning I woke to an absolutely unremarkable sky. Not a cloud in sight, gray but with some weak suggestion of brightness to the right where the sun could be sensed. I might have sensed a mere hint of gold, of warmth, but way too subtle for me in my current condition.

As usual in the morning, I turned to Scripture. Rebecca Solnit reminds me, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” And Mary Oliver: "Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.” Jesus (paraphrased): “Don’t be a jerk, and help take care of my sheep.” (cf Jefferson Airplane.)

So here’s the thing: Right now, circumstances have shaken up the snow globe, and for nervous cases such as myself, it is hard to get my bearings. Even before this godawful and illegal war, there were the billionaires cavalierly running and ruining things, a far right Supreme Court, Epstein, etc. not to mention our own mixed-grilled lives— struggling family members, climate change, the slow-mo decline of aging, and then? Ring ring ring: Our beloved old friends getting godawful diagnoses and dying. I ask you: Life just gets so much lifier than I was prepared for.

Some mornings after reading the most recent news of corruption, evil and treason at the highest levels of power, I’m reminded of Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist writer, who once said, “Another day? Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”

It can be unfathomably weird and hard these days. How do we see a way forward through the swirling white particles of fake snow? How do we not give up and let them ruin and steal everything that is beautiful about America?

Well, here’s the thing: What has always worked before will work again. We stick together. We feed the poor. We take to the streets, loudly and peacefully, like Molly Ivins said, banging pots and pans and shouting, “This must end.” We keep the faith in We the People, in the Constitution, in the basic goodness and courage of people.

I have seen alchemy many, many times in my 72 years here: against all odds, lead transformed to gold. Sober drunks like me are Exhibit A.

My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always tells me, when I am at my most frantic and doomed, “We do what is possible, what is practical, simple and kind.” You all have got the kind part down: We wave to people, we return phone calls and library books, pick up litter, flirt with very old people in the express line even though they have brought coupons. You give some money or food or clothing to the poor, drop dollar bills into paper cups, you show up and listen to people who are hurting, while refraining from offering your incredibly annoying advice.

The game of life is rough, and a lot of people are playing hurt. We listen. We get them water.

The practical part is to help protect the midterms by supporting the integrity and possibly even the existence of the midterms. You give anything you can afford to the ACLU, and to the nonpartisan Election Official Legal Defense Network. If you are struggling with higher food and gas prices because of the illegal Iran war, have a garage sale and donate what you make that day. Doing this will make you happier that you could have imagine possible, what with the appropriate terror and grief so many of us are feeling these days. I promise: You’ll feel as enlivened and hopeful as you did at the last No King’s Rally. If you don’t, I will gladly refund your misery.

The practical/spiritual part, in the loosest meaning of the word “spiritual” is to fill up on nature, on her staggering, showoffy beauty and her schoolmarm lessons: let her blow your mind with awe and the interconnectedness of all things. Remember that root systems share their oxygen, water, and nutrients with trees who may not be doing so well. We are in this together and we are connected. There is still so much magic in the world, let alone those the strange sidelong paths that Reverend Solnit describes. No matter how tempting it is to check out, stop hitting the snooze button. Keep looking up and around: Guess what? The sun did rise yesterday, not blindingly so, but as a plain old ordinary yellow sun, as life and possibility.

So here’s the thing: A golden portent of light means that that’s where the sun will come up. Stay alert, and let your good heart stay open. I know I sound like a broken record, but here’s the thing: I think we’ve got this.

— Anne Lamott

https://annelamott.substack.com/p/gold

It was such a joy to meet Anne Lamott

when she came to Powell's Books in Portland. 

 Which of her books would I recommend? 

Any and all of them. 

💜