A Prayer: Radiate Kindness All Over the World

Photo by Molly

As a mother who would risk her life to protect her child,

her only child, even so should one cultivate 

a limitless heart with regard to all beings. 

So with a boundless heart should one cherish 

all living beings; radiating kindness 

over the entire world.

— The Buddha

Remembering the Visionary Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The time is always right to do what is right. 

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. 

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.  

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

 

The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.

  

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. 

 

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial. 

 

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth." When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?" 

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children. 

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 

We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and we must put our own house in order. 

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

 

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.  

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. 

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.  

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breath.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. 

 

As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.  

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

 

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

 

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. 

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. 

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Satish Kumar: Let Peace Fill Our Heart, Our World, Our Universe

Photo by Molly

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept.

We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.

I want to see a New Story education, which is not only about intellectual knowledge – not only about measurement — not only about academic achievement. It is also about heart, feelings, emotions, relationship, love, compassion, generosity, beauty. All these values are part of the heart.

Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.

— Satish Kumar

As Satish Kumar Turns 90, His Radical Idealism Is More Important Than Ever

I have long loved Satish Kumar and the ways that he illuminates the sacred, our interconnectedness with all of life, and what it is that truly matters. May we all be inspired by this beautiful, radiant, wise human being. — Molly

Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere

‘What we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it’

By Annabel Heseltine

In a quiet corner of coastal Cornwall far from Westminster, the brightest eyes the colour of polished conkers sparkle from a dark corner of a lovely old stone farmhouse. ‘Our crisis is not climate change, not economic growth, but aesthetics. We have lost our sense of balance, proportion and harmony. We don’t use our heart and our hands,’ says Satish Kumar, editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and founder of Schumacher College, and who this year will be celebrating his 90th birthday. Kumar has been calling for a radical reimagining of our relationship with the natural world for over six decades, arguing that we need to shift our emphasis from economic growth to human and planetary wellbeing.

His influence stretches far beyond the eco-chamber. When Jane Goodall interviewed Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever who transformed the corporate giant by placing sustainability at the core of its business model, he quoted Kumar. ‘When they teach economy, they should also teach ecology,’ he said, and, ‘humanity comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth’.

‘Satish Kumar has changed the world, because he is the catalyst for other people to do things. He articulates possibility, and paints a picture of what could be, filling you with optimism and hope,’ says Louise Chester, who introduced Polman to Kumar. Chester, a high-flying financial analyst who was overseeing billions of funds before she founded Mindfulness at Work, a not-for-profit which coaches compassionate leadership to CEOs, lists a global collective of influential changemakers mentored by Kumar. This includes activist Vandana Shiva, who established seed banks across India to resist the commodification of agriculture. ‘I really don’t think I would be the person I am without Satish. I have a very close relationship with him but so do thousands of others,’ says Chester.

Satish Kumar: ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere

Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth, credits Kumar with inspiring thousands through Schumacher College, which he founded in 1991 to offer a more holistic education through ‘the three Hs’ – heart, hands and head, including the right brain hemisphere valuing intuition and imagination. The college has become a global centre for ecological thinking and environmental humanities, attracting students from more than 60 countries. ‘Satish and I occasionally disagree,’ says Porritt. ‘I’m much angrier about the current situation than he is, and he’s uncomfortable with angry people. He thinks that’s a negative emotion and not helpful, but however choppy the waters we’re all navigating, somehow Satish in his little boat always seems to be sailing along on an even keel. He is imperturbable, which is astonishing.’

Kumar’s views are shaped by experience, conviction and courage. Raised in a Jain family in India, he scandalised his family by running away from a monastery to join the Gandhian movement, realising he could better spread the message of peace in the wider world. In 1962, aged 25, he embarked on his famous 8,000-mile peace walk, inspired by outrage at the imprisonment of the 89-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell for demonstrating against nuclear weapons. He walked from Gandhi’s grave in Delhi to Washington DC delivering packets of peace tea to the four nuclear capitals, urging leaders to pause and think. Advised by his mentor, Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s embodiment who spearheaded land reform in India, to take no food or money, he entrusted himself to the hospitality of strangers. Being vegetarian wasn’t easy among Hindu Kush tribesmen. 

It was when he was on his way home after the walk, in 1966, that he met the economist E F Schumacher (after whom the college was named), author of Small is Beautiful. Schumacher persuaded him to become editor of Resurgence & Ecologist (formerly Resurgence magazine), arguing that there were many Gandhis in India but there would only be one in England. Kumar spent the next four decades shaping one of the most influential environmental magazines in the world. He created a platform for pioneering ecological thinkers like James Lovelock, Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra and Joanna Macy, and challenged readers to confront difficult questions around sustainability, economics and population growth long before such debates entered the mainstream.  

‘The problem is our attitude,’ he explains. ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ He contrasts Descartes’ duality, ‘I think therefore I am’ with the Sanskrit phrase So Hum, ‘you are, therefore I am’, a philosophy rooted in interconnectedness with the universe outside of ourselves. He calls for a reframing of most aspects of modern life: leadership, education, economics, farming, planning and our relationship with nature, in that when we are killing the planet, we are killing ourselves. He advocates more respect for farmers; that schools should nurture imagination as much as intellect; that children should be ‘eco-literate as well as computer literate’; and that communities should care for one another rather than depend on centralised government.

It’s to nature that we return again and again in our conversation. It’s his spiritual practice, his mentor and his respite. He describes the rolling Cornish coastline and its changeable weather as a metaphor of life and reminds us of the generosity of the soil. ‘Soil is very forgiving. It does not ask if you have a Visa card. Out of one seed comes 50 tomatoes. ‘When I started writing about renewable energy in Resurgence in the 1970s, people said we were “naive, idealistic fools in cloud-cuckoo-land”,’ but what seemed radical then feels only too relevant now after decades of biodiversity collapse, floods and fires, polarisation and blinkered leadership. ‘Our bodies are soil transformed,’ he says, ‘so what we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it.’

In 1964, Satish Kumar set off on a peace walk from Delhi to Washington

I catch up with Kumar between appearances at the Oxford Union and Darwin College, Cambridge, where he is discussing alternative leadership styles. In June, he spoke at Eton College. His 90th birthday tea party will be hosted by Frieda Gormley, co-founder of the B Corp House of Hackney (which put nature on its board), who persuaded the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans in its definition of nature. His retreats based on his books Radical Love and Soil, Soul & Society are sell-outs. Other books include The Buddha and the Terrorist, No Destination, a memoir about that two-year peace walk, and his ninth book, Peace is Possible, has just been published.

He believes modern society suffers from a failure of courage and trust. ‘We want the world to be nice, but without standing up for it,’ he says. ‘Mahatma Gandhi talked about “[being] the change you wish to see in the world”.’ For Kumar, that means teaching young people resilience, compassion and respect for difference. He worries about a world increasingly shaped by division and intolerance, where people seek to destroy opposing viewpoints rather than understand them. ‘We have to dream and to imagine that a slightly less imperfect world is possible,’ he says. ‘We need to train young people to be statesmen, not politicians, to embrace diversity, not to make everyone like ourselves.’

As the sun falls over the Cornish coast, Satish Kumar turns on a light. The 89-year-old peace activist is no longer sitting in the shadows but glowing with vitality. He leans forward, those brown eyes shining even more brightly. ‘You know, Annabel, I know I sound like an idealist. But what have the realists done for us? Realism is overrated. Realists haven’t given us anything except climate change and wars, and they don’t even win them. It’s time to give the idealists a chance.’

Please go here for the original article: https://www.countryandtownhouse.com/culture/satish-kumar/

Pema Chödron: Cultivating Kinship

Photo by Molly

Cultivating Kinship

Whatever you are doing, take the 

attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly 

to benefit others. Take the attitude 

of wanting it to increase your experience 

of kinship with your fellow beings.

—  Pema Chödron

bell hooks: A Wise and Loving Politics

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.

― bell hooks

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/bell-hooks

Dolly Parton Remembered as ‘Advocate for Inclusion, Women’s Rights, Children’s Literacy, and More’

For all of the most authentic reasons which were steeped in compassion, generosity, wisdom, and love, Dolly Parton was indeed a national treasure. Grief and gratitude for this remarkable woman. Dolly will be missed.  And her legacy lives on. 🙏💜 Molly

Dolly Parton died August 25, 2026 at the age of 80. (Photo by Dolly Parton/Facebook)

“She was not only a talented musician and songwriter, but a lifelong philanthropist and advocate for literacy, education, LGBTQ+ rights, healthcare, and disaster relief. Her music and humanity touched millions.”

By Jessica Corbett

Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 80, and was fondly remembered by people around the world for not only her decades in the entertainment industry but also her philanthropy and promotion of the belief that “everybody should be treated with respect.”

Parton’s nephew and head of security, Bryan Seaver, confirmed the country music icon’s passing in a video message shared on her social media accounts. As Rolling Stone reported, she “was born January 19, 1946, the fourth of Robert Lee and Avie Lee Owens Parton’s 12 children, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River,” and “grew up in rural poverty,” lacking plumbing and electricity.

Peace & Justice Project

@corbyn_project

·

Follow

Dolly Parton was a tireless advocate for expansion of literacy around the world. Her Imagination Library programme distributed over 300 million books into communities in every continent, and boldly stood by the principle of education opportunities for all. RIP.

Sky News

@SkyNews

“Dolly Parton could have retired long ago having achieved greatness,” Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said of the singer and actress who won multiple Grammy and Emmy awards, among numerous others, and whose songs include “Coat of Many Colors,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “Jolene.”

Rather than retiring from the spotlight, Khanna noted, “she chose to continue her life pursuing the arts, and pushing boundaries to advocate for inclusion, women’s rights, children’s literacy, and more. Dolly touched countless hearts and will forever be remembered.”

US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media that “Dolly Parton was one of the great entertainers of our era. She was not only a talented musician and songwriter, but a lifelong philanthropist and advocate for literacy, education, LGBTQ+ rights, healthcare, and disaster relief. Her music and humanity touched millions. She will be sorely missed.”

DSA

@DemSocialists

·

Follow

Democratic Socialists of America extends our deepest condolences to the family, friends, and fans of Dolly Parton, a hero of the working-class and an inspiration to us all.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that “Dolly Parton gifted the world with her talent and heart. From supporting children, donating to science, investing in Tennessee, and giving us songs to sing our hearts out to (looking at you, ‘9 to 5’), she made the world a better place. Thank you, Dolly, for leading with love.”

Democratic North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said that “Dolly Parton was so special, so universally loved. The first word that came to my mind just now was ‘authentic,’ which is funny since she is well known for her big wigs and extravagant gowns. But she was always herself. Her music was powerful and moving... But her impact on the world was much greater—from providing kids free books to funding vaccine research and promoting tolerance. America lost one of our best today.”

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley

@RepPressley

·

Follow

Dolly Parton knew that all of our kids deserve to dream & see themselves reflected in our books. Her Imagination Library made that possible for millions. Let's honor her by protecting the freedom to read nationwide. Rest in power, Dolly.

Similarly saying that “Dolly Parton represented the very best in America,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote at his blog that “I think what I admired most was her empathy (the sentiment disparaged by Elon Musk. In fact, to my mind she was the human that embodied the exact opposite of Musk.) She felt the pain of those in poverty. She felt for women subordinated to patriarchy... She felt for working women.”

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed

@AbdulElSayed

·

Follow

Dolly Parton used her gift for music to highlight the challenges of poverty, inequality, and struggle in ways that uplifted and inspired working people. “And I told 'em all the story / Momma told me while she sewed / And how my coat of many colors / Was worth more than all their clothes.

 

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani

@NYCMayor

·

Follow

This is truly heartbreaking. Dolly Parton was an extraordinary person and an irreplaceable champion of the working class. We are a better country because of her.

 Parton took stances on topics that have become divisive in US politics—such as supporting LGBTQ+ rights and vaccine research—but she openly avoided wading into political races, and was also honored on Tuesday by various right-wing politicians and other figures, from Cabinet members, federal lawmakers, and governors to Republican President Donald Trump, who announced on Truth Social that “I am lowering the American flag throughout the United States for a one week period.”

Meanwhile, as elected Republicans ban books and cut programs for the working class while giving more tax breaks to the ultrarich, Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, said that “Dolly Parton spent her life helping kids, marginalized communities, and people in need, while entertaining millions. She never had to, she chose to. In a world full of wannabe Donald Trumps, choose to be a Dolly Parton.”

Please go here for the original article and links: https://www.commondreams.org/news/dolly-parton