In the Aftermath of 9-11...

I have been learning to be more courageous, to look more deeply, to discern, to expand my circle of caring, to be more humble & more conscious. I am filled with greater gratitude for each day & greater consciousness of it's gifts. I am passionate about cultivating & nurturing love within myself such that the ripples I send out into this beautiful world will increasingly be kind, compassionate, loving. I hold my loved ones in my heart with even greater tenderness. How has 9-11 changed you? ♥

Bolivia Set to Pass Historic 'Law of Mother Earth' Which Will Grant Nature Equal Rights to Humans

by Keph Senett

With the cooperation of politicians and grassroots organizations, Bolivia is set to pass the Law of Mother Earth which will grant nature the same rights and protections as humans. The piece of legislation, called la Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra, is intended to encourage a radical shift in conservation attitudes and actions, to enforce new control measures on industry, and to reduce environmental destruction.

The law redefines natural resources as blessings and confers the same rights to nature as to human beings, including: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. Perhaps the most controversial point is the right "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".

In late 2005 Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Morales is an outspoken champion for environmental protection, petitioning for substantive change within his country and at the United Nations. Bolivia, one of South America's poorest countries, has long had to contend with the consequences of destructive industrial practices and climate change, but despite the best efforts of Morales and members of his administration, their concerns have largely been ignored at the UN.

More: http://www.pvpulse.com/en/news/world-news/bolivia-set-to-pass-historic-law-of-mother-earth-which-will-grant-nature-equal-rights-to-humans#.TmKtp_8Rnty.facebook

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Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca: "Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values." May we all follow this wisdom!

Hafiz: Wise Men Keep Talking About

WISE MEN KEEP TALKING ABOUT

Time is the shop

Where everyone works hard

To build enough love

To break the

Shackle.

Wise men keep talking about

Wanting to meet Her.

Women sometimes pronounce the word God

A little differently:

They can use more feeling and skill

With the heart-lute.

All the world's movements,

Apparent chaos, and suffering I now know happen

In the Splendid Unison:

Our tambourines are striking

The same thigh.

Hafiz stands

At a juncture in this poem.

There are a thousand new wheels I could craft

On a wagon

And place you in -

Lead you to a glimpse of the culture

And seasons in another dimension.

Yet again God

Will have to drop you back at the shop

Where you still have work

With

Love.

~ Hafiz ~


(The Gift -- versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)


Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Wise_Men_Keep_Talking.html

Doctors to McDonald's: Stop Making Our Kids Sick

Frances Moore Lappe
Author, "Diet For A Small Planet"

This week an open letter to McDonald's signed by 550 health professionals appears in full-page ads in newspapers across the country. Their message? Real simple: "Stop making the next generation sick--retire Ronald and the rest of your junk food marketing to kids," said signer Dr. Steven K. Rothschild, Associate Professor of Preventative Medicine at Rush Medical College.

The letter's signers also include Dr. William C. Roberts, Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of Cardiology, Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Deborah Burnet, Chief of General Medicine and a pediatrician at University of Chicago, as well as the Hollywood immortalized doctor, Patch Adams.

Their letter coincides with a McDonald's shareholder meeting in Chicago where 14 institutional investors will introduce the first resolution ever to call on a major corporation to deal with its public health impacts as well as shareholder liabilities for these impact could carry.

In a campaign coordinated by Boston-based Corporate Accountability International, the doctors describe the epidemic that alarms them: A full third of American kids are obese. And thanks to diets high in McDonald's-style fast-food it's estimated that one in three American newborns will develop Type II Diabetes in their lifetime.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/doctors-to-mcdonalds-stop_b_863396.html?

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"I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are... Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully." ~ Frances Moore Lappé

John O'Donohue: For a New Beginning

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life's desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/For_a_New_Beginning.html

Mary Oliver: Spring

Spring

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her,

her four black fists

flicking the gravel,

her tongue

like a red fire

touching the grass,

the cold water.

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her

rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees.

Whatever else

my life is

with its poems

and its music

and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(House of Light)

http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Spring.html

Robert Bly: Warning To The Reader

Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone, and wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.

But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries. The bird, seeing freedom in the light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat's hole is low to the floor. Writers, be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!

I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed...

They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor...

-- Robert Bly

Quotes In Living With Humility and Compassion

Stephen Levine

Quotes

"We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive."

"Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it."

"Those who insist they've got their 'shit together' are usually standing in it at the time."

"When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion."

"If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay."

"There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it."

"God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality."

"That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom."

"Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How we appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind."

"How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die?"

More: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4169.Stephen_Levine

Making a Living (Economy)

By David Korten

We’re wasting our resources subsidizing a war economy, sprawl, and consumerism. What we could do differently in a living economy.

In a world rushing toward environmental and social collapse, there is no place for war, speculation, auto-dependent sprawl, toxic contamination, and wasteful consumption —activities that generate a major portion of current GDP. This massive misallocation of resources is an artifact of a mistaken belief that human prosperity is maximized by unrestrained global competition for resources, markets, and money to drive growth in the consumption of whatever goods and services generate the greatest private financial profit.

The living economy frame shifts the focus from making money to making a living. This simple shift in perspective shines a spotlight on the many ways we can simultaneously improve the quality of our lives while reducing our human burden on the biosphere.

More: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/making-a-living-economy?utm_source=wkly20110513&utm_medium=yesemail&utm_campaign=titleKorten

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In a living economy, the rights and interests of living communities of living, breathing people engaged in a living exchange with the natural systems of their bioregion properly take priority over the presumed rights of artificial corporate entities that value life only as a marketable commodity and operate by the moral code of a malignant cancer. Protecting the boundaries of the community from intrusion by predatory corporations is an essential function of any responsible government. ~ David Korten

John O'Donohue: For Lost Friends

For Lost Friends

As twilight makes a rainbow robe

From the concealed colors of day

In order for time to stay alive

Within the dark weight of night,

May we lose no one we love

From the shelter of our hearts.

When we love another heart

And allow it to love us,

We journey deep below time

Into that eternal weave

Where nothing unravels.

May we have the grace to see

Despite the hurt of rupture,

The searing of anger,

And the empty disappointment,

That whoever we have loved,

Such love can never quench.

Though a door may have closed,

Closed between us,

May we be able to view

Our lost friends with eyes

Wise with calming grace;

Forgive them the damage

We were left to inherit;

Free ourselves from the chains

Of forlorn resentment;

Bring warmth again to

Where the heart has frozen

In order that beyond the walls

Of our cherished hurt

And chosen distance

We may be able to

Celebrate the gifts they brought,

Learn and grow from the pain,

And prosper into difference,

Wishing them the peace

Where spirit can summon

Beauty from wounded space.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)


Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/For_Lost_Friends.html