Wendell Berry: Sacred Places

Mount Rainier, Washington

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/people/kevinmcneal/


There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places and
desecrated places.

- Wendell Berry

Gratitude: An Open Door to Joy

To be grateful is in itself a blessing and an 

open door to joy. Each time you are grateful for something, 

 stop to take in and fully experience that uplifting and joyful feeling. 

Gratitude can be an ongoing frame of reference from which to live your life. 

You might even, as Albert Einstein suggests, begin to see that 

everything around you is a miracle.

~ James Baraz, Awakening Joy

Gifts From My Mother and "The Ear as Petal"

Many years ago while participating in a women's spirituality group, I had the opportunity to meet a most extraordinary woman. She was a Catholic nun who had started a nonprofit here in Portland which was committed to helping prostitutes get off the streets and begin the long and courageous journey of transforming years of victimization, oppression, and abuse to a life of dignity, respect, compassion, connection, meaning, and love. Among the words that Sister Cathy spoke that night in talking about healing work with others are these, which will always stay with me: "What is needed more than all else is to be a heart with ears." 

At that time I was still in the earlier years of my own awakening, healing, and transformation of generations of tragedy and loss. Skillfulness, sensitivity, empathy, compassion, tenderness, and the capacity to be present - to truly listen and hear one another - were not qualities that were readily modeled and passed on in our family; nor are they graced with value in our culture at large. Gratefully, the healing journey has freed me from blame and instead offered the exquisite gift of feeling into the experiences of not just myself, but also my brother, my parents, my ancestors, and ever widening circles of beings. In learning to gradually open my heart more and more deeply, I have been empowered to make increasingly mindful choices and offer a very different legacy to my children from the one unknowingly handed down to my twin and me, to my parents and their parents before them, and on and on.

Miracles happen. Out of so much loss - and truly a lifetime for my mother - have come these priceless opportunities for my mom and me to be with one another, to share moments in which we both are able to set aside the old stories which kept us apart and instead truly be present to the truth and love that has always been available, but which was tragically denied for many years. For so long I had thought that any depth of listening and sharing would always be a one way experience with my mother. With Alzheimer's and dementia, major depression, and a lifetime of unattended wounds, I did not believe my mother capable of moments of such clear access and lucidity of heart. I was wrong. What makes these moments that we have shared all the more precious and priceless is that, to one degree or another, we both know what it is like to have this tender connection deeply missing within ourselves, with each other, and in all our relationships. And, paradoxically, this has been one of my life's greatest teachings, one which I have learned from my mother's great struggle - which then became my own - to be present in our bodies, in our hearts, to be able to listen and to hear. 

Through so much loss has come this illumination of the profound preciousness of connection, of open-heartedness, of compassion, of being able to listen and receive the sweetness of our hearts and that of others. Blessed are the gifts of the alchemist - the capacity to embrace, heal, transform, and receive the gems hidden in all the darkness. They are there, waiting, these extraordinary gifts... in our hearts, in the Love that connects us all. My heart overflows with gratitude... Molly*

The Ear as Petal

The ear is only a petal

that grows from the heart.

When we hear each other,

it all becomes a garden.

Just what does it mean to listen? We have all exhibited the remarkable mental divisiveness whereby we choose not to pay attention, and yet when asked, we can recite word for word what was said.

Listening arises from a deeper place, and it seems we can only hear the living to the extent that we have truly lived, only understand pain and joy to the extent that we have allowed ourselves to be touched by life. If the ear grows from the heart like a petal, then as roots absorb rain and sun until a simple flower opens, the heart must absorb both tears and joy in order to spout an ear that can truly hear.

I remember, years before cutting my feet in search of a path, sitting on my immigrant grandmother's hospital bed, watching her wince as they put gauze on her bedsore heels. I remember, years before I saved my golden retriever from drowning, watching a coworker cry for his dead dog, trying to understand how he could love an animal more than a person. I remember, years before having to start my life over, racing down a farmhouse road in the middle of the night to see my father-in-law's proud eyes jut as the barn he built thirty years before was burning to the ground. 

It was only later that I felt their pain, and even more, their true joy in caring for things. To be sure, we do not have to experience the same things to receive each other, but we do have to experience what is ours to live through before life will show its roots.

What does it take to truly listen? The breakdown of everything that parades between our hearts. If I dare to hear you, I will feel you like the sun and grow in your direction, and you in mine. For when we hear each other, it all becomes a garden. It all becomes edible. 

- Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want

by Being Present to the Life You Have

Among the many miracles which were occurring while my mother lived here near

her family were many moments in which we both were able to listen and hear.

On this path of awakening, I am consistently humbled and deepened and 

amazed by the power and the mystery of Love. Blessed be. ♥

(*The trial for permanent guardianship of my mom has been moved to mid-November. Until then, she remains at this time in Michigan. Continued prayers are appreciated.)

Anxiety, Heartbreak, Tenderness and Softening Our Hearts

Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. 

It's the kind of place we usually want to avoid. 

The challenge is to stay in the middle 

rather than buy into struggle and complaint. 

The challenge is to let it soften us rather than 

make us more rigid and afraid.

~ Pema Chödrön

 

 

from Pema Chodron

Mary Oliver: Fall Song

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(American Primitive)

 

 

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The Crisis at Fukushima's Unit 4 Demands a Global Take-Over

by Harvey Wasserman

Published on Friday, September 20, 2013 by Common Dreams

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.Fukushima's badly damaged Unit 4.

There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focused on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.

Why is this so serious?

We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil’s brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.

Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool. Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.

Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific. (Note: A relatively small earthquake struck Fukushima prefecture on Thursday, an indication of the inevitable occurrence of larger future ones in the area.)

The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.

More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It’s vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.

Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.

Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.

The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.

Just prior to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It’s clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.

According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.

Chernobyl’s first 1986 fallout reached California within ten days. Fukushima’s in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.

Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”

Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet’s best scientists and engineers.

We have two months or less to act.

For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.

If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.

The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight.

For the original article, please go here:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/20-1

Dollarocracy: How Big Money Undermines Our Democracy

And how we can take it back

by Robert McChesney and John Nichols

Published on Monday, September 16, 2013 by The Nation

(Image: Reuters)“We’ve found through our experience that timid supplications for justice will not solve the problem,” declared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 as he announced the civil rights movement’s pivot toward the economic justice message of the Poor People’s Campaign. “We’ve got to massively confront the power structure."

With those words, King spoke a language every bit as American as his “I Have a Dream” message of four years earlier. There are times for optimism and hope, and there are times for acknowledgment of an overwhelming challenge and the radical demand that it be addressed. Often they merge, and in these moments, great movements fundamentally redirect the nation. Tom Paine knew that. So did Frederick Douglass, and Jane Addams, and A. Philip Randolph. There is a rich American tradition of recognizing that some crises cannot be answered by tinkering at the edges of the problem. At such times, the people have responded with a boldness that ushered in new political parties or a New Deal, new understandings of the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of governments. And they have amended the Constitution, not once or twice but twenty-seven times. 

After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, we began what would become a three-year survey of the state of American democracy, using the 2010 and 2012 election cycles as touchstones but focusing on a range of electoral, governmental and journalistic measures of democratic decay. The experience forced us to recognize the futility of timid supplications in pursuit of reforming politics and the media. We did this not as critics of the reform impulse, but as co-founders of a media reform organization who have maintained a long-term faith in the power of organizing and the potential of electoral politics to achieve consequential change. We retain that faith, along with a deep understanding of the value of continual prodding at the local, state and national levels. But we concluded that mild reforms are no longer sufficient to address a political crisis as far-reaching as any the nation has known. 

The United States has experienced fundamental changes that are dramatically detrimental to democracy. Voters’ ability to define political discourse has been so diminished that even decisive election results like Barack Obama’s in 2012 have little impact. That’s because powerful interests—freed to, in effect, buy elections, unhindered by downsized and diffused media that must rely on revenue from campaign ads—now set the rules of engagement. Those interests so dominate politics that the squabbling of Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, is a sideshow to the great theater of plutocracy and plunder. This is not democracy. This is dollarocracy. 

Tens of millions of Americans recognize the crisis. Congress is held in ridiculously low esteem. Almost two-thirds of the public say their government is controlled by a handful of powerful interests. At the same time, confidence in the media as a check on abuses of power is collapsing almost as quickly as the circulation figures of daily newspapers. 

Yet when the evidence of the decay of democracy is pieced together, as it is in our new bookDollarocracy, the picture is even more troubling than most observers and activists imagine. To wit: 

§ The 2012 elections were the most expensive in the Republic’s history, with spending of roughly $10 billion. They did not cost $6 billion, as was broadly reported last November. That figure was based on a sound study of federal election spending, but it did not account for the massive infusion of cash into local and state contests, as well as judicial and referendum votes, by the same wealthy donors, corporations and interest groups that fund national campaigns. The full picture shows that the worst fears of good-government groups have already been realized. 

§ The biggest fantasy promulgated by pundits after the 2012 election was that President Obama’s victory showed that grassroots activism can still beat big money. In fact, Obama and his supporters raised and spent roughly $1.1 billion, while Mitt Romney and his supporters raised and spent roughly $1.2 billion. Yes, Obama’s campaign collected more small individual contributions than Romney’s. But the Democrat’s campaign also collected more large contributions than did the Republican’s. Romney’s relatively slight money advantage came from the higher level of spending on his behalf by interests like the Super PACs. Bottom line: in 2012, big money beat big money.

To continue this article, please go here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/16-8

************

Our current crisis requires a great demand. The people know this. That’s why the most successful reform movement of the moment is the most ambitious: sixteen states and more than 500 communities—from the city of Los Angeles to the town of Mount Desert, Maine—are, at the encouragement of Free Speech for People, Move to Amend, Public Citizen, Common Cause, People for the American Way and other groups, calling for a constitutional amendment to restore the ability of cities, states and the federal government to regulate money in politics. It is an audacious demand, one that could overturn Citizens United. But it is not sufficient to renew American democracy. For that, we need a new age of reform that answers the call for voting rights, for free and fair elections and for a media system that informs rather than discourages voters. To offer anything less underestimates the task at hand. We must recognize anew, as Dr. King did a half-century ago, that “America is at a crossroads of history, and it is critically important for us, as a nation and a society, to choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage. It is impossible to underestimate the crisis we face in America. The stability of a civilization, the potential of free government, and the simple honor of men are at stake.” - Robert McChesney & John Nichols

We Have Met the Enemy - and the Friend

It was Pogo, a cartoon character created by Walt Kelly, who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." This particular slogan now appears a lot in the environmental movement. It isn't somebody else who's polluting the rivers - it's us. The cause of confusion and bewilderment and pollution isn't really someone else's problem: it's something we can come to know in ourselves. But in order to do that we have to understand that we have met the friend and he is me. The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame somebody else.

It's a little uncertain who is "us" and who is "them." Bernard Glassman Roshi, who does a lot of work with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn't work with the homeless because he's such a great guy but because going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with the parts of himself that he has rejected. It's all interrelated. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. That's a very important point.

- Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are

What Is Amazing

Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source of both inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species. On the one hand they constitute nonviolence in action. On the other, they are the source of all spiritual qualities: of forgiveness, tolerance, and all the virtues. Moreover they are the very thing that gives meaning to our activities and makes them constructive. There is nothing amazing about being highly educated; there is nothing amazing about being rich. Only when the individual has a warm heart do these attributes become worthwhile.
 

- The Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium

Church Members Mistreat Homeless Man in Church Unaware It Is Their Pastor in Disguise

Pastor Jeremiah Steepek transformed himself into a homeless person and went to the 10,000 member church that he was to be introduced as the head pastor at that morning.

He walked around his soon to be church for 30 minutes while it was filling with people for service, only 3 people out of the 7-10,000 people said hello to him.

He asked people for change to buy food – no one in the church gave him change.

He went into the sanctuary to sit down in the front of the church and was asked by the ushers if he would please sit in the back.

He greeted people to be greeted back with stares and dirty looks, with people looking down on him and judging him.

As he sat in the back of the church, he listened to the church announcements and such.

When all that was done, the elders went up and were excited to introduce the new pastor of the church to the congregation.

“We would like to introduce to you Pastor Jeremiah Steepek.” The congregation looked around clapping with joy and anticipation.

The homeless man sitting in the back stood up and started walking down the aisle. The clapping stopped with all eyes on him.

He walked up the altar and took the microphone from the elders (who were in on this) and paused for a moment then he recited,

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

‘The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

After he recited this, he looked towards the congregation and told them all what he had experienced that morning. Many began to cry and many heads were bowed in shame.

He then said, “Today I see a gathering of people, not a church of Jesus Christ. The world has enough people, but not enough disciples. When will YOU decide to become disciples?”

He then dismissed service until next week.

Following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ should be more than just talk. It ought to be a lifestyle that others around you can love about you and share in.

Please go here for the original article:  http://ireporterstv.co/church-members-mistreat-homeless-man-in-church-unaware-it-is-their-pastor-in-disguise/