Anaïs Nin: The Light Within

Photo by  Molly

When you possess light within, 

you see it externally. 
 

– Anaïs Nin

Henry David Thoreau: Nourishment For Our Soul

Photo by Molly

One is wise to cultivate the tree

that bears fruit in our soul.

― Henry David Thoreau

Howard Zinn: Veterans and Dissent at the War Memorial

Year after year, it is my belief that the wise voice of Howard Zinn needs to be shared again and again and again. May more and and more of us listen, learn, and work together to end the madness of war. Another world is possible. ― Molly

For Veterans Day, we highlight this article, “Dissent at the War Memorial,” written by Howard Zinn for The Progressive in 2004. Asked to speak on a panel called, “War Stories,” Zinn said, “I don’t want to honor military heroism — that conceals too much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years have opposed the horror of war.”

 By Howard Zinn

As I write this, the sounds of the World War II Memorial celebration in Washington, D.C., are still in my head. I was invited by the Smithsonian Institution to be on one of the panels, and the person who called to invite me said that the theme would be “War Stories.” I told him that I would come, but not to tell “war stories,” rather to talk about World War II and its meaning for us today. Fine, he said.

I made my way into a scene that looked like a movie set for a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza—huge tents pitched here and there, hawkers with souvenirs, thousands of visitors, many of them clearly World War II veterans, some in old uniforms, sporting military caps, wearing their medals. In the tent designated for my panel, I joined my fellow panelist, an African American woman who had served with the WACS (Women’s Army Corps) in World War II, and who would speak about her personal experiences in a racially segregated army.

I was introduced as a veteran of the Army Air Corps, a bombardier who had flown combat missions over Europe in the last months of the war. I wasn’t sure how this audience would react to what I had to say about the war, in that atmosphere of celebration, in the honoring of the dead, in the glow of a great victory accompanied by countless acts of military heroism.

This, roughly, is what I said: “I’m here to honor the two guys who were my closest buddies in the Air Corps—Joe Perry and Ed Plotkin—both of whom were killed in the last weeks of the war. And to honor all the others who died in that war. But I’m not here to honor war itself. I’m not here to honor the men in Washington who send the young to war. I’m certainly not here to honor those in authority who are now waging an immoral war in Iraq.”

I went on: “World War II is not simply and purely a ‘good war.’ It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side—too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.

“Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it—the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don’t want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq.

“I don’t want to honor military heroism—that conceals too much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years have opposed the horror of war.”

Please go here for the original: https://www.howardzinn.org/veteran-dissent-war-memorial/

Celebrating 15 Years With My Beloved

 

Celebrating 15 Years With My Beloved

These images from 15 years ago are reminders of when it all began. I will be forever grateful for the profound blessings and synchronicity and grace which brought Ron and myself to the little coffee shop in Portland where we first met on November 11th, 2010. And what kids we were then at 59 and 62 and soon to be finding ourselves falling head over heals in love. 

Of course, there were also bumps and setbacks and scary and painful places — and especially in our early days — which sent each of us off to therapy and other resources of support. Gratefully, there was also already much healing work that we had done before we ever met. And there was more to do. Of course. 

This is what our intimate relationships call us into — the courageous territory of further working with our old triggers and trauma, of assuming greater accountability and embodying deeper compassion, and of deepening and expanding the ongoing sacred journey of unburdening ourselves of our old wounds and learning how to undefend our hearts.

And Love is always the greatest medicine. 

I write this today with the deepest love and gratitude to my beloved husband. Ron and I have certainly brought the nourishment, the safe ground, the commitment and courage, and the compassion and kindness and abiding love needed to increasingly support ourselves and each other in growing into more and more of the wholeness and beauty of who we most truly are.

There is no greater gift that we humans can give to each other and ourselves. It takes courage to risk vulnerability and authenticity, honesty and open-heartedness, trust and love with another human being. And when we have found those who grace us in such profound ways on our human journeys, we have been blessed with life's greatest treasure.

And I will forevermore treasure my beloved Ron. 💗🙏 Molly

Joanne Cacciatore: Fierce Compassion

This deeply compassionate and wise book by Joanne Cacciatore was recommended to me by a family therapist several years ago. Before I engaged in brief therapy with one of my sons, and in our initial conversation, this therapist spoke to me of Bearing the Unbearable upon learning of the suicide of my twin brother in 1978. It didn't matter that decades had passed and that I had done many years of deep grieving and healing, I still found this gem by Joanne Cacciatore to be a wise and beautiful gift. 

It is not easy to be human. Bless us all on our 

human journeys and beyond. 

🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Fierce Compassion

It is in knowing suffering, in all its darkest places and with all its most harrowing faces, that we are brought to a place of fierce compassion for others, and perhaps one day, for ourselves.

The road of sorrow is not easy. It is ominous, jarring, and narrow.

We may meet others along the road who offer sustenance: some water, a morsel of food, loving support or guidance, a small candle to light the way, a hand that helps us climb out of a ditch we've fallen into, a patch of shade in which we can shelter from the heat. Such meetings plant seeds.

These seeds of kindness grow one day into our own compassionate care for others.

And, at some point, we ourselves will shade another.

At times, the turn toward compassionate action unfurls so slowly.

At other times, the calling is more precipitous, a tsunami in response to quakes of fully inhabited grief.

 And this is how our world will change.

Those who have deeply suffered understand life in ways others cannot: they know the only way to attain authentic and lasting contentment is to turn our hearts outward in service to those who are suffering as we have suffered.

I am now present with life because I am present with death.

I know joy and peace because I am present with grief and suffering.

— Joanne Cacciatore

From Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and

the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

Mary Oliver: Messenger

Photo by Molly

Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—

equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

— Mary Oliver

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan: Zohran Mamdani, Eugene V. Debs, and the Dawn

Excellent. 

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Zohran Mamdani made history, winning the race to be the next mayor of New York City. The Democratic socialist is the first Muslim and the first person of South Asian descent elected to lead the largest city in the United States. At 34 years old, he is the youngest elected to the office in over a century. His meteoric rise from a little-known state assemblymember to his stunning upset on Tuesday has sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. With over 100,000 volunteers, a savvy social media presence, and a platform to make New York affordable, Zohran Mamdani charted a path to victory, defeating the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo.

At his victory party at the Brooklyn Paramount late Tuesday night, Mamdani was welcomed on stage by a cheering crowd of jubilant supporters.

He opened his rousing speech saying, “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but, as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” quoting one of the most famous socialists in US history.

Eugene V. Debs was born to immigrant parents on November 5th, 1855. He started working at 14, laboring on the railroads, becoming a fireman, shoveling coal on steam-powered locomotives. He joined the fireman’s union, rising in its ranks. He then formed the American Railway Union (ARU), to organize all railway industry workers, including, he hoped, women and African Americans.

The ARU struck against the Pullman Company, owned by George Pullman, who built and operated a massive fleet of luxury railroad sleeper cars, amassing a fortune while keeping his workers in near-indentured status in his company town of Pullman, Illinois. The strike went national, hobbling the rail industry. President William Howard Taft called in the military, violently breaking the strike, killing over 30 strikers. As the public face of the strike, Eugene V. Debs was targeted for prosecution. He was convicted and sentenced to six months in a county jail. As he read and wrote in his cell, Debs became more radicalized, and left jail a committed socialist.

By 1900, he ran as the Socialist party’s candidate for president, the first of five such runs. In 1905 he co-founded the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, seeking to organize workers across industries into “One Big Union.” During his presidential run in 1912, he built so much momentum that establishment candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were seriously concerned he could win.

After the US entered World War I, patriotic fervor swept the nation. Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, then the Sedition Act in 1918, making it a crime to speak out against the war. Despite this, Debs spoke at an outdoor mass meeting in Canton, Ohio, criticizing the war. No known recordings of Debs’ voice exist, but actor Tim Robbins read the speech in a 2009 performance of Voices of the People’s History of the United States, produced by Anthony Arnove and the late historian Howard Zinn. Debs said, accusing Wall Street tycoons of warmaking,

“Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch patriot. Every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug. What rot. What false pretense. Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.”

Debs was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. His address to the court at sentencing, on Sep. 18, 1918, is considered one of the most eloquent speeches in modern English. That’s the speech Mamdani quoted. Debs opened with perhaps his most famous words (performed at a different Voices event by actor David Strathairn),

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Debs served three years in federal prison – running his final presidential campaign, in 1920, from his cell.

New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani chooses his words carefully. In quoting Eugene Debs, he not only signaled his Democratic socialist beliefs; he was issuing a call to action. Like Debs, Mamdani understands, and his campaign embodied, that the struggle for justice requires mass organizing.

President Donald Trump has threatened to punish New York City for electing Mamdani, by cutting off federal funds. Like President Taft, Trump has deployed the military to several cities, and promises more. Mamdani replied to Trump in his speech with a challenge:

“To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” He went on, “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/6/zohran_mamdani_eugene_v_debs_and

Michael Meade: Genuine and Undivided

A very wise and true piece from one of my longtime teachers, Michael Meade. Deep bow to Michael. And it has certainly been my experience that we either meet and embrace life's challenges and sorrows and the divisions and delusions we absorb by growing more curious, courageous, compassionate, loving, and whole or we contract and become increasingly fearful and rigid, bitter and brittle, and disconnected and lost to who we truly are. Living out of our authentic and sacred Selves is such a deep imperative. Through the wisdom of our hearts and souls we are able to seek the vista beyond the one we now see and ultimately become empowered to bring more and more of our much needed and holy gifts to our beautiful, hurting world. May it be so. 🙏Molly

 

At the human level, when faced with a great obstacle or a true dilemma, there will be one of two outcomes: Either we will become bigger people who understand ourselves and the world better, or we will become smaller souls more narrow in our thinking and ultimately more rejecting of the mystery and wonder of life. We may feel overwhelmed by fear and anxiety as the tension in life becomes greater and problems seem to grow in size as time runs out, but what life wants is meaningful change. Either we face the way that life roars at us and become wiser and more of a friend of the world, or else we run in fear and shrink from life, mystery, and love.

When faced with a difficult choice, a child will run to one side or the other, typically looking for the place of least tension and greatest comfort. Maturity, however, is related to a person’s ability to withstand and even understand the tensions that come with growing up and facing up to the issues at hand. To mature means “to ripen,” not simply to take on responsibilities but to be exposed to the weather of life and become fully grown, well-rounded, and finally ripened. In order to withstand the stress of life, a person must become who they truly are at seed and ripen into the unique individual they are intended to be from the very beginning.

"In the end, all the troubles we face and the struggles we endure serve the purpose of helping us become true and unique individuals."

 Individual means “un-divided,” the one not divided on the inside, thus able to withstand great pressure from the outside world. The genuine individual is a less divided person who has suffered their own inner conflicts enough to know that an underlying unity can at times be found.

Those who insist upon choosing one side of an issue and condemning those on the opposite side are themselves split and divided within. Their insistence on certainty in the outside world belies a greater uncertainty and lack of self-knowledge in the inner realm. A neurotic is a “divided person,” one who suffers inner splits that obstruct meaningful change as well as emotional and spiritual growth. A neurosis forms where honest suffering has been avoided.

Becoming a genuine individual requires learning the oppositions within oneself. Those who deny or refuse to face the oppositions within themselves have no choice but to find enemies to project their inner conflicts upon. Enemy simply means a “not-friend;” until a person deals with the not-friend within them, they will find many seeming enemies all around them. There are certainly real conflicts and unfriendly people in the world, but real change has to begin where we each are conflicted within ourselves.

"The genuine individual or undivided person must be made again and again from creative tensions generated by facing fundamental oppositions within the self."

Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas. The same is true for groups that create unnecessary enemies by refusing to deal with their own shadow elements and inner conflicts.

The actual end of the world seems most possible when the power of imagination becomes diminished and people cannot envision creative ways to handle the inevitable conflicts and dilemmas of life. The emergence of the third thing requires an act of imagination and becomes an act of creation as something that was unknown or unseen becomes manifest and consciously known. The eruption of the third thing coming between opposing poles creates a quantum change that changes everything. From a mythic perspective, it repeats the original process of creation when the sky and earth were separated and the world became visible and life became viable.

This world may be at times a valley of tears, a place of great conflict where the blind lead the blind, the one-eyed man rises to rule, and the single-minded, true believers battle endlessly. But it is also the realm where creation is ongoing and each person is threaded to the eternal, capable of being a vehicle for revelation in some way.

Each moment which is fully entered into becomes momentous in some way; the world offers second chances more than once. In mythic terms, it is rarely “three strikes and you’re out,” but more the sense that the third time is the charm. The third thing waiting to be found beyond or below any opposition turns a seeming end into the beginning again—not because someone intelligently figures the whole thing out, but because an unseen aspect enters the space between the opposites. When one genuinely suffers the tension of the opposites, something unexpected will occur; something as yet unconscious or unknown will become conscious, and with that awakening there will also come a renewal of vitality and basic life energy.

— Michael Meade

From Why the World Doesn't End

https://www.mosaicvoices.org/

This Is Why Voters Are Looking For Something New

 So well said, wise, and true. — Molly

I have no idea how this will land with readers. But after a day of watching and listening to stunned people on both sides of the aisle here in the South, I feel compelled to reason it out - as I do - in writing.

People love to act shocked when someone like Zohran Mamdani wins. They scream socialism as if that word alone explains everything. They never bother to look at the country they are defending.

Start with the basics. Minimum wage stuck at $7.25 while the price of eggs plays powerball. Rent takes half a paycheck and the landlord still treats you like a squatter. Groceries cost more every month. You get charged for bags, carts, and the privilege of staying alive.

Health care? Miss one shift and you owe a hospital more than a luxury car. We die in debt. We are born in debt. We live in debt. The economy runs on a hamster wheel of panic.

The average home buyer is now pushing forty. Most young people have never seen a starter home. They get starter roommates. Starter basements. Starter despair. Meanwhile, the wealth gap is a canyon with billionaires launching rockets across it for fun.

Child care costs more than college. Elder care drains the last dollars a family has left. Then dying costs thousands too. They bill you long after your pulse quits.

People are lectured to work harder by politicians who have never worked a day. The same politicians who call it radical to want a doctor, a house, and a chance. They yell about freedom while millions choose between medicine and rent.

This is why voters are looking for something new. They are tired of pretending the current system works. They are tired of being told survival is a luxury. They do not want a revolution. They just want a life.

So when Mamdani wins, maybe the bigger question is not why New York elected him. Maybe the question is why the rest of the country keeps voting for the pain.

— Kevin Bart

Maya Angelou: A Brave and Startling Truth

Photo by Molly

 A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

— Maya Angelou