Look Who I Met on My Walk Today

In the Village of Greensboro, Vermont

Let's Do Justice

Shakar Aamer

An important phone call to make with your unlimited long distance service: 

Every day, call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 or leave a comment at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact and ask the president to send Shaker Aamer back to his wife and 4 children in London.

LET’S DO JUSTICE. Aamer was living in Afghanistan with his family and running humanitarian aid projects, including a girls' school, when in the autumn of 2001 he was seized by Afghan forces and transferred to U.S. custody. He was sent to Guantanamo 11 years ago, tortured, abused and then cleared for release.

Aamer was cleared for release by President George W. Bush in 2007 and again by President Obama in 2010. Why is Shaker Aamer being force-fed by the Obama administration instead of being sent home? That's the question the President will not answer.

The hunger strike by prisoners at Guantanamo has passed 100 days with no action from President Barack Obama. His administration admits that more than 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo are now on a hunger strike, and 30 are being force-fed.

Here is a first easy action President Obama could take today: Send Shaker Aamer back to London. He is the last British resident being held at Guantanamo and the United Kingdom's secretary of defense has been demanding his return.

Why Birds Look So Peaceful

My Florida Friend, the intrepid boy photographer Roy, sent me this lovely scene of an early evening dinner in Wisconsin.  He said the guests were a, "peaceful crowd."

What does that little barn look like to you?  I never saw the resemblance before.

Do you think they're peaceful because they are giving thanks while they eat?

Enjoy this day.

Be thankful.

New Life! More Beauty on Earth!

Glorious Marigold seeds from Ramakrishna's beautiful Mysore ashram.

Fifteen days since planting, 15 seeds woke up and are sprouting on the Vermont windowsill.  Thrilling!  Thank you, Divine Love, for the gift of life, and such beautiful life.

I Surrender...and am FREE

 

 

I Surrender 

Surrender is what cleans off the barnacles that have been clinging to the soul. It is the final act of human openness. Without it I am doomed to live inside a stagnant world called the self. The problem is that the self is a product of my own making. I myself shape the self. I construct it one experience, one attitude, one effort at a time till the person I become—rich in reality or starved for it—is finished. I shape me, great or small, wizened or insulated, out of the tiny little measures of newness that I allow to penetrate the depths of my darkness one dollop at a time. What I do not let into my world can never stretch my world, can never give it new color, can never fill it with a new kind of air, can never touch the parts of me that I never knew were there. What I once imagined must forever be, what I relived in memory for years, is no more. Openness saves me from the boundaries of the self and surrender to the moment is the essence of openness.

Surrender does not simply mean that I quit grieving what I do not have. It means that I surrender to new meanings and new circumstances, that I begin to think differently and to live somewhere that is totally elsewhere. I surrender to meanings I never cared to hear—or heard, maybe, but was not willing to understand. Try as I might to read more into someone’s words than they ever really meant, I must surrender to the final truths: She did not love me. They did not want me. What I want is not possible. And, hardest to bear of all, all arguments to the contrary are useless. I surrender to the fact that what I lived for without thought of leaving, I have now lost. Try as I might to turn back the clock, to relive a period of my life with old friends, in long-gone places, out of common memories, through old understandings and theologies of the past, I come to admit that such attempts are the myth of a mind in search of safer days. The way we were is over. They are in fact, laughable to many, resented by some, essentially different in intimation to each of us.

Surrender is the crossover point of life. It distinguishes who I was from who I have become. Life as I had fantasized is over. What is left is the spiritual obligation to accept reality so that the spiritual life can really happen to me.
–from Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)

Happy June!

My friend Roy is a master with the camera...driven by a great eye and an even greater HEART.  While he claims he is an amateur, I thank him for being my Man of Cheer.  I can always count on Roy to share Good News.  

Don't we all appreciate friends who help in keeping the balance in life?   While Brian Williams et. al. tell us how much trouble we're in...Roy reminds us of the miracles all around.  Here are his latest pix!