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!

 

 

Nor'easter Teaches Lessons

The really earnest and alert aspirant finds lessons in every object around her.  Every moment of her life is a moment of choice between the true and the false.  Every spiritual aspirant must be wide-awake and keep the fire of discrimination always bright in her heart.  No event, no thought, should escape her notice.  To such a person the whole universe is a great book of knowledge.                   

                                                            Swami Yatiswaradananda

So, what are the lessons of this loss?

• Nothing is permanent.
• Don't get attached.
• Don't take it personally.
• Have no expectations.
• Appreciate the moment.

Our beautiful crab apple did her best to be flexible in the high winds of last night's Nor'easter.  She will continue to bloom to her fullest ability...reminding us that no matter what happens...

We are always BEAUTIFUL.

May 24 and Snowing and I'm Not Kidding

Planted marigolds yesterday and put them on the windowsill.

"Look outside.  See the big beautiful spring world you'll enter soon."

Around noon, the snow began to fall and I think the little seeds are debating about whether to come out in this weather....

Our pink flowering crab looks a little snow shocked, too!

Today, Celebrate Giving

May's full moon is the 2013 day Buddhists 'round the world observe the birth, enlightenment and death of Gautama Buddha.  

Giving something we have to someone who needs it is a great way to celebrate Buddha's remarkable life.  Forgiveness, attention, food, kindness, shelter and support are gifts we can give away daily; Jesus and Buddha both encouraged sharing!  

Practicing Buddhist or not, today one can recall the Buddha's precious teachings and how we can incorporate them into daily life.  As the Dalai Lama says, by giving of ourselves we increase our own happiness.

With great love, I lift up my dear friend, Sujata Naidu, who has taught me so much about Buddhism and giving.

http://www.yowangdu.com/tibetan-buddhism/water-offering-bowls.html

Dear Readers:
For some time, I haven't felt the desire to write in this space.
So, at this change of season, I'm announcing my own shift:
I have no plans for new posts. Please feel free to peruse the archives; perhaps you will find something of meaning for this moment in your life.
May this be a Spring of Transformation!  May we all find ways to experience more gratitude, contentment and new forms of self expression.
Your Bethany with love

A Mighty Lenten Message

Powerful Words from my Favorite Contemporary Writer...Sister Joan Chittister. (Here she is, pictured with the Dalai Lama)

The Eucharist Dilemma

The major problem of eucharistic theology in our century is not that people do not understand and value the meaning of Eucharist. The problem is that they do.

The Eucharist, every child learns young, is the sign of Christian community, the very heart of it, in fact. And who would deny the bond, the depth, the electrical force that welds us together in it? Here, we know, is the linkage between us and the Christ, between us and the Gospel, between us and the Tradition that links us to Jesus himself and so to the world around us. No, what the Eucharist is meant to be is not what’s in doubt.

What’s in doubt is that the Eucharist is really being allowed to do what it purports to do—to connect us, to unify us, to make us One. The truth is that as much as Eucharist is a sign of community it is also a sign of division. For the sake of some kind of ecclesiastical political fiascos centuries ago between the East and West, we close the table between Orthodox and Uniate—though the faith is the same and the commitments are the same and the vision of life and death are the same.

What’s in doubt, too, is that the divisions posited between baptized men and baptized women can possibly witness to what we say is the faith: that men and women are equal; that women are fully human beings; that God’s grace is indivisible; that discipleship is incumbent on us all; that we are all called to follow Christ.

At the end of one presentation after another, women make it a point to continue the discussion with me. ‘I used to be Catholic,’ they begin. ‘I was a Catholic once,’ they say. ‘I’m a recovering Catholic now,’ they announce. It’s a sad litany of disillusionment and abandonment by a Church they once thought promised them fullness of life and then let them know that it is their very persons that deny them that. They are to get out of the pronouns and off the altars of the Church, they read in its latest dictums. They may want to follow Jesus but Jesus, they’re told, does not want to be followed by them.

Call it ‘holy’ communion if you want, they tell me, but it’s not. Not like that. Not under those conditions.

So they go away to where Jesus waits for them, arms open, in someone else’s Christian church. There’s something about it all that simply defies the lesson of Mary Magdalene or the Woman at the Well or Mary of Bethany or Mary of Nazareth. They go where every minister at the altar, every bishop, every lawgiver, every homilist, every member of every Synod on the planet is not male. They go where they can see ‘the image of God’ in themselves in another woman. They go where eucharistic theology, which we’re told makes us one, is palpable.

– from “Eucharist” by Joan Chittister, Spirituality Magazine. Volume 18, March-April 2012, No 101. Dominican Publications: Republic of Ireland.

Beautiful Message from Beautiful Joan Chittister

A Place Called "Home"

In each of us there is a place where we go in the middle of chaos to escape from the fray. It is that “home” place, that hiding place, that soft place where no memories of it come with ragged edges and no thought of it is tinged with fear. It’s an empty beach, perhaps. Or a hidden place on the bluff above town where we remember being able to see everything while no one could see us.

It is the place of our dreams and the hope of our hopes.

It’s that place to which we return in our minds to change life in the middle of too much life for us to take just then.

It’s that natural place within us where the roar of the water or the silence of the mountains or the warmth of the desert or the moss of the swamp soothes our souls and makes us feel human again, at one with the universe again, in control again.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, it calms us and makes us new again.

For me, ironically, that special place was right in the center of the city. In the very shadows of the city buildings lay a world beyond the world. It was the public dock on the bay of one of the Great Lakes, where tourists came to fish and sail and ride on a water taxi from the mainland over to the peninsula. Nothing more than a hotdog was ever sold there. There were no bands, no arcade games, no skate-board parks. It was commercially non-commercial. And yet it was my own small planet. There in that place everyone walked more slowly than usual, talked in more measured tones, dared to sit alone on the breakwall in total silence. There you could simply be yourself, no airs, no deadlines, no pressure, nothing false to serve or adore. Nothing that required us to bow down before it. There we just all melted into nature.

It is that kind of place of which the Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, paints. His work, called genre painting, is a call to us to understand the relationships we build between who we are and where we are. He reminds us of our place in the universe, small, simple and sustained by the world around us.

In our own day, when technology has trumped nature, we would do well to sink into Bruegel’s work and remember who we are. We would do well to realize that those “home” places we all need andseek out in a time of the mechanical, the digital, the virtual and the plastic are calling us to the

center of our real selves. We must remember that it is the self for which we are seeking when we leave our worlds of glitz and glamour and sink into the real world. It is environment that shapes us and it is the natural to which we must, like Bruegel, cling when everyone else abandons it or lose the very soul of our lives.

– from The Monastic Way by Joan Chittister (February 2012). Order now.

I'm Ready for 2012

2012

Love the number.

I see Happy Birthday, Bethany, on 2-12-2012!

Love the number 60!

I see GO!

I'm ready, 2012.

Meet the Neighbor

My neighbor in New Port Richey.  Isn't he handsome?  Christmas colors!

Keeping Faith

We're in the second week of Advent, and I want to share this wonderful little essay by James Dillet Freeman on Keeping Faith. Upon reading it, I was inspired me and strengthened, and I hope it will do the same for you.

"Christmas is a way of keeping faith in the power and love of God and the goodness of things, even when we see only small evidence of their presence in the world around us. Christmas is more than just a festive celebration, a tinsel time for getting gifts and having parties. It is a declaration that there is an element---divine, isn't it?----in us human beings which is stronger than all our weaknesses, braver than all our fears, surer than all our doubts---something which in the darkest days proclaims its faith in the advancing light and, even through the worst of winter lies yet ahead, keeps confident that spring is on its way.

Let the snow fall as it may, and let the short days hang on dark and cold; there is that in us which refuses to submit to icy season or gloomy reason, but stops forth into the wind and snow and says in a cheery voice to the world and every passerby, 'Merry Christmas!'"

I Pray You Enough

A friend passed on this story.

Overheard a mother and daughter in their last moments together at the airport.. They had announced the departure. Standing near the security gate, they hugged, and the mother said, 'I love you, and I pray you enough.'

The daughter replied, 'Mom, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I pray you enough, too, Mom.'

They kissed, and the daughter left. The mother walked over to the window where I was seated. Standing there, I could see she wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on her privacy, but she welcomed me in by asking, 'Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?'

Yes, I have,' I replied. 'Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever good-bye?'

'Well...I'm not as young as I once was; she lives so far away & has her own busy life. I have some challenges ahead, and the reality is - her next trip back will be for my funeral,' she said.

'When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, 'I pray you enough.' May I ask what that means?'

She began to smile. 'That's a prayer that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone.' She paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail, and she smiled even more. 'When we said, 'I pray you enough,' we wanted the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them.'

Then, turning toward me, she shared the following as if she were reciting it from memory.

I pray you enough sun to keep your attitude bright no matter how gray the day may appear..

I pray you enough rain to appreciate the sun even more.

I pray you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive and everlasting.

I pray you enough pain so that even the smallest of joys in life may appear bigger.

I pray you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.

I pray you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.

I pray you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.

Then, she began to cry, and walked away.

They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but an entire life to forget them.

TAKE TIME TO LIVE.......

To all my readers, I PRAY YOU ENOUGH.......

Sending Super-Powered Christmas Cards

A dear friend asked me if I knew of any reliable websites selling Christmas cards that benefit good causes. What a great question!

My answer is yes, and here they are. I welcome any other ideas from readers...let's encourage one another to support good works, in the name of Jesus.

Here's a great place to start: http://www.cardsthatgive.org/

And few personal favorites: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest Peace promoting organization: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2507/t/12047/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=943

Another remarkable group is the mouth and foot painters association. Yes, these folks paint the art for cards, holding a brush in their mouth or foot:

http://www.mfpausa.com/

If you are interested in preserving endangered species...how about Florida's manatees?

http://shopsavethemanatee.org/holiday-items/2011-holiday-cards/

You can never go wrong with the sweet drawings made by the world's children, published as cards by UNICEF:

https://www.shopcardsandgifts.unicefusa.org/group.aspx?grp=7F9C1F03-EFCA-4372-B568-879AD07940C7

MAY YOU FIND GREAT JOY IN WISHING EACH OTHER HOLIDAY JOY!

Letting Go Creates Space for the Unknown

Even God cannot make two mountains without a valley in between.
— Gaelic saying

Taking time between....what a lovely concept. Autumn provides such a break in the calendar year...between our Vermont summer and Florida winter.

October has become a valley, by choice. I am enjoying the time to deepen down into my yoga and meditation practices.

This weekend, I grounded myself with a welcome stay at the Sivananda International Ashram and Yoga Camp in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. The fall colors were as healing and beautiful as the yoga classes, satsangs and talks by a visiting Tibetan monk, Lama Tenzin Yignyen, instructor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Hobart and William Smith College in New York. What a grand time to visit the Ashram...Thanksgiving weekend in Canada!

Yes, I gave thanks. And will continue to for this valley of earthly delight.

Season Changes...Take Good Care

We in the northern hemisphere have welcomed autumn. We find our days marked by less and less sunlight.

This week, I am launching a five week yoga course on "winterproofing" ourselves against the pitfalls of cold weather life.

Beyond the physical challenges of frostbite, head colds and falling on the ice...we Yankees face great challenges to our mental health with this seasonal change. Depression leaks in through the drafty windows. Seasonal Affective Depression Disorder (perfectly nicknamed SADD) can claim whole families.

While preparing for this special yoga series, I received the information on a Harvard study (below) from a friend. I thought the results were worth posting, as we all need to see the value of Self Care and the importance of working hard to Prevent Depression from gaining any ground in our lives.

Self Care is not selfish! Practicing yoga or other healthy pastimes benefits everyone in our lives. My wish for all this fall and winter is that we remember to love ourselves daily. As Swami Sivananda taught, "Health is wealth. Peace of mind is happiness and yoga shows the way."

Study: Depression associated with increased risk of stroke
September 26 2011

People who suffer from depression have a 45% increased risk of stroke and a 55% higher risk of having a fatal stroke, according to a new study.

In an analysis of almost 318,000 people and 8,478 stroke cases, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health also found that depression is associated with a 25% higher risk for the less deadly ischemic strokes.

The relationship between depression and stroke is important to public health, researchers note, because stroke is the leading cause of disability. Lifestyle factors that might explain the link between depression and stroke include having poor health habits, such as drinking, smoking and not exercising. Depression also is correlated to conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and other inflammatory diseases.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What's a July Pie? Raspberry!

We picked fresh ripe raspberries in our backyard today...and tonight, in anticipation of our dear Sujata's arrival tomorrow....made a Vermont Raspberry Pie...whole wheat crust...topped with a Georgia peach. Yum!