....we

“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 

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 A Brave and Startling Truth

thanks to Coyote Prime and Alex Noble

....from her heart

A few Fridays ago my daughter Erin and I went to the local elementary/junior high school at lunch time to give the children an opportunity to sign a banner to ask the Japanese government to put a stop to the taking of dolphins for captivity..... to stop the slaughter of the dolphin not pretty enough to perform in marine parks around the world.

Close to 400 children signed...kids love dolphins...see the magic in them...we heard that repeatedly from the little and bigger girls, "ohhh, I love dolphins!"....

Well they need our help.

September 1 was the beginning of this horror at the cove in Tiaji, Japan.

 Erin has turned over a lot of her energy to putting an end to the annual 6 month slaughter.

Last Thursday, the day they beginning killing the dolphins in The Cove, she arrived in San Francisco for the peaceful protest she was responsible for putting together in front of the the Japanese Consulate.  

The petition some of you may have signed, along with the kid's banner, was put into the hands of the gentleman who came out to receive them.  

There was an excellent turn out.  Erin worked hard at putting the information out there.

 And needless to say I am very proud of her.  

From a FB reader....

Hi Erin, I was so touched by some of your posts recently and the heart felt passion you have for protecting life on our planet. 

I appreciate the depth of your emotion...

it feels sometimes that we are just "dust in the wind".

I want to share this recent note I posted on my wall just hours ago...it was about a synchrononistic find I happened upon while going through old documents on my computer... It is a bit long but truly valuable information that will help energize you. 

Erin, Thank you for your big beautiful wide open loving heart....all earthlings rejoice each time it beats! Be empowered, my friend, because your expanding love is what will save the world...love never fails!! 

                                                   Dolphin Smiles and Whale Hugs,Lanis

the note

https://www.facebook.com/notes/lanis-loveday-chidel/lifes-journey-the-rules-of-road-13-principles-of-spiritual-activism/236871153023919

.....finding our Tribe

My totem is the Turtle
I found my Turtle Tribe...postcard from SL

"A Gathering of the Tribe"

by Charles Eisenstein

"Once upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind.

One day the shaman of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around him, and he spoke very solemnly. "My friends," he said, "there is a world that needs our help. It is called Earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, and they will be stillborn without our help. Who would like to volunteer for a mission to this time and place, and render service to humanity?"

"Tell us more about his mission," they asked.

"I am glad you asked, because it is no small thing. I will put you into a deep, deep trance, so complete that you will forget who you are. You will live a human life, and in the beginning you will completely forget your origins. You will forget even our language and your own true name. You will be separated from the wonder and beauty of our world, and from the love that bathes us all. You will miss it deeply, yet you will not know what it is you are missing. You will only remember the love and beauty that we know to be normal as a longing in your heart. Your memory will take the form of an intuitive knowledge, as you plunge into the painfully marred earth, that a more beautiful world is possible.

"As you grow up in that world, your knowledge will be under constant assault. You will be told in a million ways that a world of destruction, violence, drudgery, anxiety, and degradation is normal. You may go through a time when you are completely alone, with no allies to affirm your knowledge of a more beautiful world. You may plunge into a depth of despair that we, in our world of light, cannot imagine. But no matter what, a spark of knowledge will never leave you. A memory of your true origin will be encoded in your DNA. That spark will lie within you, inextinguishable, until one day it is awakened.

"You see, even though you will feel, for a time, utterly alone, you will not be alone. I will send you assistance, help that you will experience as miraculous, experiences that you will describe as transcendent. For a few moments or hours or days, you will reawaken to the beauty and the joy that is meant to be. You will see it on earth, for even though the planet and its people are deeply wounded, there is beauty there still, projected from past and future onto the present as a promise of what is possible and a reminder of what is real.

"You will also receive help from each other. As you begin to awaken to your mission you will meet others of our tribe. You will recognize them by your common purpose, values, and intuitions, and by the similarity of the paths you have walked. As the condition of the planet earth reaches crisis proportions, your paths will cross more and more. The time of loneliness, the time of thinking you might be crazy, will be over.

"You will find the people of your tribe all over the earth, and become aware of them through the long-distance communication technologies used on that planet. But the real shift, the real quickening, will happen in face-to-face gatherings in special places on earth. When many of you gather together you will launch a new stage on your journey, a journey which, I assure you, will end where it began. Then, the mission that lay unconscious within you will flower into consciousness. Your intuitive rebellion against the world presented you as normal will become an explicit quest to create a more beautiful one.

"In the time of loneliness, you will always be seeking to reassure yourself that you are not crazy. You will do that by telling people all about what is wrong with the world, and you will feel a sense of betrayal when they don't listen to you. You will be hungry for stories of wrongness, atrocity, and ecological destruction, all of which confirm the validity of your intuition that a more beautiful world exists. But after you have fully received the help I will send you, and the quickening of your gatherings, you will no longer need to do that. Because, you will Know. Your energy will thereafter turn toward actively creating that more beautiful world."

A tribeswoman asked the shaman, "How do you know this will work? Are you sure your shamanic powers are great enough to send us on such a journey?"

The shaman replied, "I know it will work because I have done it many times before. Many have already been sent to earth, to live human lives, and to lay the groundwork for the mission you will undertake now. I've been practicing! The only difference now is that many of you will venture there at once. What is new in the time you will live in, is that the Gatherings are beginning to happen."

A tribesman asked, "Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin, and that we will separated from our beloved ones forever?"

The shaman replied, "That is impossible. The more deeply you get lost, the more powerful the help I will send you. You might experience it at the time as a collapse of your personal world, the loss of everything important to you. Later you will recognize the gift within it. We will never abandon you."

Another man asked, "Is it possible that our mission will fail, and that this planet, earth, will perish?"

The shaman replied, "I will answer your question with a paradox. It is impossible that your mission will fail. Yet, its success hangs on your own actions. The fate of the world is in your hands. The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles within, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you do now, that everything you do matters. God sees everything."

There were no more questions. The volunteers gathered in a circle, and the shaman went to each one. The last thing each was aware of was the shaman blowing smoke in his face. They entered a deep trance and dreamed themselves into the world where we find ourselves today."

※※※

"Who are these missionaries from the more beautiful world? You and I are surely among them. Where else could this longing come from, for this magical place to be found nowhere on earth, this beautiful time outside of time? It comes from our intuitive knowledge of our origin and destination. The longing, indomitable, will never settle for a world that is less. Against all reason, we look upon the horrors of our age, mounting over the millennia, and we say NO, it does not have to be this way! We know it, because we have been there. We carry in our souls the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Reason says it is impossible; reason says that even to slow -- much less reverse -- the degradation of the planet is an impossible task: politically unfeasible, opposed by the Money Power and its oligarchies. It is true that those powers will fight to uphold the world we have known. Their allies lurk within even ourselves: despair, cynicism, and resignation to carving out a life that is "good enough" for me and mine.

But we of the tribe know better. In the darkest despair a spark of hope lies inextinguishable within us, ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news. However compelling the cynicism, a jejune idealism lives within us, always ready to believe, always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh eyes, surviving despite infinite disappointments. And however resigned we may have felt, our aggrandizement of me and mine is half-hearted, for part of our energy is looking elsewhere, outward toward our true mission.

I would like to advise caution against dividing the world into two types of people, those who are of the tribe and those who are not. How often have you felt like an alien in a world of people who don't get it and don't care? The irony is that nearly everyone feels that way, deep down. When we are young the feeling of mission and the sense of magnificent origins and a magnificent destination is strong. Any career or way of life lived in betrayal of that knowing is painful, and can only be maintained through an inner struggle that shuts down a part of our being. For a time, we can keep ourselves functioning through various kinds of addictions or trivial pleasures to consume the life force and dull the pain. In earlier times, we might have kept the sense of mission and destiny buried for a lifetime, and called that condition maturity. Times are changing now though, as millions of people are awakening to their mission all at the same time. The condition of the planet is waking us up. Another way to put it, is that we are becoming young again.

When you feel that sense of alienation, when you look upon that sea of faces mired so inextricably in the old world and fighting to maintain it, think back to a time when you too were, to all outside appearances, a full and willing participant in that world as well. The same spark of revolution you carried then, the same secret refusal, dwells in all people. How was it that you finally stopped fighting it? How was it that you came to realize that you were right all along, that the world offered to us is wrong, and that no life is worth living that does not in some way strive to create a better one? How was it that it became intolerable to devote your life energy toward the perpetuation of the old world? Most likely, it happened when the old world fell apart around your ears.

As the multiple crises of money, health, energy, ecology, and more converge upon us, the world is going to collapse for millions more. We must stand ready to welcome them into the tribe. We must stand ready to welcome them back home.

The time of loneliness, of walking the path alone, of thinking maybe the world is right and I am wrong for refusing to participate fully in it... that time is over. For years we walked around talking about how wrong everything is: the political system, the educational system, religious institutions, the military-industrial complex, the banking industry, the medical system -- really, any system you study deeply enough. We needed to talk about it because we needed to assure ourselves that we were not, in fact, crazy. We needed as well to talk about alternatives, the way things should be. "We" should eliminate CFCs. "They" should stop cutting down the rain forests. "The government" should declare no fishing zones. This talk, too, was necessary, for it validated our vision of the world that could be: a peaceful and exuberant humanity living in co-creative partnership with a wild garden earth.

The time, though, for talking merely to assure ourselves that we are right is coming to an end. People everywhere are tired of it, tired of attending yet another lecture, organizing yet another discussion group online. We want more. A few weeks ago as I was preparing for a speaking trip to Oregon, the organizers told me, "These people don't need to be told what the problems are. They don't even need to be told what the solutions are. They already know that, and many of them are already in action. What they want is to take their activism to the next level."

To do that, to fully step into one's mission here on earth, one must experience an inner shift that cannot be merely willed upon oneself. It does not normally happen through the gathering or receiving of information, but through various kinds of experiences that reach deep into our unconscious minds. Whenever I am blessed with such an experience, I get the sense that some benevolent yet pitiless power - the shaman in the story - has reached across the void to quicken me, to reorganize my DNA, to rewire my nervous system. I come away changed.

One way it happens is through the "gathering of the tribe" I described in this story. I think many people who attended the recent Reality Sandwich retreat in Utah experienced something like this. Such gatherings are happening now all over the world. You go back, perhaps, to "real life" afterwards, but it no longer seems so real. Your perceptions and priorities change. New possibilities emerge. Instead of feeling stuck in your routines, life changes around you at a vertiginous pace. The unthinkable becomes commonsense and the impossible becomes easy. It may not happen right away, but once the internal shift has occurred, it is inevitable.

Here I am, a speaker and a writer, going on about how the time for mere talk has ended. Yet not all words are mere talk. A spirit can ride the vehicle of words, a spirit that is larger than, yet not separate from, their meaning. Sometimes I find that when I bow into service, that spirit inhabits the space in which I speak and affects all present. A sacredness infuses our conversations and the non-verbal experiences that are becoming part of my events. In the absence of that sacredness, I feel like a smart-ass, up there entertaining people and telling them information they could just as easily read online. Last Friday night I spoke on a panel in New York, one of three smart-asses, and I think many in the audience left disappointed (though maybe not as disappointed as I was in myself). We are looking for something more, and it is finding us.

The revolutionary spark of our true mission has been fanned into flames before, only to return again to an ember. You may remember an acid trip in 1975, a Grateful Dead concert in 1982, a kundalini awakening in 1999 -- an event that, in the midst of it, you knew was real, a privileged glimpse into a future that can actually manifest. Then later, as its reality faded into memory and the inertial routines of life consumed you, you perhaps dismissed it and all such experiences as an excursion from life, a mere "trip." But something in you knows it was real, realer than the routines of normalcy. Today, such experiences are accelerating in frequency even as "normal" falls apart. We are at the beginning of a new phase. Our gatherings are not a substitute for action; they are an initiation into a state of being from which the necessary kinds of actions arise. Soon you will say, with wonder and serenity, "I know what to do, and I trust myself to do it."

- http://www.realitysandwich.com/gathering_tribe

....but we better not tax them...sigh

this is just wrong...and has been for too long for too many


just a little food for thought.....

The overwhelming majority of the US population is unaware of the vast wealth at hand. 
An entire generation of unprecedented wealth creation has been concealed from 99 percent of the population for over 35 years.  
Having never personally experienced this wealth, the average American cannot comprehend what is possible if even a fraction of the money was used for the betterment of society.  Given modern technology and wealth, American citizens should not be living in poverty.  
The statistics demonstrate that we now live in a neo-feudal society.  In comparison to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population, who are sitting on top of tens of trillions of dollars in wealth, we are essentially propagandized peasants.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are struggling to get by,
 while tens of trillion of dollars are consolidated within a small fraction of the population,

 is a crime against humanity. 

 The next time you are stressed out, struggling to make ends meet and pay off your debts, just think about the trillions of dollars sitting in the obscenely bloated pockets of the financial elites.  I still cling to the hope that once enough people become aware of this fact, 
we can have the non-violent revolution we so urgently need.  

Until then, the rich get richer as a critical mass of increasingly dire economic prospects desperately struggles to make ends meet" 

for the complete article as well as other important things you may not know about,

 but probably should, check out Running 'Caus I Can't Fly

.....love, love xo

So silly these days...everything that touches my heart makes me cry...

and this does it...when I think of you.

xoxo

....a gem

my beautiful friend Bettina sends what she calls Gems to me everyday..

.and everyday they resonate....

Want to share this one..

.xoxoxo

Like Attracts Like 

Thursday August 18, 2011 

The law of opposites attracting may apply in the physical world, but in the spiritual, it’s like attracts like.

Imitating the Creator’s unconditional love for humanity is how you bring love into your life, and create harmony between yourself and other people, and between humanity and the natural world.

On this day of your life, dear friend, I believe God wants you to know...

...that you should never be content with so little when you can reach out for something big.

Charles L. Allen asked a question about that, wondering why so many people settle for so little. You do not have to place yourself among them. The world is an abundant place. Abundant with opportunity, abundant with good fortune, abundant with ideas, and abundant with love.

Reach into that abundance and take what is rightfully yours. It is your inheritance, gifted to you by God. Let yourself have it. Do not fail to reach for it for fear that it will not come to you. How can it come to you if you do not reach for it?

Do not be content with so little. Reach, stretch, for something big.

Love, Your Friend....Neale 

.... just some snippets for you

In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, 

but how many momenst took your breath away...


Isn't life strange?
A turn of the page
A book without light
Unless with love we write
to throw it away
to lose just a day
The quicksand of time
you know it makes me want to cry, cry, cry
...the Moody Blues


"Long you live and high you'll fly and smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be." ...Pink Floyd  


Boom, boom, boom, ain't it great to  be crazy?
Boom, boom, boom, ain't it great to be crazy?
Giddy and foolish the whole day through
Boom, boom, boom, ain't it great to be crazy?



Bella, you beautiful Luna
Oh Bella, do what you do 
Bella Luna, my beautiful beautiful moon
How you swoon me like no other
...jason Mraz



Happiness runs in a circular motion
Thought is like a little boat upon the sea
Everybody is part of everything anyway
You can have everything if you let yourself be
Happiness runs, Happiness runs.
Donovan


Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...
let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars...



Beauty, truth, friendship, love, creation..these are the great values in life.  We can't prove them, or explain them, yet they are the most stable things in our lives.
....jesse Herman Holmes 


 My, my, my, let your bright light shine...Rob Thomas


It's true that we don't know what we've got until we lose it, but it's also true that we don't know what we've been missing until it arrives.

....little things

The Star Thrower

There was a man who was walking along a sandy beach where thousands of

starfish had been washed up on the shore. He noticed a boy picking the

starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man observed

the boy for a few minutes and then asked what he was doing. The boy replied

that he was returning the starfish to the sea, otherwise they would die.

The man asked how saving a few, when so many were doomed, would make any

difference whatsoever? The boy picked up a starfish and threw it back into

the ocean and said "Made a difference to that one..."

The man left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had

said.  He soon returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping

the boy throw starfish in to the sea....

Loren Eiseley T

....what are we allowing?????

I had a different post in mind today...and uplifting poem, with a pretty picture.

But this came to me from a friend...changed my day.

I don't want to be sad...

and I don't want to put sad in your life either.  

But my God, we should be beyond sad for the state of the world and it's children.

What are we doing?

How can we allow this?

What is going on?

There are a zillion articles and stats about child solders, children who work as slaves, children fending for themselves  in the streets worldwide, child sex slaves, children dying of abuse and starvation...horrors...and it's not just There, it's Here.

Yet television news seems to indicate we care more about stars in reality shows than just about anything else.  Is that really who we are...?   Does television represent who we are?  

Every day children suffer things we can't even imagine, yet nothing seems to change. 

I don't know answers.  

Send money if you can and pray the corrupt governments let it get where it needs to go?  

I think it is our voices that need to be heard more than anything...if we care we have to demand change.  Don't we??  Do we care?  

And I know about charity beginning at home...this planet it  home?

Is it is very hard to go about my day because I'm as guilty as the next person. 

 I watch and say, it's a tragedy, I cry, and do nothing...because I suffer from apathy.  

There are days when it is hard to believe that anything will get better...

instead I think it is going to get a whole lot worse.  

Everyone seems to be looking the other way

I lay it at the feet of the 'grownups' in the world..

 as well as at the feet of world leaders, corporations and banks.

And I wonder would we care more if they were white children?

But this I do know...what befalls one of us, can befall all of us.  

And if you look at what is happening here in America, drought, corruption, greed, ignorance, poverty, joblessness, lack of medical care, war machines, rage and fear and complacency .....it seems a very real possibility.

World poverty today: S-S Africa

A child dies every four seconds from HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty often before their fifth birthday. 15 children die every minute. Over 22,000 children die worldwide every single day. About 8 million children die every year.  (Source: UNICEF)

More than one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water and water for domestic purposes. Water problems are worse especially in Africa. (source: World vision)

About 4 million newborns die worldwide during their first month of life. About 2.5 million children die every year because they are not immunized. (sources:World Health Organization)

Can you imagine?