“Please stop your day, September 20, and join with the wise voices of our Courageous Young People”. “Remember, as adults in the September 20th Climate Strike and Week of Climate Action, our role is to support and amplify the voices of young people”
WE, AS A GLOBAL SOCIETY, ARE AT A CROSSROADS. WE HAVE A DECISION TO MAKE. ARE WE GOING TO CHOOSE MONEY OR POWER OR ARE WE GOING TO CHOOSE THE FUTURE? THE SEPTEMBER 20 STRIKE IS AN INVITATION TO EVERYONE TO CHOOSE US. CHOOSE THE KIDS, CHOOSE HUMANITY, CHOOSE THE FUTURE.
Strikewithus.org
Fighting climate breakdown is about much more than emissions and scientific metrics – it’s about fighting for a just and sustainable world that works for all of us.
https://globalclimatestrike.net
On Sept. 20-27, climate action organizers are planning a Global Climate Strike, with hopes that massive and consistent turnout will make a difference. If you’d like to join the 2019 Global Climate Strike, there are lots of ways you can get involved. And if there isn’t a strike planned in your city, the organizers want to help you plan one yourself.
“The climate crisis is an emergency but we’re not acting like it,” the strike’s official website reads. “People everywhere are at risk if we let oil, coal and gas companies continue to pour more fuel on the fire.” And yes, though past strikes have focused on students, adults are welcome and absolutely encouraged to take part, too.
“… What a bizarre new landscape, so full of eerie fascination, yet one we might also come to love again. We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against very kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. Aeroplanes, streaking down in flames, still have a weird fascination for us – even aesthetically – though we know, deep down, that human beings are being burnt alive. As long as that happens, while everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.”
cited: Trans: Arno Pomerans, An Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941 – 1943, p. 81.
Image and quote submitted in response to Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday Challenge
you missed this morning’s NPR’s Morning Edition.
“Let’s write a song about a woman telling a guy off.”
Ulaby, Neda. “‘You Don’t Own Me,’ A Feminist Anthem with Civil Rights Roots, Is All About Empathy.” June 26, 2019
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/735819094/lesley-gore-you-dont-own-me-american-anthem
“Many have taken up the song [You Don’t Own Me] as a symbol of women’s empowerment — like when the female cast of Saturday Night Live sang ‘You Don’t Own Me’ with actress Jessica Chastain the night of the 2018 Women’s March — but this fiercely feminist anthem was written by two men. David White died earlier this year, but John Madara, now 82 years old, says the two songwriters were disgusted by how much music written for female singers in the early 1960s centered on mooning over guys and decided to try something: “Let’s write a song about a woman telling a guy off.
“Madara says the song’s sensibility was also shaped by his upbringing in a multiracial Philadelphia neighborhood and his participation in the civil rights movement. ‘I saw how black people got treated,’ he says. ‘It was horrible, horrible, horrible. My friends and I got locked up in Philadelphia and Mississippi, and they treated us like gangsters. And my black friends got hit more than I got hit. [The police] had billy clubs and hit you across the legs, but the black guys got hit across the body. Those are things you don’t forget.'”
And while we’re talking about empathy, please join
Lights for Liberty is calling for communities around the country to join them in holding an event called: “Lights for Liberty: A Vigil to End Human Detention Camps”. The event will take place on Friday, July 12. To find out more about the organization and their plans for this national vigil you can go to their website – https://www.lightsforliberty.org/
Scattered petals gather on the road,
more colorful than the blossoms on the
branches. ~Hatsui Shizue (K Rexroth & I Atsumi, The Burning Heart)
September was the month when the American political environment had me wonder if I, like Washington Irving’s character, Rip Van Winkle, had slept through a cultural change so profound that my childhood values, morals, and guiding principles were left to rot in the wave of adults regressing back to the elementary school playground’s name-calling, bullying, and violence that left me cringe and hide with overwhelming fear and confusion.
What has blinded us to empathy? When did social justice become a basis of negation? How did human rights become a political loss? While the Great Wall of China is one of the great architectural wonders of the world, does anyone remember the lives of those encircled by the Warsaw Wall or the delight when the Berlin Wall came down?
If I didn’t have photography which invites me to shift “focus”, would this social regression have me rise up in anger and resentment? Would I become blind and deaf to my own moral shame and moral dread? So…in reflection contemplative photography invited my internal voice to become silent and see the world through a different lens.
In September, one of the blogs I posted noted,
“Henri Cartier-Bresson… is reported to have said, “Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture, on one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and vivacity.
…the creative mind of a photographer is like a piece of unexposed film. It contains no preformed images but is always active, open, receptive, and ready to receive and record an image.~Minor White cited: W Rowe, Zen and the Magic of Photography
I invite you to spend some time with “To Live”, an amazing story of a family’s survival through times of change.
Thinking of the world
Sleeves wet with tears are my bed-fellows.
Calmly to dream sweet dreams–
There is no night for that. ~Izumi Shikibu (Diaries of Court Ladies of Old
The New Sanctuary Coalition’s call for action:
We are resolved to form a U.S. Caravan of supporters who will meet the Central American Caravan in Mexico, witness their movement, and accompany them into the U.S. At the border, we will assist those seeking entry with their demands to enter the US without losing their liberty
Hate speech and violence have crept into our communities with the targeting of synagogues, churches and other houses of worship and murders of their congregations. We want and need to stop this violence and we are calling you to stand with us, to put your bodies on the line.
The right to migrate is fundamental. Without it, the right to work, to be free, to live, cannot be realized. We reaffirm our conviction that every member of the Central American Caravan has an inalienable human right to flee from violence and poverty and toward better economic and political conditions elsewhere, regardless of national boundaries. We submit that they possess a right to enter and remain in the U.S. equal to anyone born there.
It has become amoral to engage in neutrality or silence on the right to migrate. On this issue there is a right side of history and a wrong side – but there is no middle. Each of us is morally obliged to choose such a side. The law will either make human beings illegal, or it will legalize equality, but it cannot accomplish both. The world is asking you to choose a side.
The New Sanctuary Coalition is resolved to choose the side of liberty and equality. We are resolved to sacrifice in solidarity with those leaders of liberty and pioneers of equality who are nonviolently asserting their right to migrate by moving their caravan of brave souls across the U.S./Mexican border.
If you are a lawyer, join our legal community. If you are a faith leader, join our clergy group. If you are a person of conscience, join our local organizing in your state. Click here to tell us how you would like to get involved and we will connect you with an organizing community that matches your skills and interests.
Sanctuary Caravan at NSC
http://www.sanctuarycaravan.org/
It is my deepest hope that you consider how children have been given the message that they need to speak with a trusted adult whenever they have been inappropriately touched by another or impacted by other classifications of child abuse. In fact, our powerlessness as adults to ensure the safety of our children have put the responsibility for address squarely on the shoulders of the victim…the powerless.
As a retired therapist, I find myself recalling how victims of domestic violence and sexual assault would speak, with tears in their eyes, of the need to remain silent as a way of protecting their families. It is incongruent…an injured soul seeking to protect another’s soul.
And, as evident today, when a victim does speak, she faces such scrutiny that serves to message to those who remain silent that to speak is to add to the negation that already tears into their being. Shamed by the initial act and then shamed again through outsiders with their own agenda.
Look to your children…imagine them being silent to protect you. Listen to your public words…imagine them being said to your children, the young ones who will suffer in silence to shield you from harm.
“We must look deeply to identify the real suffering of our times and to understand how it has come to be. Our modern way of living brings tension, stress and pain to our body; we are exposed to anger, violence, and fear; we live with the threat of terrorism, the destruction of the ecosystem, war and famine, climate change, the economic crisis, recession, poverty, social injustice, broken families and divorce, and so much more.
Toy Store… Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/25s 35m 100 ISO
How are we living? How are we consuming? What violence, fear, and anger are we ingesting every day through the media around us? How is our lifestyle polluting the environment and creating a toxic level atmosphere for our bodies and our minds, for our families and for future generations? If we can call the suffering, the real ill-being of our times, by its true names and if we an see how it has come to be, we will know exactly what kind of medicine, what kind of healing we need in order to deal with it. The truth of ill-being will reveal the end of ill-being.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh (The Other Shore)
“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
~Dr. Martin Luther King (Selma, Alabama, 8 March 1965)
Nikon D750 f/8 1/10 100m 100 ISO
a meditative journey 
You must be logged in to post a comment.