Sunday Dinner: In the Pink

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“The simplest acts of kindness

are by far more powerful

then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”

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Mahatma Gandhi

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“Do you know what people really want?  Everyone, I mean.

Everybody in the world is thinking:

I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to,

who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me.

That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

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Doris Lessing

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“True love is born from understanding.”

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Gautama Buddha

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“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts,

to enter into the places of pain,

to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish.

Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery,

to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears.

Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak,

vulnerable with the vulnerable,

and powerless with the powerless.

Compassion means full immersion

in the condition of being human.”

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Henri J.M. Nouwen

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“It is only with true love and compassion

that we can begin to mend what is broken in the world.

It is these two blessed things

that can begin to heal all broken hearts.”

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Steve Maraboli

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“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar;

it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars

needs restructuring. ”

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Martin Luther King Jr.

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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Follow the story here:

Sacred Ground, Now Reclaimed:  A Charlottesville Story

Please join with me in sending love, light, and protection to those whose compassion compels them to make the journey.  Their wounds are yet raw, and from their pain they draw both courage and power.  

Let the revolution of our generation be one of love, compassion and awakening

-WG.

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“Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice,

or to our leaders’ insanity,

or to those who threaten or harm us —

is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice,

can be transformed into fierce compassion.”

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Bonnie Myotai Treace

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“Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”
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Dalai Lama XIV

Eclipse

Sunset over  College Creek, at (Gabriel) Archer’s Hope, near Jamestown, Virginia

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Just as light and darkness maintain their own balance, and follow one another; so too do times of darkness and light follow one another in human history. Opposing forces remain in cyclical tension throughout our planet’s history.

We welcome the darkness which allows us to rest each night, and we awake hours later refreshed and reinvigorated. Our bodies heal and re-energize while we sleep.

Plants also need a period of darkness for their growth and cellular repair after many hours of photosynthesis in the sunlight each day. Many plants need a period of dormancy and rest each year, before vigorous new growth responds to the lengthening days of spring.

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Winter Solstice morning

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Northwestern Oregon, where the eclipse over the United States will begin next Monday, symbolizes the farthest point of our continental cultural expansion during the 19^th Century. John Jacob Astor established Astoria, Oregon, in 1811, and his team blazed the trail which opened the Northwest to settlement. He led the economic battle to incorporate the Pacific Northwest, and its resources, into the United States. In those days, the borders between the United States and British Canada remained fluid.

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Oregon’s coast, near where the eclipse will begin sliding across North America on August 21, 2017.

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Our nation’s power and prosperity come in large part from our westward expansion to the Pacific, and the rich natural, human and energetic resources of our western states. This part of our country remains energetic, innovative and largely progressive.

Charleston, South Carolina, symbolizes the first shots fired in treasonous rebellion in our Civil War, which began in 1860-61. This terrible time in our nation’s history potentially could have destroyed our republic. But it did not; and the slow and torturous process of re-unification has played out in our courts, congress, statehouses and streets ever since.

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The James River, just a few hundred miles north of where the coming eclipse will move offshore next Monday.

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This is a critical time in our nation’s history once again. The nihilistic forces of nazism, facism, and communism which were pushed back in Europe and Asia during the 20^th Century, have infiltrated our own society and American government in the 21^st.

We see this with sickening clarity after the election cycle of 2016, when these forces of hatred and anarchy have been publicly emboldened both in the media, and on the ground in cities across our nation.

And only a week after the tragic and disturbing events in Charlottesville last weekend; we will experience the rare astronomical event of a full solar eclipse beginning in Oregon and ending on the coast at Charleston, South Carolina.

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Jones Millpond, where The Battle of Williamsburg raged on May 5, 1862, in the early years of our nation’s Civil War; remains a peaceful spot along the Colonial Parkway in more recent times.

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Many of us wonder what this means for our country. We are disgusted and uncertain with elements of our own government and citizenry. We are deeply troubled about what our nation’s future may hold, and wondering whether the Republic established by our Constitution in 1788 remains sufficient to order our society today.

At this time of uncertainty, we have given much thought to the meaning and potential effects of the coming eclipse. Historically, many cultures have viewed eclipses as important times of vulnerability as the sun disappeared from the sky, and dramatic changes occurred in the aftermath. There could be several interpretations of the phenomena of darkness falling across a huge swath of the United States, from coast to coast, in the middle of a summer afternoon.

We choose to interpret the coming eclipse as a time of national renewal. Beginning in the west, where our country’s economic destiny was determined with the founding of Astoria and securing our border with Canada; and sweeping eastwards across our nation to the very city where our Civil War began; the darkness of this eclipse will be followed by new light.

The emerging sun, Sol Invictus,  will shine brightly over our nation for many hours on Monday, August 21, after the moon moves on in its orbit, allowing the sun’s light to burst forth once again.

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As morning follows night, we choose to focus on the ‘second morning’ that will occur as the eclipse ends on Monday afternoon as a time of national renewal and re invigoration. Let this ‘second morning’ usher in a time when our Constitutional government will be set right once again, and these current threats of tyranny, hatred, and lawlessness ended.

Let foreign intervention in our politics be exposed and expunged. Let nazis and their ideology, influencing our political discourse, be exposed and expunged.

Let the corrupting influence of foreign and criminally laundered money holding our political leaders to nihilistic political ideologies be exposed and expunged. Let the corruption and lawlessness in our own communities be exposed and expunged.

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Let us use this energetically potent period of a summer solar eclipse to power the necessary changes which will re-claim our communities and our state and national governments for our founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of the good.

Let us reclaim our heritage as a land of promise and equal protection for all under fair and just laws.

Let our United States fully become a center of innovation and opportunity; tolerance and love; and a haven for the endless positive potential of humankind.

Woodland Gnome 2017

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Powhatan Creek

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