Happy Birthday, Edwin Way Teale!

“Time is the river.
We are the islands.
Time washes around us and flows away and with it flow fragments of our lives.
So, little by little, each island shrinks…
But where, who can say, down the long stream of time, are our eroded days deposited?”

“The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best.
It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues--self-restraint.
Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream?
Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower?
Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same.

My act will be multiplied endlessly.
To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty,
everyone has to deny himself proportionately.
Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.”

“It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of [humanity].
Those who become aroused only when [humans are] endangered become aroused too late.

We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves.
It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country,
who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence.”

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us,
the less taste we shall have for destruction."

~Wise quotes from naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, who was born June 2, 1899 and lived up until 1980, my senior year of high school. (So, I'm a little late in noting his birthday, but it was the right month, at least!)

Wisdom from Rumi

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and
expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

~"Bird Wings," by the great Muslim Poet, Rumi

Be like the sun for grace and mercy.
Be like the night to cover others' faults.
Be like running water for generosity.
Be like death for rage and anger.
Be like the Earth for modesty.
Appear as you are.
Be as you appear.

~Rumi

Happy Pride Day!

"Goodness is stronger than evil.
Love is stronger than hate.
Light is stronger than darkness.
Life is stronger than death.
Victory is ours through God who loved us."

~Desmond Tutu

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"

~James Baldwin

"and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive"

~Audre Lorde

"This is my commandment, That you love one another, as I have loved you."

~Jesus

"Hope will never be silent."

~Harvey Milk

"To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true."

~Bayard Rustin

"Without community, there is no liberation."

~Audre Lorde

She Dreamed

She dreamed of 

a rampaging river

ripping through the cold night sky

She dreamed of impossible

made practical

and doubtful

giving it a try

She dreamed of worlds clashing

and uniting

of day and and of night

of digging deeper holes

of black and of white

and all the colors, implied
in between

She dreamed 

of magick and mastery

of fear and of flight 

of hope and of horror

despair and of fright

but mostly

hope

Mostly

she dreamed of Hope

.

And then

she woke up

filled her cups with water

and took them 

to the river

and poured them deep within.

RIP, James Lawson

"...For me, nonviolence is that quality that comes out of all the great world religions, the notion that the creative force of the universe is love, that God is love, and that love is all encompassing. Gandhi insists—and I think this is Gandhi’s great contribution—that the creative force of the universe is the force that we humans must learn to exercise because that force is the only force that can cause the human race to do on earth God’s will.

And nonviolence is power. It is not, as I was originally told in college in 1947, just persuasion. Persuasion is a form of power. Aristotle says that power is the capacity to achieve purpose. It is a God given gift of creation to human beings. Nonviolence has its deep roots in the long journey of the human family as so many people operated out of love and truth in spite of all that was raging around them.

As Gandhi and King also said, nonviolence is the science of how you create your own life in the image of God. Nonviolence is the science of how you create a world that practices justice, truth and compassion."

"My mother’s word was you should not retaliate by fighting. At age eight, in the Spring of the fourth grade, I slapped a boy who yelled racist epithets at me on Main Street. And for the first time, when I returned home from this errand for my mother, I told her about the incident.

She continued to do what she was doing in the kitchen and without turning around to face me, responded, “Jimmy, what good did that do?” And there was a long period of silence in the house as I heard her voice telling me who I was–that I was loved, that I belonged to God, and that we were a family of the church, and how important that community was to us, that I did not need to use my fists on anyone. Her last sentence to me was, “Jimmy, there must be a better way.”"

The Reverend James Lawson, September 22, 1928 – June 10, 2024

A Song of Water and of History

Studying history begins

for me, today

with a long look at

the water running

in no particular hurry

in the stream next to me.

It is, I realize,

the same water my grandmother drank

and boiled her snap beans in

It is the same water we crossed to escape torture

and the same water they drowned us in

before we escaped.

It is the Water that gathered all in one place

and separated the Dry Land from the Dry Land

It is the Water over which the Spirit hovered

and within which life began.

And so, I went down to the river to pray.

Down by the riverside.

Where we laid down our sword and shield

where we hung our harps and wept

bleeding history from our face

for the captors demanded we sing a song

of Zion

of Home

of Sanctuary

and there was

no

Sanctuary.

And so, studying history,

I remembered and recalled and imagined

and I built an ark

a boat bound for the promised land

over Jordan's stormy banks

beyond the muddy waters of the Ohio

across the Rio Grande

and like the stream beside me

I sang a song

a song

of Water

and of History

and of that first pair of centipedes that

crawled out of the water

and made a home for the rest of us

and waited for Paradise.