Bipoc String Quartet

In The New York Times Opinion Section

“We have all been manipulated into playing a part in the white damsel ideology, that young white women, often attractive, are the very epitome of innocence and virtue,” Charles Blow writes. “In this construct, all efforts must be made to protect them. So, what of the Indigenous women, or the Black women, or the Hispanic women who disappear? Why does society not see them as equally in need of honor and protection?”

Opinion | Gwen Ifill Was Right About ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ I’ve seen it happen time and again. Missing white women and girls receive outsize media coverage when other missing people receive none.

An Invitation to Save the Planet by Ending White Supremacy A racist system that values some lives over others helps to fuel the climate crisis

“If you want to heal it should start from you, the first push, and the first walk no matter how small it is. Some people you thought will be there till the end will run away, the worst part is they will leave you hanging on the edge. Still, no matter how cruel this sounds to you that's the reality of life, not because you're meant to be lonely but because the hardest battle you need to survive will be a solo flight. Please hold on to yourself even if no one does.”
-shannydey, (Repost)

This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. I try to tell the unvarnished truth about the decadence in our market-driven universities! Let us bear witness against this spiritual rot!

The promise of restoration lives within us “Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all” declared António Gutteres, the UN Secretary

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart. ~Haruki Murakami

(Book: Men Without Women https://amzn.to/3x5i7J8)

"They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.”

― Richard Wright

"I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to
shape perfect unimportant pieces.
Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze.
This is the time for Big Poems,
roaring up out of sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems.
Big, and Big."

~Gwendolyn Brooks

The American Life Is Killing You “I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And…

This was written by Chief Dan George, in 1972..

"In the course of my lifetime I have lived in two distinct cultures. I was born into a culture that lived in communal houses. My grandfather’s house was eighty feet long. It was called a smoke house, and it stood down by the beach along the inlet. All my grandfather’s sons and their families lived in this dwelling. Their sleeping apartments were separated by blankets made of bull rush weeds, but one open fire in the middle served the cooking needs of all.

In houses like these, throughout the tribe, people learned to live with one another; learned to respect the rights of one another. And children shared the thoughts of the adult world and found themselves surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins who loved them and did not threaten them. My father was born in such a house and learned from infancy how to love people and be at home with them.

And beyond this acceptance of one another there was a deep respect for everything in Nature that surrounded them. My father loved the Earth and all its creatures. The Earth was his second mother. The Earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am… and the way to thank this Great Spirit was to use his gifts with respect.

I remember, as a little boy, fishing with him up Indian River and I can still see him as the sun rose above the mountain top in the early morning…I can see him standing by the water’s edge with his arms raised above his head while he softly moaned…”Thank you, thank you.” It left a deep impression on my young mind.

And I shall never forget his disappointment when once he caught me gaffing for fish “just for the fun of it.” “My son” he said, “The Great Spirit gave you those fish to be your brothers, to feed you when you are hungry. You must respect them. You must not kill them just for the fun of it.”

This then was the culture I was born into and for some years the only one I really knew or tasted. This is why I find it hard to accept many of the things I see around me.

I see people living in smoke houses hundreds of times bigger than the one I knew. But the people in one apartment do not even know the people in the next and care less about them.

It is also difficult for me to understand the deep hate that exists among people. It is hard to understand a culture that justifies the killing of millions in past wars, and it at this very moment preparing bombs to kill even greater numbers. It is hard for me to understand a culture that spends more on wars and weapons to kill, than it does on education and welfare to help and develop.

It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers but even attacks Nature and abuses her. I see my white brothers going about blotting out Nature from his cities. I see him strip the hills bare, leaving ugly wounds on the face of mountains. I see him tearing things from the bosom of Mother Earth as though she were a monster, who refused to share her treasures with him. I see him throw poison in the waters, indifferent to the life he kills there; as he chokes the air with deadly fumes.

My white brother does many things well for he is more clever than my people but I wonder if he has ever really learned to love at all. Perhaps he only loves the things that are his own but never learned to love the things that are outside and beyond him. And this is, of course, not love at all, for man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Man must love fully or he will become the lowest of the animals. It is the power to love that makes him the greatest of them all… for he alone of all animals is capable of [a deeper] love.

My friends, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was not the hunger of the body.. He spoke of a hunger that begins in the very depths of man... a hunger for love. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.

You and I need the strength and joy that comes from knowing that we are loved. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others. There have been times when we all wanted so desperately to feel a reassuring hand upon us… there have been lonely times when we so wanted a strong arm around us… I cannot tell you how deeply I miss my wife’s presence when I return from a trip. Her love was my greatest joy, my strength, my greatest blessing.

I am afraid my culture has little to offer yours. But my culture did prize friendship and companionship. It did not look on privacy as a thing to be clung to, for privacy builds walls and walls promote distrust. My culture lived in big family communities, and from infancy people learned to live with others.

My culture did not prize the hoarding of private possessions, in fact, to hoard was a shameful thing to do among my people. The Indian looked on all things in Nature as belonging to him and he expected to share them with others and to take only what he needed.

Everyone likes to give as well as receive. No one wishes only to receive all the time. We have taken something from your culture… I wish you had taken something from our culture, for there were some beautiful and good things in it.

Soon it will be too late to know my culture, for integration is upon us and soon we will have no values but yours. Already many of our young people have forgotten the old ways. And many have been shamed of their Indian ways by scorn and ridicule. My culture is like a wounded deer that has crawled away into the forest to bleed and die alone.

The only thing that can truly help us is genuine love. You must truly love, be patient with us and share with us. And we must love you—with a genuine love that forgives and forgets… a love that forgives the terrible sufferings your culture brought ours when it swept over us like a wave crashing along a beach… with a love that forgets and lifts up its head and sees in your eyes an answering love of trust and acceptance..."

~Chief Dan George was a leader of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation as well as a beloved actor, musician, poet and author. He was born in North Vancouver in 1899 and died in 1981. This column first appeared in the North Shore Free Press on March 1, 1972. https://www.nsnews.com/nsn-50th/from-the-archives-chief-dan-george-teaches-understanding-1.23925435

New Year | New Beginning

I am grateful to be able to share with you all that I have formed a new nonprofit, the Peace Literacy Institute (www.peaceliteracy.org), based out of Corvallis, Oregon. We educate people to be as well-trained in waging peace as soldiers are in waging war. We have a curricular design team of amazing volunteers and we are ramping up our workshops in Virtual Reality to help with student engagement, especially during the remote learning needs of the pandemic. We have a very low overhead but it is not zero. We need your help to sustain this vital work – even a small monthly donation from you will help provide predictable income. Please visit our new website www.peaceliteracy.org - there are donate buttons at the bottom of each page 😊 Thank you for visiting! A quick scan of our Facebook feeds reminds us all why our world needs Peace Literacy.

“What if our religion was each other? If our practice was our life? What if the temple was the Earth? If forests were our church? If holy water - the rivers, lakes, and oceans? What if meditation was our relationships? If the Teacher was life? If wisdom was knowledge? If love was the center of our being.”
― Ganga White

If you can learn how to pronounce Schwarzenegger and Gyllenhaal, you can learn to say Nguyen, Xiu or any other person's name.

If you don't know? Ask. We'll literally tell you how to say our names and we'd prefer it over you "giving us" a bland nickname without us offering one.

"Jaspreet Singh? NAH! I'm calling you Jazz instead!"

Oh??

If that's how you roll, then I'm gonna have to use my new rule:

People who try to give me nicknames because they don't want to say my actual name will be referred to as "Bu Tu" or "Dip Schït."

Your pick 💔

Consider this as we ease into this new year/same ol' everyday.
~
elephantjournal.com/subscribe to support mindful, indie media. We're powered by you!

"The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our Mother, not an opportunity ... then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."
~ David Suzuki

Artist: Brian Kirhagis (aka BK The Artist)

"Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go."

- Pablo Neruda

Max Gomez • He Was a Friend of Mine • 2020 FB Today, the Taos New Mexico-based musician Max Gomez has shared his new single "He Was A Friend of Mine." A traditional folk song first re...

Don’t crush that ant—it could plant a wildflower New findings show how ants choose and protect the seeds they disperse

Bill Bullard - (Dean of Faculty at San Francisco University High School) Three Things to Unlearn from School https://casnocha.com/2007/07/three-things-to.html

After 250 years, Native American tribe regains ownership of Big Sur ancestral lands A northern California Indian tribe's sacred land is now back under their ownership, thanks to the help of a conservancy group.

"The water is sacred. The air is sacred. Our DNA is made of the same DNA as the tree. The tree breathes what we exhale. When the tree exhales we need what the tree exhales, so we have a common destiny with the tree… We are all from the Earth. And when the Earth & atmosphere is corrupted, then it will create its own reaction. Our mother is reacting…" – Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman

We Are All One (Native American Prophecy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWtVTu6S51M =11

Image: Ego vs. Eco: Generated by J. Gonzalez Cruz & L. J. Lucero.

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

All Life is Interrelated - Martin Luther King, Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zD0qHUAiwo&t=7s

“I think the difficulty is this fragmentation. All thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.” ~David Bohm, physicist

Wholeness & Fragmentation - David Bohm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfHzfonAgX4&t=7s

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~Albert Einstein

Related:

How Wisdom Grows: Educating Hearts & Minds https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/how-wisdom-grows-educating-hearts-and-minds/