JOYFUL WANDERING -- 62

+ Updated at 11:05am on Monday, May 16, 2016.

+ This post includes entries from Tuesday, March 15, 2016 until Monday, May 16, 2016. Latest entries are at the top. If you would like to contribute, write JW in your subject line and send it to John@abundancetrek.com or put a comment on my Facebook page.

+ Check out an impressive Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute special exhibit of Terry Slade's unique art now happening. The artist is very much focused on the damage we are doing to our environment. However, he offers art as tools for meditation and contemplation making it possible to change our ways.

+ Inner Frontier offers "Sustaining Presence" by Joseph Naft. Excerpt: "If we want to be present, not just momentarily, but to stay present a little longer, the key is to relax into being here. We relax our body, sense it, and relax into the sensation. We notice our thoughts and relax into the cognizant space behind them. We relax into the equanimity behind our more superficial and fleeting emotions."

+ The Guardian offers "Let Donald Trump Be Our Unifier" by Eve Ensler.  Excerpt: "He is the outcome of an insidious exceptionalism – the bedrock belief that American lives are more precious and valuable than any Others, those that we stigmatize, bomb, torture, murder, control, invade and whose economies we trash, whose resources we devour, whose futures we steal."

I do believe that we can be transformed by our better angels as we deal creatively and energetically with this long shadow over the planet. This is a powerful, far-reaching and all too revealing article about what the problem is.

+ Inner Frontier offers Modes of Presence by Joseph Naft.  Excerpt: "In the coming weeks, we will experiment with each of these twelve modes of presence. For this week, please look at your own work of presence and its various flavors and aspects. How do you come into presence? Does it descend on you unbidden? Do you rise into presence? Do you choose to be present? Do you choose to stay present? Who is the you that is present?"

+ Common Dreams offers "The New Truth About Free Trade" by Robert Reich. It begins: "I used to believe in trade agreements. That was before the wages of most Americans stagnated and a relative few at the top captured just about all the economic gains."

+ Joyful Wandering posts 1 to 58 are found on The Abundancetrek Blog. You can find them all here.

JOYFUL WANDERING -- 61

+ Updated on Tuesday, March 8 at 7:49am

+ Spiritual & Practice offers A Thought to Carry with You :

Way back in 1971, humorist Erma Bombeck wrote that it seems "rather incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners." She was not only perceptive but prophetic. 

This week, help reverse the trend. Look for a way each day to listen to someone, letting go of any other agenda. Remember all the tools at your disposal: concentrated silence, a nod, simple words of support like "um hmm" or "oh?" or "wow!" Reflect back what you hear the other person saying, so that they can hear themselves more clearly. Ask follow-up questions like "How come?" or "What happened then?" Offer gentle encouragement to someone by your unconditionally accepting presence. It's okay if that someone is yourself.

+ Spiritual & Practice offers "Unleashing America's Shadow" by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Excerpt: "'With media complicity, Trump has unleashed the beast that has long resided not far from the American hearth, from those who started a Civil War to preserve the right to enslave a fellow human to the Know-Nothing mobs who burned Irish-Catholic churches out of fear of immigrants.' This observation is from Timothy Egan's excellent article "The Beast Is Us" in The New York Times."

+ Patheos offers "The Making of Donald Trump and the Unmaking of a Nation" by Frederic Schmidt. Excerpt: "But Donald Trump is also the media’s creation. Together, since Richard Nixon’s appearance on 'Laugh In,' Presidents and the media have been erasing the boundary between entertainment and national leadership. Presidents make the rounds on talk shows and fawn over the hosts, treating them as the high priests of public opinion. They try their hand at stand-up comedy and they reduce policy debates into punch lines."

+ Dharma Wisdom offers "The Heart's Intention" by Phillip Moffitt. Excerpt: "Setting intention, at least according to Buddhist teachings, is quite different than goal making. It is not oriented toward a future outcome. Instead, it is a path or practice that is focused on how you are 'being' in the present moment. Your attention is on the ever present 'now' in the constantly changing flow of life. You set your intentions based on understanding what matters most to you and make a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values."

+ Weaving Home offers "Wilderness Places" by Naomi Kelly. Excerpt: "So we can come face to face with ourselves in the wilderness, with our fears, with what gets under our skin and makes us act in certain ways,. When we are on a Lenten journey, we take the time to see, to let our inner nature see the false self that so often holds us hostage. Seeng with the eyes of the heart can reveal all the pettiness and fear that tends to drive us into habitual directions of non-functionality."

+ Patheos offers "On Making America Great Again" by Erin Wathen. 

+ So, would a Bernie Sanders presidency be good for the economy?  An independent analysis suggests that it would be a dream come true for millions of hard working Americans who deserve much better than what the plutocracy has offered us in recent years. Common Dreams offers "Enacting Sanders Agenda Would Catapult Economy, Shatter Inequality" by Lauren McCauley.

+ Joyful Wandering posts 1 to 58 are found on The Abundancetrek Blog. You can find them all here.

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+ updated at 5:17pm ESDT on Tuesday, October 7, 2014. 

+ “In everything, whether it is a thing sensed or a thing known, God Himself is hidden within.”  -- St Bonaventure

+ Spirituality and Practice offers an excerpt on an excerpt on practicing Unconditional Love from the book, It's Up to You: A Practice to Change Your Life by Changing Your Mind by Karen Casey. Read the S&P review.

+ Religion for Life offers John Shuck's recent  interview with Bill McKibben

+ 2 important articles by Robert Reich:

•  “Why We Allow Big Pharma to Rip Us Off”
• “Why the Economy is Still Failing Most Americans”

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+ Robert Reich offers “Antitrust in the New Gilded Age”. Excerpt: “In 1890, when Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio urged his congressional colleagues to act against the centralized industrial powers that threatened America, he did not distinguish between economic and political power because they were one and the same. The field of economics was then called ‘political economy,’ and inordinate power could undermine both. ‘If we will not endure a king as a political power,’ Sherman thundered, ‘we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.’” 

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+ Daily Kos offers: "Peggy Noonan writes the most ironic, un-self-aware column in the history of Western civilization" by Attytood | Read the article

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+ updated at 1:00pm EST on Wednesday, January 22, 2014

+ Thanks to my friend Ralph Clingan I just discovered a fascinating website and Facebook site:  http://connectiontocreative.com/ | http://connectiontocreative.com/daily-affirmation/ | https://www.facebook.com/connectiontocreative

I suggest you go through the 167 photos on the Facebook site.

+ Democracy Now! offers an excerpt from a new documentary being featured at the Sundance Festival. Go to "Alive Inside: How the Magic of Music Proves Therapeutic for Patients With Alzheimer’s and Dementia." Here is a portion of the report:
Could a pair of headphones change the lives of millions of Americans suffering from Alzheimers and dementia? "Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory," a new documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, follows a social worker named Dan Cohen who has launched a campaign to bring iPods and music therapy to nursing homes. One of the central characters he works with is a 90-something Alzheimer’s patient named Henry Dryer, who was featured in a video posted online that went viral in 2012, with nearly 10 million views. The clip begins with video of Dryer looking largely unresponsive to the outside world. Then he was given a pair of headphones to listen to Cab Calloway, his favorite artist. The music energizes him, awakens him and helps bring back old memories. We play clips from the film and speak with Cohen about his project, "Music & Memory," which he hopes to expand around the world. We are also joined by Michael Rossato-Bennett, the film’s director and producer.

+ January is Poverty Awareness Month.  Spirituality and Practice offers information, inspiration and illumination with daily posts. It is not too late to get informed, inspired and illuminated. | See the list. 

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+ Spirituality and Practice offers prayers and thoughts as we deal with the highest poverty rate in many decades. 

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+ updated at 5:34 EST on Thursday, January 9, 2014

+ The Washington Post offers "Church shouldn't be this hard" by Tom Ehrick. Excerpt: "An assembly that should relax into the serenity of God’s unconditional love shouldn’t be so filled with hatred and fear." | Read it all

+ Love IS the answer. Sing Along!

+ Robert Reich offers "Why The Republican’sOld Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor  — Is Backfiring." Excerpt: "Republicans told the working class that its hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off to pay for “welfare queens” (as Ronald Reagan decorously dubbed a black single woman on welfare) and other nefarious loafers. The poor were “them” — lazy, dependent on government handouts, and overwhelmingly black — in sharp contrast to “us,” who were working ever harder, proudly independent (even sending wives and mothers to work, in order to prop up family incomes dragged down by shrinking male paychecks), and white." | Read it all 

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+ updated at 11:53am EST on Wednesday, January 8, 2014

+ On FB, Robert Reich posted the following:
"I'm freezing in Chicago. Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans say they won't extend emergency unemployment benefits unless their cost is offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget. But they won't even consider offsetting the cost by closing tax loopholes for the rich -- such as the "carried interest" loophole that gives hedge-fund and private-equity partners an annual $11 billion tax subsidy, almost twice the cost of extending unemployment benefits. Put this in a larger context and see the pattern: (1) Not only do they oppose extending unemployment benefits, but (2) they oppose any jobs program to put the long-term unemployed to work, (3) they want to cut food stamps, (4) they refuse to raise the minimum wage, and (5) they're determined to kill off unions. Connect the dots and you have a calculated strategy to keep wages as low as possible -- forcing large numbers of Americans to choose between working for peanuts or having nothing at all. Republicans are pushing this strategy because lower wages give their big-business patrons fatter profits (at least in the short term; longer term, they reduce overall demand for goods and services). The strategy is already succeeding: Real median household incomes are now 4.4 percent below what they were at the start of the so-called recovery, and corporate profits are up. Democrats, including Obama, should be calling them out on this strategy. Why aren't they?"

+ Richard Rohr offers "The Contemplative Alternative." Excerpt: “What we are enjoying now is a renaissance of the contemplative mind, the one truly unique alternative mind and heart that religion has to offer the world. Without this new mind, most doctrines, moralities, dogmas, and church structures will almost certainly be misunderstood, misused, and mishandled. Small people make everything small.” | Read it all

+ Robert Reich is very wise, intelligent, informed and compassionate. Recently he offered "The Year of the Great Distribution." It begins: “One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a 'redistributionist.' Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America.” | Read it all

+ “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” -- Mahatma Gandhi

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+ updated at 12:39pm EST on Saturday, January 4, 2014

+ On Facebook, Robert Reich shared: "Several of you thought yesterday's post arguing that Congess's first priority when it convenes next week should be to restore unemployment benefits for the record number of long-term unemployed was a weak palliative for what's really needed. "We don't need unemployment benefits," wrote Burr Hubbell, for example, "We need real jobs." Mr. Hubbell and others raise an important issue. In fighting for measures that alleviate symptoms of a failing system -- whether chronic joblessness, increasing poverty, widening inequality, or ever greater economic insecurity -- are we staving off more fundamental reform? Or are we taking the only humane approach available until such time as fundamental reform is politically feasible?"

+ On Facebook, J. Barrett Lee shared: (DISCLAIMER: This is in response to an anonymous commenter on my blog, not anyone I know in real-life or Facebook)
 
I think I'm going to start responding to the phrase
"Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out."
 
with:
 
"Don't be so close-minded that you blow other peoples' brains out."
History has many more concrete examples of the latter, I'm afraid.

+ Eleventh Day of Christmas
A verse from the Daily Lectionary:

May God grant your heart’s desire
and fulfill all your plans.”

Psalm 20:4 < http://www.presbyterianmission.org/devotion/daily/2014/1/4/

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas we are informed that today is the feast day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American saint according to the Roman Catholic Church. In medieval times this was The feast of Saint Simon Stylites.

Here is the Spirituality and Practice Christmas quote for today by the great Sufi poet, Hafiz:

A Suspended Blue Ocean

There is only one rule
On this Wild Playground,

For every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

They all say,

"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved's Divine
Game,

"O, in the Beloved's
Wonderful
Game."

Hafiz in The Subject Tonight Is Love by Daniel Ladinsky

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+ updated at 3:07pm EST, Friday 11/8/13

+ Here is what Robert Reich just posted on Facebook as he reflects on the recent elections.  He is very wise and informed and compassionate.

Always listen for the day-after adjectives, which give a clue as to how candidates and issues will be framed in the future. In talking about Chris Christie's win in New Jersey, the Washington Post writes of "pragmatic, as opposed to ideological, governance." But in describing Bill de Blasio, the media uses the adjectives "left" or "left-leaning."

In an era when almost all economic gains are going to the very top, when poverty is increasing, and when median household incomes are dropping even with two wage earners, to be in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy and providing better schools to everyone else should not be considered "left." I'd call this pragmatic. By the same token, to be against raising the minimum wage -- as is Chris Christie -- is not a sign of "pragmatism." I'd call this ideological.

Here’s more from Reich on this topic.

+ I think you will enjoy hearing and seeing http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes/love-is-all-2/

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+ Truthout offers "The Violence of Organized Forgetting" by Henry A Giroux. Excerpt: "Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rationale thinking itself.  Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs." | Read the article

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+ TruthOut offers "Where the Hell Is the Outrage?" by Richard Eskow. Excerpt: "Middle-class wages are stagnant. Uemployment is stalled at record levels. College education is leading to debt servitude and job insecurity. Millions of unemployed Americans have essentially been abandoned by their government. Poverty is soaring. Bankers break the law with impunity, are bailed out, and go on breaking the law, richer than they were before. And yet, bizarrely, the only Americans who seem to be seething with anger are the beneficiaries of this economic injustice – the wealthiest and most privileged among us. But those who are suffering seem strangely passive."

MY RESPONSE: Economic Justice continues to be undermined by the powers that be. We could be doing so much to alleviate the pain and we are instead increasing the pain. What is wrong with us?

I refer you to my post on The Abundancetrek Blog yesterday: "A Nation Based on Christian Values" where I offer a repost of an amazingly cogent statement on the need for economic justice by my friend J. Barrett Lee.

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Some thoughts about the political situation here in the USA and elsewhere:

Plutocrats have the upper hand whether the Democrats are in power or the Republicans.  Plutocrats do not necessarily have the best interests of the people in mind.  They probably think they do. They often try to justify their power and privilege even as so many people are suffering as a result of their policies. 

Plutocrats are not always wrong.  A lot of good things can get done and do get done as they rule the planet.  Maybe they will even see the light and work to reduce carbon emissions so that the global catastrophe so many scientists predict can be avoided.

But I simply can not put my faith in rule by the plutocrats.  I would like to see true democracy emerge.  Since both of our political parties are now dominated by plutocrats, I am feeling the need to separate myself as much as possible from the Democratic Party even though its policies and values and vision are closer to my own than those of the GOP.  But I can't support plutocracy and most Democrats are beholden to plutocrats just like most Republicans are.

So, what can I do? 

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+ The New York Times offers "Lessons from a Comeback" by Paul Krugman. This is about California where the GOP has been marginalized and deadlock is over.  Good things are happening.  Excerpt: "... California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too." | Read the article

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+ Democracy Now! offers "The Costs of War: 10 Years After Iraq Invasion, New Study Tallies the Massive Human, Financial Toll"

On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at a massive new report by a team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts and physicians about the Iraq ... Read More or Watch Video →

+ TruthOut offers “US Climate Bomb is Ticking: What the Gas Industry Doesn't Want You to Know” by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Excerpt: “We spoke with experts - Cornell engineering professor Dr. Anthony Ingraffea and biologist and author Dr. Sandra Steingraber - to explore what the newest studies show and to bust common myths about gas shale hydraulic fracking. The path out of this situation is a combination of promoting sound science, ending the extraction economy and employing direct action to weaken the stranglehold of industry on the political process. It is time to end the "all of the above" energy strategy which ensures going over the climate tipping point and instead commit to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy.” | Read the article

+ TruthOut offers “Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization?” by Noam Chomsky. Excerpt: “Dewey called for workers to be 'masters of their own industrial fate' and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain ‘the shadow cast on society by big business.’

 

"The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority 'down below' has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.

 

"There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible. 

 

"It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference?” | Read the article

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+ GOP and Obama Ready to Make Needy Seniors Pay for Bush Wars

Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: With President Obama's apparent concession that he is willing to cut back earned benefits for seniors, he has become a passenger on the 1% austerity express. Why should the elderly, Mr. President, pay for a deficit racked up for unfunded wars, tax cuts for the rich, and a criminally crashed economy?

Read the BuzzFlash Commentary

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+ The New York Times Op Ed page offers “Come Home America” by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman. It begins: “EVERYONE talks about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about Germany and Japan? / The sequester — $85 billion this year in across-the-board budget cuts, about half of which will come from the Pentagon — gives Americans an opportunity to discuss a question we’ve put off too long: Why we are still fighting World War II?” Another excerpt: "Partisan debates that focus on shaving a percentage point off the Pentagon budget here or there won’t take us where we need to go. Both parties are stuck in a paradigm of costly international activism while emerging powers like China, India, Brazil and Turkey are accumulating wealth and raising productivity and living standards, as we did in the 19th century. The long-term consequences are obvious."| Read it all

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+ updated at 5:05pm EST on Wednesday, February 27, 2013.

+ Mother Jones offers "9 Surprising Facts About Junk Food" by Tom Philpott. Excerpt: "At least since 1999, the industry has known its products are contributing to a massive public-health crisis."
  
+ Truthout offers “The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power” by Henry A Giroux. Here is some scathing criticism of the state of our society here in the USA.  He deals with things like our growing greed, narcissism and fascination with violence. Excerpt:

How does one account for the lack of public outcry over millions of Americans losing their homes because of corrupt banking practices and millions more becoming unemployed because of the lack of an adequate jobs program in the United States, while at the same time stories abound of colossal greed and corruption on Wall Street? [11] For example, in 2009 alone, hedge fund manager David Tepper made approximately 4 billion dollars.[12] As Michael Yates points out: "This income, spent at a rate of $10,000 a day and exclusive of any interest, would last him and his heirs 1,096 years! If we were to suppose that Mr. Tepper worked 2,000 hours in 2009 (fifty weeks at forty hours per week), he took in $2,000,000 per hour and $30,000 a minute."[13] This juxtaposition of robber-baron power and greed is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media in conjunction with the deep suffering and misery now experienced by millions of families, workers, children, jobless public servants and young people. | Read it all

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+ TruthOut offers "The Secret Rise of 21st Century Democracy" by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Excerpt: "New economies based on greater democratic control, real representation and citizen participation are on the rise. There is much to be learned from countries like Venezuela that break from the Washington Consensus."