RESOLVE I just returned from a walk along the San Francisco Bay in the glorious sunshine - the first sun I have seen in many days. I have spent the better part of the last two weeks doing precious little. I needed to decompress. I even spent some time in the hospital ER at the suggestion of my RN sister who was concerned that I might be having a heart attack. Until I stopped I did not realize how much toxicity and stress my body was holding. For the holiday my body was demanding "quiet." We have all been through so much in the past months that celebrating seemed incongruent. Having quiet conversations with dear ones was the best tonic. I have two simple messages for the New Year. The first is to "LET GO." This theme keeps coming up in whatever I happen to be reading or thinking. Let go of whatever you are holding that is not serving you. Be it a person, a belief system, an activity, a hatred or anger, a judgment - whatever it is, LET GO! The second message is a wish that you shall have continued RESOLVE in the ability to let go of what is not serving you. May peace come to you in the New Year. May you find or invent the activities or projects that provide some peace in the challenging times we live in. I hope you find the following stories useful. It is a pleasure and privilege to be in touch. Stewart xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 1.EXPLORING 1. EXPLORING From my friend Cherie Porter: An explorer needed to make an urgent march through the jungles of the upper Amazon in South America. In an effort to do so, he contracted with a group of natives to carry his gear and guide him on the march. For the first several days good progress was made. One morning, however, when the explorer emerged from his tent, he saw that the natives were sitting solemnly on their haunches, making no effort to prepare for further travel. "Why is there no preparation for us to resume our march?" he asked the chief. "They are waiting..." the chief explained. "They cannot move further until their souls have caught up with their bodies" In thinking about the story, I decided on a New Year's wish for myself, my family and my treasured friends: May each of us check in with our individual lives, consider if we need to gift ourselves a bit more time for ourselves... with ourselves, and give our spiritual natures what ever they may need to be fully caught up with our physical being. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 2. WALT WHITMAN "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to anyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. " ----Walt Whitman xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 3. INDIVISIBLE One Planet, Indivisible 9/11 for some of us This season
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 4. GOD'S WINGS An article in National Geographic several years ago provided a penetrating picture of God's wings. After a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, forest rangers began their trek up a mountain to assess the inferno's damage. One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by the eerie sight, he knocked over the bird with a stick. When he gently struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother's wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had carried her offspring to the base of the tree and had gathered them under her wings, instinctively knowing that the toxic smoke would rise. She could have flown to safety but had refused to abandon her babies. Then the blaze had arrived and the heat had scorched her small body, the mother had remained steadfast. Because she had been willing to die, those under the cover of her wings would live. God will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge." (Psalm 91:4). Being loved this much should make a difference in your life Remember the One who loves you, and then be different because of it. My instructions were to send this to people that I wanted God to bless - and I picked you. Please pass this on to people you want to be blessed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 5. OPPENHEIMER'S WISDOM First Line Against Terrorism Wednesday, December 12, 2001; Page A35
When a nervous senator then asked how such a weapon smuggled in a crate or even a suitcase could be detected, Oppenheimer quipped, "With a screwdriver." A few years later, he persuaded the Atomic Energy Commission to write a top secret study on the dangers of nuclear terrorism. The document, known as the "Screwdriver Report," remains classified to this day. Our leaders realized then that there was no defense against such an attack and, because we were defenseless, chose to play down its possibility. But on Sept. 11 Islamicist terrorists used knives and box-cutters to turn commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction. And then there was anthrax. The next time they could use spent nuclear reactor fuel wrapped in explosives. And if they are determined to sacrifice their own lives, the assassins will achieve a high degree of success. Oppenheimer understood a half-century ago that by unlocking the power of the atom he and his colleagues had suddenly made the world a smaller place. That's why in 1946 he proposed banning nuclear weapons. The globalization of science and technology has now reached a point where weapons of mass destruction really can be wielded by a handful of individuals. In such a world, our military prowess is our very last line of defense. To our own peril in this interdependent world, we are foolishly squandering our first and strongest line of defense: the imponderable that the venerable World War II secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, called our reputation for fair play. In this sense Sept. 11 was the ultimate failure of a foreign policy that has systematically sullied our reputation. For a half-century our foreign policy establishment complacently assumed that America could act with impunity in the Third World. We fought the Cold War on Third World battlefields; the list of our interventions is staggering: Iran, Korea, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua and, of course, the entire Middle East. Millions died. In the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, our policymakers have pursued a "triumphalist" stance based on America's invincibility as "the world's only superpower." They told us that the smoldering ethnic and tribal conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, Congo, Sudan, Chechnya, Afghanistan and dozens of other places were not America's business. They were wrong. America needs a radically new foreign policy. The artificial Cold War dichotomy between realism and idealism must be abandoned. No foreign policy devoid of sound moral principles is realistic today. Even a "victory" in Afghanistan will do little to protect us from terrorists if we once again become complicit with authoritarian regimes that abuse their own people. We need a smart foreign policy that addresses the underlying grievances that foster suicidal rage. We need to go back as a nation to where we were in 1945 -- before Hiroshima, before we took the road to a permanent national security state. Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination, an end to colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations -- these were all ideas of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. We need to return to this Rooseveltian vision of a foreign policy based on human rights. We need to encourage the weak and afflicted to take their grievances to the United Nations, the World Court and the new International Criminal Court. And that means we too must abide by U.N. and World Court decisions. We desperately need to engage with the world -- and not just dominate it with dollars, cruise missile diplomacy and secret military courts. The billions we contemplate spending on missile defense should instead be invested to promote peace agreements and meet basic human needs in the world's poorest societies. And right now, we need to end our long illicit affair with nuclear weapons. In 1948 Oppenheimer observed that nuclear weapons -- born in secrecy and designed as "unparalleled instruments of coercion" -- were by definition antithetical to a free society. And so paradoxically he insisted that even a nuclear-armed America must nevertheless remain loyal to two mutually interdependent ideals, the minimization of secrecy and coercion: "We seem to know, and seem to come back again and again to this knowledge, that the purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion." Kai Bird, a fellow at the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Martin Sherwin, a professor of history at Tufts University, are writing a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. (c) 2001 The Washington Post Company xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Stewart Levine |
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