Community, Environment

Community.

* Compassion
* Solidarity
* Peace
* Equality

It's about being aware. To See people, whether close to you and your home or on the other side of the world and a stranger.
It's about responsibility - for home, family and the Earth... Doing your part of making a difference. It doesn't have to be something grand! Even a small act of goodness can make a world of difference - bigger isn't better.

The opposite of Community is Indifference.

Environment.

It's where we are, where we live and breathe and bring up the Future. There are no other options but take responsibility, show consideration.

The opposite of Environment is... The End!

"We do not own the world, and its riches are not ours to dispose of at will. Show a loving consideration for all creatures, and seek to maintain the beauty and variety of the world. Work to ensure that our increasing power over nature is used responsibly, with reverence for life. Rejoice in the splendour of God's continuing creation."

(Advices&Queries no.42)

Gratitude...

This made me cry. This isn't just another day...

Article from The Guardian.

I just read this on The Guardian on Facebook and I thought it interesting...and share-worthy. Your thoughts?


The Quakers: a religion Richard Dawkins could sign up to
Anne Karpf · 28/09/2011 · guardian.co.uk

In party conference season, I'm too long in the tooth to expect fresh thinking from political leaders or political gurus, but maybe we're looking in the wrong place.

Newspaper ads and posters over the next 10 days will feature attractive people involved in conflict-resolution, nuclear disarmament and campaigns against the arms trade. Though they look like activists from some radical pressure group, they are actually all members of a religion – the Quakers: a religion singularly unafraid to take up radical political positions.

Indeed, Quakerism is more like a political movement or even party – a kind of wish-the-Labour-party-were-like-this party. Quakers played a prominent role in the abolition of slavery; were instrumental in setting up Amnesty, Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and for the past two years have campaigned for same-sex marriage.

They train people in non-violent direct action and have been particularly active in the Middle East; earlier this year Quakers voted to boycott goods from Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They also co-ordinate in the UK the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, training volunteers to monitor checkpoints and to accompany Palestinians to school and work. At a time when most politicians and political parties seem to have one eye permanently trained on the Daily Mail, it is astounding to find such an unapologetic embrace of so many different progressive ideas in one body.

It's hard to imagine another religion having (or wanting) to promote itself through an activist advertising campaign – to run during Quaker Week, which begins on Saturday and ends on 9 October. One reason for doing so is to challenge the taint of the past that clings so tenaciously to Quakers: painting them as old-fashioned puritans wearing broad-brimmed hats who have something to do with porridge. Or – since they don't (supposedly) smoke, drink or swear – as a kind of Amish also good at selling chocolate.

While Quakerism would make for an unusual political party, it's also (pretty much for the same reasons) an odd religion – one without priests, hierarchy, creed, sacraments, catechism, scripture, liturgy or dogma. Though it's based on a personal relationship with God, many Quakers are reluctant to even utter the G-word without qualifying it. Christian by roots, nowadays they can accommodate pantheists, and even non-theists too.

Indeed a Quaker would sooner not believe in God than in pacificism. Why, this is a religion that surely even Richard Dawkins could sign up to. Especially since even "birthright" Quakers have to decide, at 16 or thereabouts, whether to become "Quakers by convincement" (Quakers are fond of their archaisms) – hence none of the indoctrination that so irks Dawkins. If Quakers had a church (they emphatically don't) then it would certainly be a broad one.

Yet probably the main reason that Quakerism, though essentially a small movement (around 23,000 members in the UK), remains such an interesting phenomenon is its holistic scope. It's rare to find a movement prepared to point out, for instance, that economic structures contribute to personal problems like self-harm and domestic abuse; or to critique consumerism without blaming the consumer; or to see ethics and economics inhabiting the same moral universe ("Quakernomics").

I'm not a Quaker, but I was taken to a Quaker meeting house by a family friend as a child, and what a religious innovation that turned out to be – especially the communal silence. In a noisy world the "gathered stillness" is powerful indeed – and is itself a form of collective worship, according to Tony Stoller, editor of The Friends Quarterly.

Today, sitting alongside cynicism about religion and politics, there is an almost palpable yearning for a space where ethics and politics, environmentalism and spirituality, come together. Quakerism, with its active social engagement, and its injunctions (or 'testimonies') to "try to live simply" and "step lightly on the earth", seems to provide one such example.

Good News!

I'm not big on subscribing to magazines. I don't even get a newspaper any more - I still manage to get the news! :) I like me the odd bit of Royal gossip now and again but I'm not that keen knowing who a certain celebrity might, or might not, be sleeping with at the moment so cheezy gossip mags are quite quickly flicked through...

Most stuff deemed newsworthy, in the regular 'proprer' new now just isn't... There's too much doom and gloom, sadness, sickness, greed and agony in my opinion. Sure, we need to hear that too but not just that! There's very few sunshine stories to inspire us towards positive change, towards thinking, feeling, knowing that this place might not be The Best, but together we CAN make it/take it there! :)

I'd like to hear more of those kinds of news! News of compassion and kindness, of hope and inspiration, of light in the darkness... Things I'd not be afraid to share with my young children (who are too young to be allowed to watch the news broadcast with me) and guess what!? :) I've found it! :D In Good News Magazine, a reasonably new Swedish magazine that just happened ;) to fall into my lap last weekend on my lunch break when I was hunting for something readworthy at work. Chance? ;) I think not and as soon as I got home I ordered a subscription for myself.

The magazine is thick as a book and filled to the brim with inspiration! Joy, Light, Hope, Positive Progress, Health and Smiles. This particular no. had articles on Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontier, TED.com and hope in Afghanistan and much more!! :) My kind of magazine! :D :D :D

Yesterday I got my first very own issue of the GNM and this one is titled With The Help of Techology and I'm still ploughing my way through it! :) I want to read every single word of it! Even the ads (that are surprisingly few!) are interesting!! :D :D :D

GNM's facebook page shares positive stories/articles, most of them in English. Like them and start feeling postitive about the world we live in! :)

Love&Light,

Billions of people refused to give up!

I found this (in Swedish) posted on a notice board at Uni. With me being Ms.Indecisive and Ms.Doom&Gloom lately I thought I'd share it with you all to 'prove' that it's not all bad, far in fact far from it. ;)

ღ
Good news in during the last days:
* The planet continued to rotate around its axis as usual resulting in the sun rising all over the world.
* Millions of birds were singing and an infinite number of flowers bloomed.
* The Earth was blessed with 490 000 new precious babies.
* Intelligent, loving and courageous acts were performed every second on the planet.
* Millions of people refrained from saying or doing something unkind.
* Hundreds of thousands of new, really good ideas were hatched.
* Billions of people laughed, learned something new, touched another with tenderness, loved, and refused to give up.
ღ

(Source unknown. translated to English by E.)

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (1819 – 1892) an American poet, essayist and journalist.

Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none. God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.

"This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors 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,
Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh 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."

"I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best."

"In the faces of men and women, I see God."

"When I give, I give myself."

"The future is no more uncertain than the present."

"Be curious, not judgmental."

"Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?"

"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others..."