Intention Friday

My intent this weekend:

Give up being right: invincibility in defenselessness.

Namaste

The divinity within me salutes the divinity within you.

Marie Howe

This Marie Howe poem was read at yoga this morning and I've had it in my head ever since:

Even if I don't see it again -- nor ever feel it
I know it is -- and that if once it hailed me
it ever does --

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn't -- I was blinded like that -- and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I'd die
from being loved like that.

Portraits of Humanity

Thomas Hawk @charityfocus on twitter has assembled a fantastic collection of portraits.

Half The Sky

"Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself." -Abraham Lincoln

I have been reading Half The Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. There are three passages from this book that I want to share with you:

• The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
• As the Journal Foreign Affairs observed: "Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was."
• The ultimate reality is that women's issues are marginalized, and in any case sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.

Read this book.

Begin to take action.

Intention Friday

Set your intention for the weekend.

My intent is to be grateful.

What is your intention this weekend?

The treasure of a Normal Day

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, savour you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky, and want, more than all the world, your return.

- Mary Jean Irion

Justice

Michael J. Sandel

Justice : A Journey in Moral Reasoning

Hundreds of students pack Harvard's Sanders Theater for Michael Sandel's "Justice" course—an introduction to moral and political philosophy. They come to hear Sandel lecture about great philosophers of the past—from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill—but also to debate contemporary issues that raise philosophical questions—about individual rights and the claims of community, equality and inequality, morality and law.

Despite the size of the course, Sandel engages students in lively discussion on topics including affirmative action, income distribution, and same-sex marriage, showing that even the most hotly contested issues of the day can be the subject of reasoned moral argument. This film, which contains excerpts of several classes, is part of a project to make this legendary course an educational resource that reaches beyond the Harvard classroom.

Be sure to check out Michael Sandel on PBS. Read the article in The New York Times: Morals Class Is Starting; Please Pass The Popcorn

Charter for Compassion

Weeks from the Charter for Compassion launch, Karen Armstrong looks at religion's role in the 21st century: Will its dogmas divide us? Or will it unite us for common good? She reviews the catalysts that can drive the world's faiths to rediscover the Golden Rule.