Peacemakers 5 - us!

  

Signs and symbols...

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From the internet...feel free to share!

Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.

H. JACKSON BROWN JR. Check out Yesterday's Pages on The Ukraine.

Then there's Grace.

 Thinking how I have "grace" in my life...

Grace is always present. You imagine it is somewhere high in the sky,

far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart.

Grace is the Self. . . .You are never out of its operation.

-~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

I somehow was never taught about grace in my Christian Sunday School classes. How come? And when I left the straight and narrow and tried exploring many other ways of looking at the world (ie other religions.) nobody seemed to tell me about it.

Then within the wonders of Unitarian Universalism, where many faiths are welcome, and sometimes different ones are given the pulpit on a Sunday...I finally learned that I had "Grace" in my life. It was just there, always, and sometime surprisingly available.

From another blogger, "the beauty we love" I found these quotes on Wednesday. Boy I needed to get in touch with grace the day I read that!

Grace is a manifestation of the cosmic free will in operation. 

It can alter the course of events in a mysterious manner

 through its own unknown laws, which are superior to

 all natural laws, and can modify the latter by interaction.

It is the most powerful force in the universe.

It descends and acts only when it is invoked 

by total self- surrender. 

Rationalists laugh at it, and atheists scorn it, but it exists.

It is a visitation of force unexpected and unpredictable.

 It is a voice spoken out of cosmic silence - 

It is ‘Cosmic Will which can perform 

authentic miracles under its own laws’.

~ D.C. Desai

 from Divine Grace Through Total Self-Surrender

I've edited this quote so that it is palatable to my own pagan beliefs, where all life is part of a universal spirituality. 

I edited out where D.C. Desai used the term "God" which I prefer to avoid, coming from it's patriarchal religious limited background. Remember this is a blog where I share my opinions. You're welcome to comment.

Grace was needed as I struggled with breathing difficulties that day. I tried lying down to rest, only to have more coughs. Earlier I had had to stop the sit-R-cise class when it started the aerobic part. I'm just feeling like things are sort of out of my control. Been there, got the tee-shirt!

And then a dear friend said her debilitating back pain had returned, after having just a week or so without it since the beginning of Feb. She was at church last Sunday for a musical program. This back pain doesn't respond to over the counter meds, but her doctor hasn't offered anything besides muscle relaxants so far.  

Then there's my life here, at this little laptop. Yes you can see I do go elsewhere and do other things...but the other day I had a major accident on the laptop. 

When reaching for my meds to take with a full mug of ginger ale, I poured the whole mugfull across the keyboard!  

Pick up mug! 

Pick up laptop, and let ginger ale pour onto floor! 

Unplug so I don't electrocute myself! 

Look in panic around living room for anything to start to wipe as much ginger ale off the keyboard as possible!

You can imagine my continued swiping with napkins, a lap blanket, anything. When put upright on its side, ginger ale came out the bottom keys.

I left it in that position, and then switched to damp cloth and towel. Then did the exterior, and the screen. And didn't turn it off.

The next day it had drained the battery while asleep so I plugged it back in, turned it on, and slowly it came to life. Much gratitude felt then!  Some grace had gotten me to that point.

I proceeded to copy every file onto a thumb drive before anything else.

Oh did I mention that that the "big ginger ale fiasco" took place a few hours before I drove at night and picked up my friend from the airport at about 11:20 pm. Did I mention I avoid driving at night?  

I finally got a little sleep before the early morning physical therapy apointment...maybe 6 hours.

I was able to nap later that next day, right through the noon hour. And strangely enough, I didn't succumb to coughing problems. Just mental, and perhaps coordination! Those are conditions I've not had to deal with before, being very careful about not falling.

Second example of grace (receiving good things that I don't necessarily deserve, haven't worked for, haven't even asked for...my definition) was the extra keyboard that had been sitting unused just below the laptop on the slide-out drawer, where the mouse pad was.  When I realized all the ginger ale keys would no longer have any bounce, and would require a harder push (well, duh) I tried plugging in the spare keyboard. It was given to me to help with a Mac computer, so I wondered what would happen with the microsoft laptop. First try, "we do not recognize this device." Second try, same. Kept on trying, and finally it's working. (So that part was my diligent effort!

I (like so many bloggers) may suddenly go dark. I don't have any other method to blog. Well, I do have the laptop before the one before this...very very slow. But I can read your blogs. Not sure how photos would go through. But I'm probably going to need to take this laptop in for some kind of cleaning, wouldn't you say?

Gratitude comes with grace. The worst didn't happen that evening with ginger ale. The driving was successful though somewhat harrowing with my trying to be safe by using the high beam headlights, but sometimes going too fast when I needed to slow down. It's hard for me to see roads' lines at night, even without cataracts anymore.

We survived. I'm here another day. Much gratitude!

Interdependence Day

Joy Harjo recites her poem "Grace"

"Grace" by Joy Harjo

                         For Darlene Wind and James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. 

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. 

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

Our US Poet Laureate

Cousin Adam Stevens and wife Lucinda Hansford Stevens posed in front of their Hayesville, Oregon home. Lucinda was daughter of Mary Polly Hansford Gilmore, whose 2 daughters and husbands went on the 1849 California Gold Rush, but one and her family died in Sweetwater, WY (not yet a state) and the other made it to Oregon.
Great Aunt Mary Polly Hansford was one of those who died in Sweetwater in the cholera epidemic.  Her sister was my three times great grandmother, Nancy Hansford Williams, who stayed in Missouri.  Her son, my G G Grandfather William T. Williams served in the Union Army in 1865, and then moved to Texas between 1866 and 1880.

The Hansford family may have lived on this land in Kentucky before they moved west to Missouri.

I don't know where this is, but it reminds me of how the weather, and now we know the climate changes, affect all our lives.