An uplifting news item, poem, thought or quotation each day. Archive of past entries
26 September 2004

Invent your own rituals

  • Inject meaning into your daily rhythms: awakening, eating, exercise, beginning and ending work.  Remind yourself of the attitudes you want to maintain. 

  • Mark the passage of time: anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. Invite friends and family to participate, and create structures that give them permission to express themselves.

  • Remember in your own way loved ones who have passed out of your life.

  • Devise phrases that fly in the face of your limitations, and craft them into affirmations that you can repeat, with hypnotic effect.

  • Precede activities that are emotionally difficult (that you might seek to avoid) with rites that nourish you.

  • Transform activities that have become unconscious habit; suffuse them with awareness of your sensations and thoughts.
         - Josh Mitteldorf

25 September 2004

Zen, distilled

"If you don't understand, just don't understand. If you keep this "don't understand" then your Don't Know mind becomes very strong and a big Don't Know is possible, which means great question and great doubt. If you don't know completely, then you will get complete enlightenment. If you have only a small question, only small enlightenment is possible. There are many kinds of enlightenment--small enlightenment, middle enlightenment, big enlightenment, and then finally, no enlightenment. No enlightenment is complete enlightenment."

  -Gabe (f/k/a Unlearned Hand)
  A handful of sand

24 September 2004
The international drug industry has become enormously profitable by marketing to wealthy people, and offering marginal relief. Meanwhile, the afflictions of millions of people in the third world are neglected.

Two years ago, Victoria Hale perceived this reality and resolved to do something about it. She founded a non-profit drug company, dedicated to curing the parasitic diseases that are most deadly to the world’s poor- malaria and leishmaniasis and pediatric diarrhea.

"When I wrote the strategic plan for OneWorld Health I had to step back because it frightened me a bit. At that time I saw it as me taking on sizeable global health problems. How would I ever make it succeed? ...the question was not was I going to change the world, it was whether I was willing to commit everything I had to make it work."

The Institute for OneWorld Health does clinical trials of drugs that have been abandonned by Big Pharma because they don’t offer sufficient profit potential, then brings those drugs to market.

23 September 2004

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
 -Beryl Wolk

22 September 2004
"A clarion call for global unity is being sounded from the four corners of the Earth."

"Behind the scenes, a worldwide movement for a better world has been growing, bringing us hope for a more peaceful, just and sustainable future."

Yesterday, Sept 21, was the 22d International Day of Peace

21 September 2004

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T S Eliot
Little Gidding (fr Four Quartets)
20 September 2004

"We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain...we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy."

Ursula Le Guin
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas