Why Celebrate Beethoven by Becoming a "Point of Light"?

Beethoven's Birthday today!

Even if you don't love his music, it is undeniable that the man gave the world a great gift - soaring music in so many different genres, that influenced every generation that came after him.

OK, so the man was a genius.

But we all have gifts. ALL of us. And they need to be savored and relished for our own enjoyment - painting, coloring, writing, building dog houses.

And we need to keep reminding ourselves that some of these gifts need to be shared. The yarn group I started at my local Unitarian church has produced warm shawls and lap robes for Meals on Wheels and the local Senior Center. I have a bag, a la Santa, of 40 hats, gloves, scarves, etc. to share with the Emergency Food Bank. If you are food-insecure, you don't have $ for warmth. And if you can lower in the inner temp because you have sweaters, you can save some more $ to apply to food.

And I offer free classes every term at my local senior college. I do free health talks at the Food Co-Op. I do free work in reiki and other healing work as a percentage of my total work time.

In my parents generation - and among working class and Southerners today, especially - community work was an integral part of life. Everyone, of every income level except the dirt-poor, knew that they had a responsibility [that means, not optional] to give back out of whatever abundance they had - money, time, prayer, or all three.

The shredding of our social safety net - and Republicans going after "benefits" that we working people of America paid for, over a 47 year work life, like Medicare and Social Security - means that we have to band together as never before.

As a Hindu scripture reminds us, "Do not berate or think badly of the poor, because many poor were once prosperous - and you may someday lose your prosperity as well." In other words, we are all in this together.

So inventory what you are good at. Can you cook? (free cooking classes) Can you crochet? (sit over here by me) Can you build things? (Habitat). You get the picture.

Beethoven was a genius, and you and I are not going to have the earth-shattering impact that he had. But consider these words from Middlemarch: : "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Every year when I pay my property taxes, I feel like the hero that I am. I am taking care of my community, without fuss or complaint. There are so many unhistoric acts of making our worlds a better place we can take.

Honor the man immortalized into the depths of space..... make your mark on your small corner of the world.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

The Secret Truth Behind the "War on Christmas"

The Truth Behind the “War on Christmas”

Of course, you know there is no war on Christmas and never was. The folks who claim otherwise are the slice of America that bemoans the Most Favored Religion status that Christianity had half a century ago. You know, religious pageants by all the kids at the PUBLIC school (including the kids whose parents were trying to teach them a different religion, or wanted their kids to have only science as their guide to life. The latter is sad, but certainly it is every parent’s right to not have a religion shoved down their children’s throats.). Christian religious decorations all over the schools. Christian religious symbols all over public, paid for by your tax dollars, government buildings, where the whole community needs to enter to receive a dog license, contest an easement or just go to work. Easter (not Spring) Break, which followed a Christian religious holiday.

Eventually, when enough new Justices were added, people who revered the Constitution and its hallowed separation of Church and State, the Supremes decided that it was all too egregiously unconstitutional. Hallelujah, said the vast majority of devout Christians, who could see the dangers to their religion in becoming a de-facto State Faith. Religion is irredeemably damaged when it gets wrapped around political power. Examples abound, both today and in previous centuries. [Email me PRIVATELY for details.]

The reason you can say Merry Christmas to someone and that someone has no idea what you really mean is because Dec 25 is a secular, civil holiday for the entire nation of citizens, as well as a religious holiday for a slice of those citizens, and the word “Christmas” has been appended to BOTH of them. If you say Merry Christmas you could be wishing someone a happy secular, civil holiday – or you could be greeting a co-religionist. You could be greeting a co-religionist and wishing them a happy BOTH holidays. Is this crazy? Ya sure, you betcha.

HOW did we get to this crazy state of affairs? The way we get to most messes: a cabal of people tried to get ascendency by grabbing power, not by earning respect. In this case, a group of Christian lawmakers thought of a clever way to make their religious holiday a national holiday – establishing their religion as the State Faith without being so overt about it that even a conservative Supreme Court couldn’t stomach it. The law establishing Dec 25th as a national, civic – secular! – holiday stated that Christmas was a holiday that was about family (not religion) and as such was embraced by all corners and segments of American society. It wasn’t true then, but the law made it so!

And that, dear devout and religious Christians, is why you can’t “Put Christ in Christmas” unless you are talking about your private religious celebrations, where he’s pretty well entrenched, you’ll have to admit. No, you can’t get Christ into a secular, civil holiday because – establishing your religion is unconstitutional in the USA. The national shopping, eating, visiting-family, commercial holiday with Frosty and Rudolph belongs to We the People. It’s a civic holiday and capitalism and customers can do whatever we like with it. THAT is the result of your co-religionists trying to pull a fast one with the US Constitution a century ago. Let that lesson sink in, really, really deeply. The reason that Christmas is no longer exclusively a day that a religious leader was born is 100% your own damn fault. 100%. You created this mess. It’s all on you. And this is one genie you will never, ever get back into the bottle.

You COULD repeal the designation of Dec 25 as a national holiday and have it return to just being a personal-choice day that religiously-inclined people can ASK their employers for [no guarantees, and it is close to the end of most companies’ fiscal year, so – good luck with that], but neither you nor the rest of us will get a paid holiday. Much less Dec 24th, Dec 26th or any other day prior to New Year’s. Wanna start using your personal vacation time to have a day or two off and skip the whole family travel thing? Hmm? Didn’t think so.

Neither will the rest of the overworked, exhausted 350 million rest of us who look forward to the only long Federally-encouraged family time off from work.

Because of the confusion with both holidays using the same words, people who are not aggressively trying to get back those halcyon days of unconstitutionality – which includes Christians who want to protect their religion as well as those of other, or no, faith tradition – coined the respectful Happy Holidays, to acknowledge that civil holiday, as well as Yule (Wiccans & other Neo-Pagans), Solstice (everyone), Hanukkah (Jews) and Bodhi Day (Buddhists). Respect is the foundation of a law-based, justice-focused democratic society. Respect is good.

And why do I say “Christians who want to protect their religion”? Well, if a holiday is purely religious, you have control of it. If you allow the name and the date to be used as a national secular holiday, then it belongs to all of us, and that includes Madison Avenue, the retail industry, Hollywood and any and all other commercial ideas that the human mind can think up.

you really follow the teachings of that marvelous, inspirational Jewish Palestinian construction worker of two millennia ago, start campaigning for a national, secular Yule Holiday on the 21st, or the 26th or some other late-December day [we need a long holiday close to New Year so we can have that family and rest time], so you can have your religious holiday back. The only thing you can’t have: Your religious ancestors wanted to force everyone to celebrate their religious holiday, as a way of either converting us all, or rubbing our faces in a de-facto theocracy.

Them days are gone for good, no matters what lies a President or politician tries to spin. You can’t slip a theocracy past the Supremes in the 21st Century, even a pack of Republican Justices. But you can put Christ back into a new exclusively-religious holiday. Heck, you could even move it back to when the Messiah was actually born – late March or early April. We’ll still have Christmas, that “family holiday enjoyed by all sectors of American society. “

Deck the halls with boughs of whatever and happy eggnog to us all, every one!

Honoring the 11 Million - Planning Our Own Acts of Courage

In my spiritual practice today, I sent healing prayers to the survivors and descendants of the Nazi Holocaust.  Our new understanding of the science of epigenetics has sobering information on how traumas can shift gene expression, allowing the trauma to be transmitted to succeeding generations in the form of lowered immune system activity and other effects.  Reiki healing helps.

We can start, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, with remembering all 11 million victims.  It always pains me when Jewish writers and speakers talk about 6 million, instead of 11 million.  Others quote that erroneous 6 million figure all the time.  But talking about 6 million Jews and ignoring the equally-tragic 5 million others is the worst kind of racism.  Those people were murdered once, and now the world is erasing their memory – as if their lives didn’t matter and their deaths aren’t tragedies.  Let’s stop it.  11 million.  The Roma people (aka gypsies) were almost exterminated, a percentage that exceeds any other targeted group by a huge margin.

What also helps is staying vigilant about pain and suffering today.  As people become emotionally overwhelmed, their empathy drops.  We have to avoid becoming overwhelmed, without unplugging completely.  So do Reiki, meditate, exercise, take creative arts time-outs, to renew and replenish yourselves for the long fight.

It might also be pertinent to consider what could be coming tomorrow.   Commentators in the USA and elsewhere have noted not only the appalling spectacle of white supremacists in the White House, but a worldwide rise in dictatorship-under-guise-of-democracy from Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia, to possible (unimaginable) election of a fascist thug in France. 

In the 1930’s, people who noticed the rise of fascist dictators who made the trains run on time and got people back to work weren’t called “negative” of course, but that’s the response to “Uh, people, there’s a pattern here…” today.  Doing the “don’t worry, just mind your own life” dance, as far too many million Americans are doing, worries me.  This problem isn’t going to go away by prayer, or raising the vibrational energy of the room.  Our grandparents didn’t pay attention until it was too late.  I hope that we, with their example to learn from, will wake up and take action sooner.

Our species has much more DNA devoted to cooperation than competition.  Cooperation in early social groups – food sharing, with everyone who had a bad collecting day – is what propelled our lineage into planetary dominance.  Empathy is an advanced trait of primates and the most intelligent mammals, like elephants and cetaceans.  

On Nazi Holocaust Remembrance Day, let’s celebrate the good people of 70 years ago, many of whom died, all of whom risked their lives, to save or try to save the targeted people from death.  We are good people, most of us.  We can call on the better angels of our nature to stay on the path of courage as our own time of testing is upon us.  Who in your city or community needs saving?  Take action.