Will you be gathering around the table with a family that has passionate political and religious differences. Here are some thoughts about how to put them aside for a few hours. Those of us whose families have been divided in the political realm have a particular challenge and a particular opportunity this holiday season to begin healing the nation. Please share this!
Hostess’s Wonder Bread and all its processed preserved pasteurized pastries used to be signs of progress and prosperity — no more, and that’s a good thing. Hostess really died in 1968 — when it was first acquired by a conglomerate — and has gone bankrupt twice already. The recession or union didn’t kill Hostess — healthier diets did.
Many mornings growing up, when I’d drag myself out of bed and make my way to the living room, I’d find my mom sitting quietly in “her” chair. Sometimes she’d be reading; more often, just staring off into space with an open book in her lap. The greatest gift my mom gave me was her example of loving reading, solitude and contemplation.
When you find yourself feeling particularly ungrateful about your life — or a spiritual director or friend points out that you seem that way — the gratitude list is a simple tool to help you stop and remind yourself of things for which you can be grateful. Here are a few tips to get started.
Trinity Lower East Side’s soup kitchen, which serves 250 hot meals a day, lost its stock of food supplies when Sandy flooded its basement. Here’s a great way to give directly to a local organization that has an immediate need due to Hurricane Sandy serving my community’s most vulnerable members.
With the ouster of the Tea Party in New Hampshire and Maine after two years, Northern New England has repudiated the politics of fear, anger and exclusion, giving me hope that it may again be an example to the nation of how politics can and should be done — grassroots-driven, open-minded, civil.
What Rachel Maddow expresses hope for, that this will be a wake-up call for the Republicans and could result in more balanced government, is something that I also pray for. If there was a vibrant competition of good ideas, not parliamentary game playing and grandstanding, the result would be better legislation. I see a few hopeful signs, but we will soon see.
Everyone is affected by the seasons. That’s not a disorder. That’s being human. As the nights grow longer, check out these great tips for dealing with the shorter days of winter.
UPDATED 2012 MAPS–There is so much suggested and influenced by the shorthand terms “red state” and “blue state”: the ideological hardening of “right” and “left,” distortions in our electoral process, and further distortions caused by the way news agencies report on it. You get the impression you must choose a camp. Are you red or blue? Worse, it sets up the other color as an opposite, with no overlap. It sets up people who have chosen the other camp as Other, creating division and weakening our sense of oneness with other people and the world around us. If I’m “red,” is someone in a “blue state” my neighbor?
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