Category: peace
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Good stuff is going on
The poet Naomi Shahid Nye, whose father is Palestinian, visits schools in the United States and the Middle East. At the Texas Book Festival in Austin, she remembered the students in one classroom in the Middle East. “Do the kids in the United States know we want to be their friends?” the children asked. No…
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A day at James and Jeany’s farm
My brother James just broke a chicken’s neck. He killed it, and now he’s plucking its feathers. My sister-in-law Jeany is working at the Los Lunas community garden. Yesterday I helped Jeany and her friend Suzanne make salsa using tomatoes, onions and green peppers from Jeany’s garden and garlic from the community garden. We canned…
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The sounds of the loons
At night, when I pulled the covers around me to keep warm in our cabin in Maine, I heard the sad, loud sounds of the loons on the lake. “How do you describe those sounds?” I asked one morning. To answer my question, my friend Leslie pulled a bird guide from the bookshelf. The guidebook…
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A minute of meditation
Meditation can help people with heart disease, people who want to quit smoking and people who want to achieve a little inner peace. Meditation means paying attention to the breath, listening, being still, said Ruben L.G. Habito of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in an article in the April 22, 2014,…
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Solitude and silence
When Malcolm Gladwell runs, he never has anything in his ears. He doesn’t listen to music or the radio or an audio book, he told the audience recently at an Arts & Letters presentation in Dallas. Gladwell prefers silence. “Something beautiful happens when you’re alone with your thoughts,” he said. His father was a mathematician,…