April 19, 2005

A friend sent me this beautiful article.

I wanted to share it with my readers to help remind us of the consciousness, compassion and tolerance found in humans and non-humans alike at times of crisis.

From Jim France of the Pavilion Hotel Group in Bangkok:

At a resort on Phuket, one of the most popular attractions is (was) elephant rides.

As many as eight people on one elephant, first into the surrounding forest, then down to the beach, to lunch at a fresh water lagoon, then back to the hotel.

The elephants (nine) were kept chained to in-ground posts, not because they needed to be, but because it made the mothers feel better. Their children seemed safe from a tromping when feeding the beasts.

About twenty minutes before the first wave hit, the elephants became extremely agitated and unruly.

Four had just returned from a trip and their handler's had not yet chained them.

They helped the other five tear free from their chains.

They all then climbed a hill and started bellowing.

Many people followed them up the hill.

Then the waves hit.

After the waves subsided, the elephants charged down from the hill, and started picking up children with their trunks and running them back up the hill; when all the children were taken care of, they started helping the adults.

They rescued 42 people. Then they returned to the beach and carried up four dead bodies, one of them a child.

Not until the task was done would they allow their handlers to mount them. Then with handlers atop, they began moving wreckage.

Many super-human and super-sentient capacities were exhibited through these wonderful elephant beings, including concern and compassion for one another and their fellow humans through the transitions they were going through.

For me, this is another sign that we will eventually awaken to recognizing the animals as our companions and conscious co-creators of life on earth, instead of beasts of burden, food and clothing.

January 01, 2005

With sorrow and remembrance of the victims and survivors of the Tsunami, I am including this article by Bob Herbert from the New York Times.

Our Planet, and Our Duty
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Friday 31 December 2004

One moment the kids were laughing and skylarking on the beach, yelling and chasing one another, sweating in the warm bright sun. The next moment they were gone.

The world is used to horror stories, but not on the stupefying scale of the macabre tales coming at us from the vast and disorienting zone of death in tsunami-stricken southern Asia. Einstein insisted that God does not play dice with the world, but that might be a difficult notion to sell to some of the agonized individuals who have seen everything they've lived for washed away in a pointless instant.

The death toll now is more than twice the number of American G.I.'s killed in all the years of the Vietnam War. Not just entire families, or extended families, but entire communities were consumed by waters that rose up without warning to destroy scores of thousands of people who were doing nothing but going about their ordinary lives.

On Tuesday The Times ran a big front-page picture taken in a makeshift morgue in southern India. It certainly captured the horror. It looked for all the world like a sandy playground covered with dead children.

Imagination pales beside the overwhelming reality of the tragedy. There were, for example, the grief-stricken throngs, clawing through mud and rubble, peering into the faces of the severely injured, wandering through piles of decaying corpses, in search of loved ones.

The Boston Globe quoted a young man whose college sweetheart was among the more than 800 people killed when a train carrying beachgoers in Sri Lanka was slammed by a 30-foot wall of water that lifted it from the tracks and hurled it into a marsh. "Is this the fate that we had planned for?" cried the young man. "My darling, you were the only hope for me."

Perhaps a third of those killed were children. Many were swept away before the eyes of horrified, helpless parents. "My children! My children!" screamed a woman in Sri Lanka. "Why didn't the water take me?"

The killer waves that moved with ferocious speed across an unprecedented expanse of global landscape flung their victims about with a randomness that was all but impossible to comprehend. People in beachfront dwellings ended up in trees, or entangled in electrical power lines, or embedded in the mud of hillsides. People died in buses, cars and trucks that were swept along by the waves like leaves in a strong wind. Sunbathers were swept out to sea.

In that environment, Einstein must stand aside for Shakespeare, whose Gloucester said: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

Any tragedy is awful for the relatives of those who perished. But this is a catastrophe of a different magnitude. "This," as one observer noted, "is like confronting the apocalypse."

"What makes it especially frightening is that whole communities have been annihilated," said Dr. John Clizbe, a psychologist in Alexandria, Va., who, until his retirement a couple of years ago, had served as vice president for disaster services at the American Red Cross. He said, "We've known for years now that the emotional devastation that survivors feel and experience is often greater than the physical devastation."

The recovery process is easier, he said, when there is a supportive community to bolster those in need. But in some of the most devastated regions of southern Asia, the regions most in need of support, those communities have vanished.

It's a peculiarity of modern technology that people anywhere in the world can sit back and watch in real time, like voyeurs, the life-and-death struggles of their fellow humans. The planet is growing smaller and its residents more interdependent by the day. We're fully aware that our planetary neighbors in southern Asia are desperately drawing upon the deepest reservoirs of fortitude and resilience that our troubled species has at its disposal.

What this means is that we're the supportive community. All of us. This catastrophe would at least have a silver lining if it moved the people of the United States and other nations toward a wiser, more genuinely cooperative international posture.

William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

That's what Faulkner believed. We'll see.

September 15, 2004

If I allowed myself to believe everything the media is telling me, I would constantly be fretting about why I don’t have a perfect body, with florescent teeth, always happy, sweet smelling, emotionally balanced, confident, effortlessly successful, and sexually available at the slightest suggestion.

The women I know who have come to recognize these lies of expectation have come to a rested happiness, accepting their own limitations and relinquishing the stress of seeking perfection in an imperfect world. They do not fend off the signs of maturity, and their sexuality is not complicated by negative self-image and nagging doubt. Praise to the women who love their bodies and give deeper meaning to beauty in all its variety!