My good friend Emma sings with the Threshold Singers of the East Bay. They sing to the terminally ill and dying. They also sing for newborns in the NICU. They sing for those crossing thresholds of birth and dying. I recommend the article and listening to the songs. Be soothed in support.
https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/threshold-singers-east-bay-lullabies-dying/
Today I read the words of Ajahn Sumedho: A life without generosity, respect, and giving to others is a joyless life. Nothing is more joyless than selfishness.
I contrast what Trump and cronies are doing with what Grant did when Lee came to him to surrender the Civil War. From Heather Cox Richardson:
But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—“about twenty-five thousand”—in stride, telling the general that “he could have…all the provisions wanted.”
By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while the Union army, backed by a booming industrial economy, could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.
Tuesday this week added extra trauma for many of us as we worried Trump would carry out the horrific things he said, but I continue to see how essential it is to stay with what we know is true, humane, and good. We do it for ourselves and the world. We feed and care for those who are hungry, and in need, and in that, we teach and feed ourselves on Joy which includes sorrow and grief, and happiness, tenderness, and care!
In John Keat’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, he writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
I saw that yesterday at the No King’s Protest. I stood and waved with others at the exit to a freeway. On a beautiful Saturday like yesterday, people are on their way to West Marin and the beaches. As two lanes merge into one, they’re going slowly or often stopped, so it’s an intimate exchange as we stand on the sidewalk with our signs, music playing and joy and cheer waving with our signs. It’s festive and invigorating, and a huge percentage of the people in the cars join in, waving, honking, smiling, and they are so beautiful. They understand compassion, unity, care and the flowing energy and expansion of love. Those who drive by compacted, ignoring and frowning are not beautiful. They are a downer. Of course this is my perspective. One might say I resonate with those on “my side”, and yet, there is beauty in seeing movement, resonance, response, awareness, and joy. I saw so clearly that love and care for others is a beauty treatment and brightens the heart and eyes. We share a path and unity and care for all carves and curves the places to nourish and share and know enough.
I was on a poetry/meditation call where a woman shared she envisioned this inner/outer world we share as a teabag immersed in a cup of water. She sees us immersed in an ocean of water and air flowing in and out.
The image is with me as I reflect back to 1976 when Republican President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, a month to honor the accomplishments and contributions of Black people throughout our history.
Now, the Trump administration denies and stomps on that contribution. How does that affect us all, this denial of inner and outer flow? One can only feel compassion for a tragic group of people isolated and contracted in fear and hate. What a horrific way to live on a planet that teaches and shows us how to thrive in connection, generosity, reflection, and inner and outer flow.
I rise for my journey south to be with family but read Heather Cox Richardson first, and learn how NORAD started tracking Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
From Heather: On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh.
According to legend, the tradition of tracking Santa’s sleigh began in November 1955, when a child trying to reach Santa on a telephone hotline advertised by a Sears, Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado transposed two digits. It was not Santa who picked up the phone, but Colonel Harry Shoup of Continental Air Defense Command, known as CONAD, located in Colorado Springs.
He realized this was an opportunity to promote our air defense system that protected us and Canada from Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole.
A few weeks after the young child’s call, Shoup told his public-relations officer to inform the news wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa’s sleigh as it traveled from his home at the North Pole. Reporters loved the story, and the following year they called to see if the trackers would be operational again.
In 1957,* Canada and the U.S. formed the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. By charting Santa’s ride, the agency illustrated the military’s mission to protect the citizens of the continent by tracking an object traveling from the North Pole, over the Arctic Ocean, to Canada, and beyond.
By Christmas Eve 1960, NORAD was posting updates and tracking the flight of “S. Claus.” It reported that the sleigh had made an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay. When Canadian fighter jets stopped by to check on the incident, they found Santa tending to a reindeer’s injured foot. Once the animal was bandaged, the jets escorted Santa’s sleigh as he completed his annual flight. Since then, fighter jets have frequently intercepted the sleigh to salute Santa, who reins in his team to let the slower jets catch up.
Over time, NORAD became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its mission expanded to include collecting information about the Earth’s atmosphere, coastal waters, and intelligence. It is still key to U.S. and Canadian defense.
And what began in 1955 as a way to familiarize war-weary Americans with Cold War–era defense systems has become an operation in which more than 1,000 Canadian and American military personnel, Defense Department civilian workers, and local participants near Colorado Springs, where NORAD is headquartered, volunteer to answer the more than 100,000 phone calls that come from children around the world on Christmas Eve. It is a testament to the longstanding U.S.-Canadian friendship.
For one night a year, the hard-edged world of international alliances, intelligence, radar, satellites, and fighter jets turns into a night for adults to create a magical world for children.
A friend recommended the movie The Penguin Lessons. I love it. I was then inspired to read the book The Penguin Lessons by Tom Mitchell that inspired the movie. There are similarities, yes, a wonderful penguin, who changes people’s lives, but there is much more in the book, so I recommend both with maybe the book second, though who knows. Notice what draws you.
Meanwhile, enjoy this poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.
Spring Awakening
One day you wake up
able to name the weight
you’ve been carrying.
Realizing it’s not part of your body or your being,
not essential in any way to journeying or joy,
you set it down gently, without fanfare
in the long soft grass at the side of the road
and walk on
Surprised to find yourself
smiling in the warm sun
for no particular reason.
Because I’m with death these days, this process I see as transformation, warp and weft, tangling and untangling, I feel the words of Carl Perkins roll through me.
If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.
With death, we become the stream, allowing others a more vibrant and fragrant place as they fill in where we were as we liquify and aerate, dissolve and reform.
When you love, you complete a circle. When you die, the circle remains.
John Squadra
It’s a day to honor courage. The word comes from the French, couer, the heart.
We honor one man today, Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1957, he said:
“I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.”
When I was young, I had a tree, a nest into which I climbed.
I resonate to these words of Richard Powers from The Overstory.
The judge asks, “Young, straight, faster-growing trees aren’t better than older, rotting trees?” “Better for us. Not for the forest.”
She describes how a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree. “I sometimes wonder whether a tree’s real task on Earth isn’t to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time.” The judge asks what living things might need a dead tree. “Name your family. Your order. Birds, mammals, other plants. Tens of thousands of invertebrates. Three-quarters of the region’s amphibians need them. Almost all the reptiles. Animals that keep down the pests that kill other trees. A dead tree is an infinite hotel.” She tells him about the ambrosia beetle. The alcohol of rotting wood summons it. It moves into the log and excavates. Through its tunnel systems, it plants bits of fungus that it brought in with it, on a special formation on its head. The fungus eats the wood; the beetle eats the fungus. “Beetles are farming the log?” “They farm. Without subsidies. Unless you count the log.” “And those species that depend on rotting logs and snags: are any of them endangered?” She tells him: everything depends on everything else. There’s a kind of vole that needs old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs, no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading fungus; no spreading fungus, no new trees. “Do you believe we can save these species by keeping fragments of older forest intact?” She thinks before answering. “No. Not fragments. Large forests live and breathe. They develop complex behaviors. Small fragments aren’t as resilient or as rich. The pieces must be large, for large creatures to live in them.”
This morning I’m with the beauty and wisdom in this Carol video, O Holy Darkness.
I remember taking a course in Child Psychology at UCLA when I was 18. In 1968, we were propagandized that the “Communists” were programming their children. We had to fight back against that threat. Of course, our own propaganda was that we were the good guys and our children were allowed and given complete freedom and possibility in this “land of the free”.
Angela Davis, an avowed Communist, came to teach and there was turmoil and concern. In order to work as a tour guide on campus, I had to sign that I was not a Communist. I doubt I knew what that meant at the time. I knew my father believed in the Domino Theory and not wanting another World War II, he thought we were right to be in Vietnam. He didn’t live long enough to learn the truth of that.
Now, we are trying to teach our children a more whole history. Watch this beautiful movement into the embrace, the holy embrace, of wholeness.
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