A large reflection about truth, love and some form of meaning of what it is all about!
Funny how things happen!
I wrote the other post published today about an hour before this one. I have the CD Weave A Prayer from Glorious Chorus playing in the background and was idly reading the notes on the CD cover. The third track is Earth Blessing and the notes include the Sanskrit chant Prayer for Enlightment.
There are many strands that may be easily woven together to demonstrate, again and again, that love, integrity and grace are the only things that matter.
It’s so much about living in the present, appreciating the moment, just being. The wonderful example set by dogs – it really is about enlightment.
OM
ASATOMA SADGAMAYA
TAMASOMA JYOTHIRGAMAYA
MRITHYORMA AMRUTANGAMAYA
OM SHANTI, SHANTI, SHANTI
Lead us from darkness to light
From ignorance to truth
And from death to eternity
Let peace prevail everywhere
And your feedback to this musing would be really appreciated.
The number of daily readers of Learning from Dogs is now steadily in the range of 250-350 and gently increasing. Writing posts for publication on a daily basis can be hard at times, hence the insertion of articles at times that don’t adhere closely to the vision behind the Blog: This world needs integrity, honesty and grace more than even before. My judgement is that having something to read every day is better for you, dear Blog reader, but having your feedback to this point would be valuable.
Then there are moments when a number of ideas come together and having the freedom to ‘talk’ to others across the digital ether seems like a precious privilege.
You may (or may not) have noticed that I have been fairly absent from Learning From Dogs for the past few months. While numerous factors play into this, the primary reason is that in August I began my classes at the University of Georgia School of Law, and have since ceased to exist outside of Athens, GA.
Okay, so that is an exaggeration. The only unfortunate part of law school, though, is that it has hindered my ability to keep up with currents events, and thus has made it difficult for me comment on such.
In trying to think of something I could write about, I realized — why not just write about law school? I have been surprised (usually pleasantly) by my experiences here, and think that many readers would be equally surprised about many facets of legal education in the USA.
In the coming weeks I’ll be writing blog posts now and again about my experiences, how they do or do not conform to stereotypes about law school and lawyers, and what direction I think the American legal education system is heading in.
That being said, it’s time for the Legal Research and Writing class, so farewell for now!
Celebrating the beautiful Planet Earth and a stream running through a field
Evening peace
Today is Blog Action Day and the theme is water. It seemed a worthwhile cause so Learning from Dogs has joined the many thousands of Bloggers ‘speaking’ to millions of combined readers.
I have no idea what aspects of water will be covered by all those many authors but Blog Action Day sets the theme thus:
Why Water?
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.
Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.
I’m staying over in SW England at present with friends who live in a beautiful part of the County of Devon and that means plenty of lovely walks. Just a few days ago, the setting sun was glorious across the green rolling hills that are so typical of South Devon.
But this day is about water. That bountiful gift from a wonderful planet perfectly positioned from our Sun.
Hopefully, by the time this Post is published (it’s being written on the 12th) the steel rescue chamber above the trapped Chilean miners will be in action, carefully and steadily bringing the men to the surface, one by one. The event will be mainstream news so Learning from Dogs will simply watch from the side.
(And to the huge joy of millions, we now all know the miners are safe! Jon)
But there was something that caught my eye from the BBC News website on the 12th. Here’s the extract:
Meanwhile, Alejandro Pino, a journalist who has been in daily contact with the miners and advising them on handling interviews, revealed that he had been helping them prepare a speech.
“I asked them to give me just one word and with that word I would show them how to create a speech,” he said.
“It was just a try, so I can repeat to you what happened because I was touched by it and they were touched by it too, not because I made the speech but because the word they chose to start with was extraordinary: it was ‘comradeship’.”
Comradeship!
It doesn’t take very long to realise that mining is one of those crafts that relies on comradeship.
Here’s a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The greatness of a craft consists firstly in how it brings comradeship to men.”
From the word ‘comradeship’ it seems a small step to the word ‘community’ and all that is implied for the health and welfare of mankind.
Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake ye do them. (A Dream of John Ball, Ch. 4; first published inThe Commonweal 1886/7)
Fellowship, community, comradeship – call it what you will, it will have to be the essence of mankind’s future.
By Jon Lavin
(Full citation is: Smith, M. K. (2001) ‘Community’ in the encyclopedia of informal education
This Post for Learning from Dogs was inspired by a simple email. An email sent out automatically by Facebook inviting me to join a group committed to holding the Nobel prize in Economics accountably for the crisis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
That intrigued me. Like thousands of others I had previously read The Black Swan, a book The Times newspaper describes as ” as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II”.
Wikipedia has a thorough description of Taleb much recommended if you have 10 minutes to read it.
Bryan Appleyard of The Times wrote an excellent piece on Taleb on the 1st June, 2008 which may be read here. Here’s an extract from near the front of that piece in The Times:
He spilt the tea – bear with me; this is important – while grabbing at his BlackBerry. He was agitated, reading every incoming e-mail, because the Indian consulate in New York had held on to his passport and he needed it to fly to Bermuda. People were being mobilised in New York and, for some reason, France, to get the passport.
The important thing is this: the lost passport and the spilt tea were black swans, bad birds that are always lurking, just out of sight, to catch you unawares and wreck your plans. Sometimes, however, they are good birds. The recorders cost $20 less than the marked price owing to a labelling screw-up at Circuit City. Stuff happens. The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. “You will never,” he says, “be able to control randomness.”
To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”
Despite the article being over two years old, it is still an important piece for anyone trying to understand the causes of the financial mess we are all still in.
Finally, Taleb’s own website is a rich resource of much that will allow us all to better understand where we got to, where we are and what has to change if we are to have real hope for a better future.
Here’s a YouTube video of a TV interview taken in May, 2010.
Here’s an earlier video of Taleb explaining what his theory of black swans is about.
Work to line the top of an escape shaft with metal tubing is expected to finish in the next few hours at the mine where 33 men are trapped in northern Chile.
A winch and pulley will be installed and the shaft tested before the rescue begins, it is hoped, on Wednesday.
Amid the final preparations for the rescue the Chilean health minister said some of the miners were gallantly insisting they should be last to leave.
And some wonderful pictures on the BBC website here.
I’m sure the vast majority of Learning from Dogs readers will be on top of the news that is spreading around the globe reporting that the Chilean miners have been reached. Here’s the BBC:
Rescuers have drilled through to the underground chamber where 33 Chilean miners have been trapped since August.
The breakthrough at the San Jose mine came shortly after 0800 local time (1200 GMT).
It means efforts to remove the miners through the tunnel should begin within days. Tim Willcox was at the mine when the breakthrough happened.
Rescuer workers have broken through to the 33 Chilean miners trapped half a mile underground.
Engineers and relatives of the men began celebrating on Saturday morning after the escape shaft reached the point where the miners have been stuck now for over two months.
Mining minister Laurence Golborne warned though it could take days before attempts start to remove the men from the San Jose mine.
All fabulous news.
Picture from the Daily Mail online.
Contact: Rescue workers broke through to the 33 trapped Chilean miners earlier on Saturday morning
Learning from Dogs 