Padraic O Tuama / "It is in the shelter of each other that people live" (an Irish saying) / "... for the rest of my life ..."

When this came up on my YouTube suggestions early this morning, I was reminded of Pádraig Ó Tuama's book that I learned about at Alive On All Channels.  It is a heartening book I hope to read again.

And then this arrived in my email:

I lived in divided Berlin in my 20s. And after the Wall in that city fell in 1989, I never imagined that there would be another event in my lifetime which would so clearly signify a Before and an After for the whole world. But the murder of George Floyd, in the context of the last year, was such a turning point and Minneapolis a new kind of ground zero. 

What happened here rippled out across this city and then across the world. What happened here was about our world. And what was world-changing is, in large part, what started to happen inside many of us. 

Ever after, when I use the word “we” or “us,” I understand in a whole new way that I do so in a White body. I will be walking and living and working with that understanding for the rest of my life. And — both/and — I hold that knowledge together with my clarity that when time becomes history, the generations for whom we are the ancestors will see an “us.” 

-- Krista Tippett

Listening to birds and frogs

This morning as I was out for a walk in the woods and listening to all the different birds, I began wondering about the differences between crows and ravens.  There is one part of my walk where I pass a pond where frogs live.  I rarely see frogs but do hear them in the spring and summer.

Listening

*

Hard rain falling / "... good people through the ages trying to find the sun ..."

 

"The Kind of Heroes We Need to Actually Save the Planet"

Renowned Nisqually hero Billy Frank, Jr., said, “We have to work together, all of us. … In the status quo we don’t have long. We have to somewhere make a transition.”

(quoted from an essay by Rena Priest in YES! magazine -- "The Kind of Heroes We Need to Actually Save the Planet")

"Our Shared Responsibility: A Totem Pole Journey / Se-Sealth (Jewell James)

Rena Priest -- Washington State's Newest Poet Laureate

Rena Priest is a Poet and an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She has been appointed to serve as Washington State's Poet Laureate for the term of April 2021-2023. (web page)

Rena Priest (essay)

Martin Luther King, Jr (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968)

There are three ascending levels of mourning: with tears — that is the lowest. With silence — that is higher. And with a song — that is the highest. (via Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel)

*

Mandala #60 (my non-dominant left hand) / The ability to play

Two versions of a song from 1949 that I need to listen to today / Another year of the Ox

Animations by MyHeritage / I was named after my father's mother

My grandmother in the late 1900s.

Me in the 1980s.

Me in the past few years.

Hmmm ... This appears to me to be an extremely enhanced photo-shopped version of me but I can see for the first time a slight resemblance to my mostly Norwegian grandmother whose grandfather didn't marry her grandmother and remains a mystery except that he may have had a German father and an English mother.  The animated me from the 1980s does not appear to me to be the same person as the animated me in recent years.  

According to 23andMe, I am:

69.3% Scandinavian

15.9% British and Irish

6.7% French and German

0.4% Central Asian, North Indian and Pakistani

23andMe has determined that my only nephew is:

35.4% Scandinavian

15.2% French and German

7.5% British and Irish

30.8% East Asian and Native American 

0.2% Central Asian, Northern Indian, and Pakistani

Although I no longer subscribe to MyHeritage, I received an email from them recently giving me this brief opportunity to try out their animation function.  I was able to animate about 10 photos before the MyHeritage website no longer allowed me to continue animating photos and began asking me to subscribe.

Genealogy fascinates me.  I continue to search for clues about my great great grandfather on my father's side and my great grandfather on my mother's side, both of whom disappeared mysteriously, leaving two of my female ancestors to raise their children without fathers.

Here is one of the two times that my grandmother saw me in person.  My grandfather had died during the previous winter.  She saw me again when I was 3 years old.  She died when I was 7 years old.  Both of my mother's parents died before I was born.

A day for listening

Matika Wilbur

Laura Ortman