Morning Open Thread - The People Who Lift: Seeds of Possibility

This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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On Saturday, along with the junk mail and the bills, our copy of WorldArk arrived. For those who don’t know, this is the magazine of Heifer International. In this issue, there are stories about Quechua communities in the Ecuadorian Andes reviving ancestral fiber arts to create marketable clothing from the wool of their alpacas (and how to tell an alpaca from a llama); a new gender equality and cooperation program in Rwanda; and the annual ‘most important Gift Catalog in the World’– all the ways to help that you can give as gifts in someone’s honor or memory, instead of consumer goods that your family or friends probably don’t really need.

I first found out about Heifer while running the office at the synagogue where my ‘temp job’ turned into the first 20 years of my third career. It was a very popular charity with many of the congregants, but it was the boy who chose it as his Bar Mitzvah project who really made me pay attention. His goal was to raise $5,000 for the Gift of an Ark. For this year-long project, he learned to bake, so he could hold bake sales and sell custom-decorated cakes, he washed cars, mowed lawns, baby-sat, and had a part-time job – only the last couple of hundred dollars came from relatives’ money gifts for his big day. I got reports all along the way from his very proud mom when she came to pick him up after Hebrew lessons with the Cantor.

For many years now, my husband and I have given the lion’s share of our charitable donations to Heifer and to Habitat for Humanity. What these charities share is the idea of giving a hand up, not a hand-out.

During these ‘blasted heath’ years of our Republic, WorldArk has often arrived when I really needed a strong dose of hope, a reminder that in a few other places, our small donation had become seeds of possibilities in the hands of people just discovering how powerful they really are.

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I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but
still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do something I can do.

– Edward Everett Hale

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If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking (919)

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by Emily Dickinson

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If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin –© 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College – Harvard University Press

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) America’s best-known woman poet and one of the nation’s greatest and most original authors, lived the life of a recluse in Amherst Massachusetts. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, ignoring the traditional poetic forms prevailing among most of the other poets of her day. The extent of her work wasn’t known until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered her huge cache of poems.

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When we're struck with cruelty, we can either inflict the same
on others like it's a rite of passage, or decide that here is
where it stops.

― Joyce Rachelle, The Language of Angels

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The Two Kinds of People

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by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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There are two kinds of people on earth to-day;
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say.
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Not the sinner and saint, for it's well understood,
The good are half bad and the bad are half good.
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Not the rich and the poor, for to rate a man's wealth,
You must first know the state of his conscience and health.
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Not the humble and proud, for in life's little span,
Who puts on vain airs is not counted a man.
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Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years
Bring each man his laughter and each man his tears.
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No; the two kinds of people on earth I mean,
Are the people who lift and the people who lean.
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Wherever you go, you will find the earth's masses
Are always divided in just these two classes.
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And, oddly enough, you will find, too, I ween,
There's only one lifter to twenty who lean.
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In which class are you? Are you easing the load
Of overtaxed lifters, who toil down the road?
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Or are you a leaner, who lets others share
Your portion of labor, and worry and care?
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“The Two Kinds of People” is in the public domain.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author and poet, was born in Wisconsin. “Solitude” is probably her best-remembered poem, for its opening lines, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone./ For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth / But has trouble enough of its own.” Her poetry collections include Poems of Passion (1883), Poems of Reflection (1905), and Poems of Peace (1906).

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No one is useless in this world who lightens 
the burdens of another.

―Charles Dickens

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No Man is an Island

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by John Donne
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No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
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“No Man is an Island” from The Complete English Poems of John Donne — Penguin Classics, 1977

John Donne (1573–1631) born into a Catholic family; English poet, scholar, soldier, and member of Parliament in 1601 and 1614, who reluctantly became a cleric in the Church of England, serving as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (1621–1631).  His poetry included sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin   translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He was also known for his sermons.

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Wherever there is a human being, there is an
opportunity for kindness.–Seneca

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Kindness

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by Naomi Shihab Nye
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Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
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Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
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“Kindness” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye’s father was a Palestinian refuge. She was born in St.Louis, Missouri. “I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.” During her teens, she lived in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, and the Old City in Jerusalem. Shihab Nye has published over 20 books, including poetry, novels and essays.  In 2019, she was appointed as the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation.

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Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still...
Iris, blue each spring
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—  Ome Shushiki

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“Dead my old fine hopes” from A Net of Fireflies, translation © 1960 by Harold Stewart – Charles E. Tuttle Company

Ome Shushiki (1668-1725) Japanese poet, a student of Kikaku, and disciple of Basho. There’s a story that she made her name as a haiku poet at age thirteen, when she wrote a poem about the cherry blossoms at a temple, then fastened it to the branch of a tree, and the abbot read the poem and was impressed.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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