Tag: memorial

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I didn’t think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

During my more than three decades as an environmentalist and campaigner for democratic rights, people have often asked me whether spirituality, different religious traditions, and the Bible in particular had inspired me, and influenced my activism and the work of the Green Belt Movement (GBM). Did I conceive conservation of the environment and empowerment of ordinary people as a kind of religious vocation? Were there spiritual lessons to be learned and applied to their own environmental efforts, or in their lives as a whole?

When I began this work in 1977, I wasn’t motivated by my faith or by religion in general. Instead, I was thinking literally and practically about solving problems on the ground. I wanted to help rural populations, especially women, with the basic needs they described to me during seminars and workshops. They said that they needed clean drinking water, adequate and nutritious food, income, and energy for cooking and heating. So, when I was asked these questions during the early days, I’d answer that I didn’t think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

Cross-posted at DailyKos.

At 11:30 yesterday morning on the corner of Greene St. and Washington Pl. I met Firefighter James M. Sorokac for the first time. I’d never met him before but being the keeper of “The Last Alarm” and a member of the of the FDNY ceremonial unit, his face was far too familiar to me.

In the shadow of the Asch Building he explained that the bell that is rang for the fallen dates back to a time when there was one bell at every NYC fire house. He told me the story of the four fives. When firehouses would communicate to each other across the city by ringing five times in a series of four the message that “a brother has fallen in the line of duty.”

Today that bell is rang once by a white gloved firefighter at funerals and memorial services.

Yesterday Firefighter James M. Sorokac rang that bell 146 times.  

Jill Richardson runs La Vida Locavore, a blog about food. Jill writes her heart out about the politics of food safety, and her blog has attracted gardeners and farmers and people like me, who write there too sometimes.

Jill’s brother died last year. He was in his 20’s. Jill posted an essay late this evening about Adam, about how this would have been his birthday. “What can I give him?” she wrote.

Jill’s essay is here:  http://www.lavidalocavore.org/…

Adam died when he was 23. Jill’s essay is painful and beautiful.

I went to a concert the other day and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was so into music and he knew so much about it. He would have been happy I was going to a concert.

Below the jump is the music I posted over there. A moment of silence for a fellow blogger, please.

Justified Honor and Remembrance for not only Sgt. Yarosh but all who served and are serving in these two theaters, burned soldier portrait to show at Smithsonian!

This is and will be for a long time a great tribute to this soldier, and all the Fallen and Maimed of these two continuing occupations. And like “The Wall”, until we can build a Memorial for the Fallen of both these conflicts, it should be a Reminder to this Nation of what We Allowed “In Our Names!”!!

Before dawn every Sunday morning, at the foot of the Santa Monica Pier, volunteers set up crosses in memory of American service members killed in Iraq.

The Video was produced for the New York Times and can be also seen At Their Site

Cross posted at Daily KOS

A while back I got the urge to visit Goodwill, I rarely do because the days of bargains are long gone around here. But I also know even if I’m not shopping for anything when I get that urge I will find something I didn’t know I needed until I get there. I also found a parking spot close to the door, another sign I was going home with something. I hit the furniture section and didn’t see anything and then headed down the back wall something I never do, when I spotted it hanging on a hanger amidst some curtains. A flag. Not just any flag mind you, but a special flag, the creases from it’s unmistakable triangular fold still visible. It was a interment flag, used to drape the coffin of a veteran or soldier who died in action.