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My Friend Lizzie Cornish recently posted the Lakota prayer "Mitakuye Oyasin" ("All My Relations") on her Facebook page, with the comment that it beats the hell out of the Lord's Prayer. I have to confess that the Native American prayer is more universal in its message than the one Jesus is said to have recommended to his followers I think they serve different purposes.
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin
All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer.
To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.
To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.
To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.
You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.
Thank you for this Life.
The prayer is said by one person to a multiplicity of beings. It acknowledges that the Spirit infuses all living things, and all parts of planet Earth, not just human beings, and expresses gratitude for the cooperation and coexistence of all these beings, which sustains the person speaking the prayer as well as all the rest.
In contrast, the Lord's Prayer is said by a group of humans ("us") to a unitary male deity, begging him to remain sacred and in charge, to keep on feeding us so we stay alive, and to make it easy for us to continue behaving morally. It calls for a bargain in which we forgive the bad things others do to us and God in turn forgives us for all the bad things we have been doing (and continue to do) to others. It implies that perfection ("heaven") exists and that God can and should make our earthly life more like that perfection.
- Our Father in heaven,
- hallowed be your name.
- Your kingdom come,
- your will be done,
- on earth as it is in heaven.
- Give us this day our daily bread,
- and forgive us our debts (trespasses, sins),
- as we also have forgiven our debtors (those who trespass against us).
- And lead us not into temptation (trials),
- but deliver us from evil (the evil one)
for the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory are yours for ever
About that bargain, with the background of Jesus' other teachings in mind, we must assume that we are supposed to stop doing evil right now, so that the bargain can be final, but what if we keep doing bad things to other people? It doesn't ask that victims of our bad acts be made whole, but just that God forgive us on behalf of them; what happens to "them" is of no concern. The prayer is human-centered, in-group-centered and selfish. It also implies that the whim of God could kill us all off in an instant.
Both prayers express a passive attitude toward life and the workings of the Spirit. In the Lord's prayer, God is to remain sacred, all-powerful, and in charge, insuring that the world continues toward perfection. In the Lakota prayer, the relationship of all beings and all "nations" is eternal and dynamic, with no single part being in charge.
Thankfulness and cooperation are at the heart of the Lakota prayer. Fear and shame seem to underlie the Christian prayer.
The reality is that those who repeatedly say the Lord's Prayer have been among those who perpetrate many large-scale wrongs on each other and upon the other peoples and "nations" of the Earth. Those who recite the Lakota prayer have, to be fair, never been numerous enough to demonstrate the positive or negative outward effects of saying their prayer on a world scale.
I know that the mental and physical effects of reading or saying the Lakota prayer feel positive and helpful. Having grown up with the Lord's prayer, I feel anxious when I listen to the words, but peaceful if I just let it wash over me as an ancient formula, like singing or hearing an old ballad. We used to say in unison, along with the 23rd Psalm and the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school; I wonder whether my life would have been different if we had recited "All My Relations" each morning instead.
Tags: lakota, lizzie cornish, lord's prayer, mitakuye oyasin
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In the good old days, years came in strudy Scottish families The McMilvies and their strudy cousins the McSilvies. MCMLVIII MCMXLVIII Back then we never thought we'd get to the hummable year "MM" Still less the egotistical years "MMi! MMii! MMiii!" Now we're in the nostalgic Tom Mix years Longing for the strong silent figure whose vacant equestrian statue graces the lonely Pinal Pioneer Parkway. "MMIX, MMX, oh MMXI MMXII!!"  In the 19th century we had a lot of donkey years like mud-kick-kick-kickssss (MDCCCXXX)Tags: roman numerals, time, tom mix
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The negotiations on raising the US debt ceiling are reputedly settling on the prospect of cutting four trillion dollars from the US economy, and the one thing both sides agree on is that "entitlements" must bear the brunt of that cutting. Four trillion dollars is an inconceivable amount of money, and intuitively we understand that taking so much from medicaid, medicare and social security would hurt millions of people and literally kill many who are depending on these programs now or will be depending on them in the future. But Wait! What have we spent about that much on lately? Warmaking! A new study from Brown University finds that the true monetary costs of the post 9-11-2001 wars to the US approach four trillion dollars. What a coincidence! If those wars had not been put on the national "tab", we would not even be talking about a deficit problem now. It's certainly not excessive spending on the elderly and the poor (or education, or even the inflated heath system) that got us where we are. We can't walk away from these costs, it's true, but one thing we CAN do is to stop our current warmaking and see to it that we raise sufficient revenue to pay down the debt and ensure a decent life for the majority of the population, which is non-wealthy, at the same time. We need to raise sufficient tax revenue to cover the cost of the interest and principal on these debts by rescinding all the Bush and Reagan era tax cuts for the wealthy and closing corporate tax loopholes We need to put our working-age population to work at genuinely useful life-affirming tasks that pay adequate (and taxed) incomes in a steady-state economy with neither increased debt loads, excessive income inequality nor excessive consumption. Democracy Now discusses the cost of the wars For more information, see the Costs of War websiteTags: us economy, war
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The visualization platform Weave Version 1.0 Beta was released this month by the Open Indicators Consortium and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  I manage the data end of the project, and and I'm rather proud of the results of this team effort, which has occupied a lot of my time and attention lately. If you are part of an organization that has a need to present statistics or information graphically on the Web, you can download the Weave application and install it on your computer or on a network server, but if you just want to work or play interactively with visualizations that others have created using Weave, all you need is your browser. Various partners in the project are now putting up websites on their areas of interest for the public to access. You can see and interact with one live sample of a Weave visualization (Obesity in the US) on the demo page of the OIC Weave website, and I have placed two visualizations of a recently-released life expectancy study, which has made a big splash in the mainstream press (e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615)at http://halfredhouse.biz/WeaveLifeExpectancy.html Most of the coverage of the study has emphasized the fact that there are widespread pockets of the US where women's life expectancy has been falling since 1997, but there are many other nuggets to be mined from the study, which lists a set of countries with comparable life expectancies for each county. If you experiment with the interactive capabilities of the visualizations, you can find some of them for yourself. Tags: data, indicators, life expectancy, open indicators consortium, visualization, weave
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 You may know of Jude Cowan through her unique and provocative singing and songwriting in To America and Doodlebug Alley . Now she has revealed her considerable talents as a poet and storyteller in For The Messengers . The material for this 87-poem collection came from her "day job" as a curator of raw video for the news agency Reuters. Each day, video clips from photojournalists around the world would come in to the London office and Jude would describe them, provide source and context for them, and shelve them where they could be incorporated into the several video "feeds" that Reuters provides to news and entertainment outlets around the world. During the entire year of 2008, she wrote poems inspired by scenes portrayed in the video she handled, and sometimes by the curating process itself. 2008 was an eventful year, a turning point in world history, and the portraits in the poems range from merely quirky to heavily charged to profound. The volume is dedicated to the Reuters cameraman Fadel Shanaah, who lost his life in Gaza in April, 2008 and to the other journalists with camera and microphone, who have "...given their lives because they believe in the power of such storytelling.", the Messengers of the book's title.  One of the poems I could relate to best was the one called "Iraq - Suicide Bomber", which delved into the psychology of an Iraqi teenager who backed out of a suicide bombing mission at the last minute. I remember being spellbound when I heard the girl's translated words on the radio (I think it was the CBC), telling how she had been clothed in the deadly equipment by a stranger, and how she had changed her mind and been saved from death by the police. Cowan tells it: ...
She's only thirteen (US soldiers think)
and when she decided she wanted
to understand fourteen and even
higher numbers, she gave herself
to the police, who removed
her explosive vest.
... The form of the free verse is deceptively simple, casual sounding, but the words and the pauses enforced by the line breaks add an emotional context that rises beyond words. Most of the poems in the book are in free verse, but some are parodies of older well-known poems and rhymes. One comments on the campaign routines of John McCain using the form of the A.A. Milne's Rice Pudding, while another tells the life story of of Austria's Jörg Haider in the form of Christopher Smart's For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry . Others, such as Afghanistan - Abdullah Wardak make skillful use of rhyme schemes and other forms that seem to be Cowan's own invention. Outside Kabul
there's a blown up,
flipped over car,
and the Governor
of Logar,
his bodyguards
and driver,
like the car,
have bodies they can
no longer use
One is a found poem with zen overtones:
UNKNOWN LOCATION: MILITANT VIDEO
Copyright: SUICIDE BOMBER AMATEUR VIDEO
Note: *** Re-use with caution as this is not Reuters copyright.
No resale without filmmaker permission. ***
There are many too many surprises here to begin to categorize them. Where do you put the delight of a zoo bear on opening a gift? A fourteen-line history of Saudi Arabia? A Japanese belly festival? A survey of sexual harassment of women in Egypt? The handshake between Condoleezza Rice and Muamar Gadaffi that didn't happen?
Although I was spellbound enough by this book to read it from cover to cover the day it arrived, I have been re-reading these poems for a week or so and must apologize for being so slow to put my reactions in writing. It's not just an interesting book.. It's a book I keep beside my bed. It has inspired more than one dream and will no doubt inspire more. I strongly urge you to get it and read it too.
Tags: afghanistan, book review, iraq, jude cowan, libya, news, poetry, reporting, videography
Current Location: Greenville, NH, USA
Current Music: Jude Cowan - The Lure of Paris | Powered by Last.fm
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In his response to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak last week, President Obama eloquently praised nonviolence as the antidote to violent religious fanaticism for young people in the Arab world. His words could have come directly from Michael True (see the video below for an example of his ideas if you have time), and they were full of hope. Here is a man who has world-class political instincts and rhetorical skills and puts them in the service of a vital paradigm-shift that the world needs.  By contrast, as I look out my frost-rimmed window at the feet-deep snow, I can't help but feel deep disappointment with Mr. Obama's latest policy proposals. In particular, I find it simply cruel that he has proposed cutting the Low Income Heatijng Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that makes it possible for some of my neighbors to keep from freezing at this time of year. Is he a good person deep inside? A lot of us assume so, but the evidence is mostly rhetoric at this point, and his policies and proposals are, for the most part, callous and inhumane to flesh-and-blood people. He has taken on the prime goal of the Republicans/Tea Partiers, to "shrink the government until you can drown it in a bathtub" and abandoned his former core anti-poverty principles in order to shrink the deficit at all costs. In the meantime, paying for a bloated military-industrial establishment and two-plus wars is not questioned. It is obvious to me that budget cuts reduce the tax bills of corporations and the wealthy far more than they do those of ordinary people, but the cutting the "discretionary budget" hurts working people almost exclusively, while exacerbating the intolerable levels of economic inequality already in place. The natural policy direction for a caring politician would be to increase "discretionary spending" in times of economic hardship for people and save the austerity for times when programs for the poor are becoming less necessary to ordinary folks; in other words, spending on social welfare, health and education should be counter-cyclical. The notion that a high debt-load is equally "bad" for a family and for a government is a false one, and this is the wrong time to be concerned with deficit reduction. George Bernard Shaw said, "Good people are the very devil sometimes, because when their good will hits on a wrong way, they go much farther along it and are more ruthless than bad people; but there is always hope in the fact that they mean well, and that their bad deeds are their mistakes, and not their successes, whereas the evils done by bad people are not mistakes, but triumphs of wickedness" (1928, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism) In a British context, George Monbiot recently said, Governments don’t ask themselves “what can we do that is good for the people?” They ask themselves “how do we persuade people that what we want to do is good for them?” The task of both politicians and the corporate press is to convince us that what is good for billionaires is good for everyone but billionaires.
So, is Mr. Obama's budget proposal a mistake? (And, if so, is it a mistake that can be corrected later or a permanent fatal mistake?) Is he just a shill for the billionaires and financial corporations, or is he demanding something in return for these sacrifices he is asking poor and working people to make? Tags: budget cuts, egypt, g.b. shaw, monbiot, nonviolence, obama
Current Location: Greenville, NH, USA
Current Music: Schooner Fare - Peaceable Kingdom | Powered by Last.fm
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Our cold metallic radiant tools, Pride of post-industrial wit, Bear the names of furry living beings Our closest companions, Our cats and our pets. Theirs is a stark modernist beauty, arcs and circles, tones of electronica, postures of obeisance required of supplicants. Silent and still I lie and imbibe swooping quark symphony, holding my breathing to its rhythm. My doctor, ecstatic, summons me afterward to see my tumor, a glowing orange sphere on a maroon field. Tags: cancer, medical technology, poetry
Current Location: Greenville, NH, USA
Current Music: Circulus - Within You Is The Sun | Powered by Last.fm
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