welcome to a day honoring so much richness and tragedy with much to say in this sacred moment of eternity beginning with noting today is the 161st birthday of unsung hero and pioneering anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells who challenged the media to tell Black truths and who innovated practices that define the field of investigative journalism to this day… by putting her life on the line to count, investigate and report lynchings in America when white-owned media refused to tell these stories, she destroyed the racist narrative that lynching victims were criminals and brought to light the truth: that lynchings were often used as retaliation against Black people who had dared to start businesses, own property and build wealth… also, on this day, seventy eight years ago, the world was forever changed when the U.S. detonated the world’s first nuclear device in the Trinity nuclear test… conducted in the desert of southern New Mexico, opening another chapter in our morally corrupt, racist, and lethal legacy with New Mexico residents not being warned before the Trinity blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test… exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000 times higher than currently allowed… another legacy is that the downwinders of Trinity were largely impoverished agricultural families, mostly Hispanic and Native and even though it was considered one of the dirtiest U.S. nuclear tests, for more than seventy years radiation exposure from inhalation and ingestion of water and food contaminated by the Trinity test fallout was never assessed… now we now know that infant death rates increased by over 20% percent in areas downwind beginning in the very same month of the test since in 2010 the CDC finally admitted that risks to newborns were especially heightened as “residents reported that fallout ‘snowed down’ for days after the blast, most had dairy cows and most collected rainwater off their roofs for drinking.” on a brighter note, today is our day for celebrating the astonishing light of our interbeing as vessels of great mystery shining forth luminously, bastions of living awakened, joyously, freely and harmoniously and this day begins with being reminded of our nature as verbs, flowing, in process with what comes…

i’ll share now a brief meditation from Parker Palmer on life on the Möbius strip which illustrates the truth of life as movement:

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“The curious object pictured is a Möbius strip. If you take your index finger and trace what seems to be the outside surface, you suddenly find yourself on what seems to be the inside surface. Continue along what seems to be the inside surface, and you suddenly find yourself on what seems to be the outside surface.

I need to keep saying ‘what seems to be’ because the Möbius strip has only one side! What look like its inner and outer surfaces flow into each other seamlessly, co-creating the whole. The first time I saw a Möbius strip, I thought, ‘amazing! That’s exactly how life works!’

Whatever is inside of us continually flows outward, helping to form or deform the world — depending on what we send out. Whatever is outside us continually flows inward, helping to form or deform us — depending on how we take it in. Bit by bit, we and our world are endlessly re-made in this eternal inner-outer exchange.

Much depends on what we choose to put into the world from within ourselves — and much depends on how we handle what the world sends back to us. As Thomas Merton said:

‘We don’t have to adjust to the world. We can adjust the world’.

Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself ever since I understood that we live our lives on the Möbius strip:

How can I make more life-giving choices about what to put into the world and how to deal with what the world sends back — choices that might bring new life to me, to others, and to the world we share?”

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yes to there’s only one of us here, all that is confluing, flowing together, dancing into the stillpoint, dancing out from the stillpoint seamlessly always connected, always interbeing, always flowing in the seasky of love energy empowering luminosity and shining the light so brightly that all our relations see the way home, home to our one heart… and, yes, to the beautiful question that we are all being asked to live in this moment of great turning…