Vaya con Gaia en Paz, Amor y Alegri’a Bodhisattva Blessing

we have come to this world to be this…

we have come to this world to see this…

we have come to this world to become this…

we have come to this world to hear this…

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we have come to this world to see this:

all our relations living as one

we have come to this world to hear this:

all our relations breathing as one

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all our relations living as one

dancing our prayer as we turn around the sun

all our relations breathing as one

flowing in beauty to the cosmic moon hum

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we have come to this world to be this:

beloved community serving in joy

we have come to the world to become this:

one tree of interbeing rooted in earth, sheltered by heaven…

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once upon a time long, long ago there was a king whose luxurious lifestyle threatened his kingdom… despite his excesses, each year, following ancient custom, he made offerings to a tree known for its healing power, asking for the tree’s protection…

the buddha, as the consciousness of that tree, thought: “This king’s selfishness threatens the realm. I must save him and his kingdom.”

that night the tree bodhisattva appeared like a burning bush in the king’s bedchamber and said, “Great king, due to your selfish ways, your kingdom will fall into ruin. Go among your people and learn the truth.”

shaken, the king donned ordinary clothes and left the capital city eventually coming across a man whose forest home was fenced by thorny branches… when the man pierced his foot on the thorns, he blamed the king since the man had lived in the city, but he’d fled to the forest because of thieves and tax collectors, that is, because of the king’s mismanagement of the city… in pain, he cursed the king: “May he be pierced in some fray as I’ve been pierced today.”

hearing this, the king wanted to turn back and set things right but the tree bodhisattva inspired the king to continue onward…

next, he saw a woman fall under a load of firewood. without money, she couldn’t provide the dowry for her daughters and without husbands, her daughters weren’t safe gathering firewood in the forest so the woman had to do it herself… blaming the king for her poverty, she cursed him as well…

the king then went on to encounter a plowman, a dairyman, a cow grieving the loss of her calf, and a frog being eaten by a crow… each one blamed the king for their misery and cursed him and the king—having learned his lesson—finally returned home… from then on, he ruled wisely and the kingdom prospered…

we know today that forests form a worldwide web of compassionate intercommunication with older trees guiding nutrients to younger kin, younger ones do the same for aging tree relatives… trees shelter so many lives with squirrels, bugs, birds, snakes, fungi, insects, and grubs finding homes in them. humans shelter beneath their branches, gather fruit, nuts, bark, and sap for medicine and food… then in death, trees add nutrients to the soil; we build houses from their bones…

over hundreds of millions of years, plants and trees formed soil and transformed our barren rock into a garden. Now they oxygenate our atmosphere and pull heavy metals from the earth, pollutants from the air. They do not kill to live; they photosynthesize energy directly from sunlight. How’s that for compassionate action and living as one interbeing?

Union with the Cosmos

“When dwelling on union with the cosmos . . . you discover that there is a possibility of losing your ground, losing the whole union completely, losing your identity as yourself, and dissolving into an utterly and completely harmonious situation, which is, of course, the experience of luminosity…”

~The Tibetan Book of the Dead~

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and then the day came when they finally stopped looking for the divine elsewhere—in the books, theories, systems, steps; in later, bigger, better; they stopped turning their back to the miracle of their warm breathing body and the intimate, subtle ways the Goddess was guiding them from within…

the body is a portal opening into a luminous tapestry vibrating through time and space, through every atom, cell, forest, mountain and star; with every breath one feels the goddess weaving the divine story of the be longing field of peace; every heartbeat is the Mother drumming us home to knowing, dignity and the sacred space of interconnection…

let us commit in every breath to co-create a cosmic field of harmony…

today i am resting in the deep song, el canto hondo which is so easy now that i live on the river… join me in sacred flowing space lulled by the words of Thay,  beloved teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh…

Resting in the River Meditation

“My dear friends, suppose someone is holding a pebble and throws it in the air and the pebble begins to fall down into a river. After the pebble touches the surface of the water, it allows itself to sink slowly into the river.

It will reach the bed of the river without any effort. Once the pebble is at the bottom of the river, it continues to rest. It allows the water to pass by.

I think the pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting.

The Buddha said, “My practice is the practice of non-practice.” That means a lot. Give up all struggle. Allow yourself to be, to rest.

Let us visualize the waves on the ocean, several waves appearing on the surface of the ocean. Some waves are big, there are those that are small, and each wave seems to have its own life.

…if the wave is able to bend down and touch the water within herself, it will realize that while it is a wave, it is at the same time water. Water is the foundation of the wave. While waves can be high and low, more and less beautiful, the water is free from all these notions. That is why if we are able to touch the foundation of our being, we can release our fear and our suffering.

Touching the foundation of our being means touching nirvana. Our foundation is not subjected to birth and death, being and non-being. A wave can live the life of a wave, but a wave can do much better than that. While living the life of a wave, a wave can live a life of the water. The more our solidity and our freedom grows, the deeper we touch the ground of our own being. That is the door for emancipation, for the greatest relief.”

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may we all rest in the deep river of peace living the life of water flowing easefully around the obstacles and conflicts in the devocean of interbeing real-eye-sing we all belong to each other…

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today, on the magical mystery tour, i delight in being in a house of mirrors, beautiful mirrors as i look into your soul and see such radiance… thank you for being such a profound reflection of our true nature… your lovingkindness, compassion, generosity, grace, luminescence, humor, sensitivity, presence, devotion, joy, peace, patience, passion, curiosity and on and on enrich and inspire me in every moment… thousand fold thanks and deep bows…

april is national poetry month and on this 10th day while reflecting on the sacred mirrors, let’s also tune into outer and inner birds  flocking around reminding us to be openhearted and free  and singing a joyful song, re-joy-sing…

“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile”

~ e.e. cummings ~

may we travel in a  sacred way reflecting our true nature of lovingkindness, compassion, peace and joy…

 on this movable feast day of rebirth and resurrection in the midst of these unprecedented times of so much suffering as we are all thrown into the whirlwind of mutation, a soul song of joy quietly sings me and breathes me whispering of our dying to what doesn’t serve, to what has been corrupted and to open space for innocence, the inner sense of joy to rise again, to see through the fresh eyes of a child beholding the world as a wilder-ness of wonder…

how joyous it is to celebrate this act of rebellious spirit, of being reborn, of being in the world but not of the world, of being in this great turning together and awakening more and more into the heart knowing that we are beloved community, we interbe…

in this moment, this beautiful moment of eternity where we can choose to dwell no matter what is happening in the outer world, let us attune to, get in tune with the river of joy always flowing through us to the tune of may our hearts be softened, may our minds be purified, may our words be more tenderly spoken, may our thoughts extend love to every living thing, may our actions be a blessing unto the world, may our souls shine and may we be continually humbled, grounded in and saturated with wave after wave of transforming love and grace bringing greater comfort and understanding to every sentient being who desires it… may we move more deeply into beloved’s embrace now so that we may be consouled as one… let us seal this re-joy-sing in the revolutionary energy of joy, love and peace passing all understanding and landing us in the sheltering energy of great mystery…

loving our walking home and serving in joy together…

namaste and deep bows, beloveds…

nowhere to now here

anxiety, overwhelm, listlessness, disorientation, frustration, heartbreak and tenderness are some of the feelings many of us are experiencing in this nowhere, in-between phase of the great mutation, transfiguring us from caterpillars to butterflies and is the kind of place we usually want to avoid… we are challenged to stay in this nowhere space rather than buy into struggle and complaint, to soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid… when we are brave enough to stay in nowhere, compassion arises like the sun… organically dissolving into the caterpillar stew of not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what cannot be known, dying to the false self, we open to birthing the true self, our new butterfly way of being…

take heart! we are made for this moment of coming home to now here from nowhere…

always being, always becoming… always arrived, always arriving…

may we  wander from nowhere to now here with heart wide open letting golden light sync into every pore feeling mama gaia singing us, dancing us, pulsing us, breathing us, celebrating us, loving us, at-oneing us, blessing us… deep peace of gaia’s humming resonance…

come, join with me standing in love for love in the center of interbeing around the children’s fire where we dream the new story, where singing waters hum in harmony bathing the new world lovingly, peacefully, joyfully, beautifully, where we build beloved community in the new jerusalem of stillness… behold, graceland!

now is the moment for inner awakening, for listening for the call of  soul, the whispers of our one heart encouraging our slowing down to come home and tend the garden of our genius, the spark of light, the inner flame that is eternal and immortal, the dream that will never die…. yes, may we be instruments of  peace built on justice guided by love, hollow reeds of flowing lovingkindness…

“Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him…”

~ CG Jung ~

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today, Jung’s quotation could not be more apro pos for this sacred moment of eternity, for this day, for the last 8 days, for the last 18 moons, for the last 2 years and on and on… as many across the globe honor this day as Good Friday, a (w)holy day in (w)holy week, i contemplate what crucifixion means and where it leads… i find this Jung quotation about being on the road to (w)holeness necessitating crucifixion so right on for on each of our paths, aren’t we led daily to the cross roads where we are given the choice to dissolve into and serve our greater self who responds in kind with wholeheartedly entering the human realm? isn’t this cross the true cross, the sacred stillpoint in the tiny space of the heart where every dance begins, where we real-eyes the gift of our suffering, of our bearing whatever is with grace, is what leads to the deepest peace of the flowing river of joy and to liberation?

deep peace of the running wave be unto you…

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.”

~Milan Kundera~

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Happiest of Turns Around the Sun, Ms Radiance!

yes, my precious grandpuppy, this being of excitement i used to get to spend most every day with, this quintessentially exuberant spirit who always greets me so joyously with the most unconditional love and is the embodiment of the female face of Buddha – Tara rolled into this cute furball of invincibility turns six today while another of my favorite beings, Ram Dass, is on his 92nd continuation day… i wasn’t sure if i’d have it in me to write tonight after spending a good portion of the day at the healing temple on the hill and i’m so glad i do because she is such a beloved…

this sweet little furball clown is also such an amazing spiritual teacher of  being in the moment, of unconditional love, of joie de vivre and fills me with lovingkindness and compassion moment by moment pulling me into the practice and paradise of puppy consciousness where every moment is an adventurous moment of arrival into the new and fresh, a coming home to this moment of presence of interbeing, every sound and smell a compelling curiosity calling us to engage fully in unfolding mystery…

deep bows and boundless love onederfull beings…

and, holy synchronisiddhi! as i re-member this day of april is often a magical day of awakening and radiance long before nia graced our lives…

yes, on this day eight turns around the sun ago while on sacred pilgrimage to the heart chakra of  the earth, i awaken at 4:44 on what was then Easter Monday with everyone of my 70 trillion cells vibrating at the most alive frequency re-membering today we head off for sunrise at stonehenge… arriving in the mists, it looks like our magic bus has pulled into an ET Terminal where we get on a Hogwarts trolley to transport us more of the way… disembarking into pea soup, we walk the last steps to the ancient temple… A proper guard informs us not to touch any of the stone people and one of our sherpas reminds us to find our stone…

as we enter through a holy portal, we are teleported into the great beyond… i walk around the stone people as a labyrinth and drink in the most glorious sunrise ever witnessed as the sun transfigures into rainbow dragonfly weaving a web of luminescent light shimmering more brightly with every breath… if this were my last moment, it would be perfect… to just drink in the sun on this holy ground with our ancestors is pure ecstasy… my cup runneth over and flows into dancing and singing in joyous celebration of all our relations…

as we leave the temple, i begin to feel like Harry Potter with a strange throbbing between my eyes, yes, stonehenge is the gift that keeps on giving as my third eye more fully activates and with this expansion and deepening, the ability to see through the veils of illusion and into the invisible realms of radiance opens more and more unfolding and unfolding into this moment, this wild and precious moment of awakening into the radiance of interbeingness…

in this sacred moment of eternity, sooo much is happening – the full moon of libra and it’s golden rule day and i’m letting a lot go as i prepare for an early morning trip to the healing temple on the hill and it’s the 66th day of a season of peace and i really want to honor the day after MLK’s murder by bringing in a dear friend of his who vowed to carry on Martin’s calling of peacemaking and beloved community by sharing one of his, Thay’s love letters to the earth, one i love engaging with daily and reading as a goodnight story to children of the earth… injoy this praise song of earth…

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Our Journey of Eons

“Dear Mother Earth,

Do you remember when you and Father Sun first formed from the dust of exploded stars and interstellar gas? You didn’t yet wear the silken cloak of freshness that you do today. At that time, Mother, more than four and half billion years ago, your robe was made of molten rock. Soon it cooled to form a hard crust. Although Father’s light was far less than it is today, your thin atmosphere captured the heat and kept your oceans from freezing. In those first few hundred million years, you overcame many great difficulties to create an environment capable of sustaining life. You released great heat, fires, and gases from your volcanoes. Steam was expelled from your crust to become vapor in your atmosphere and the water in your great oceans. Your gravity helped anchor the life-sustaining sky, and your magnetic field prevented it from being stripped away by solar winds and cosmic rays.

But even before forming the atmosphere, you endured a collision with a great heavenly body, almost the size of Mars. Part of the impacting planet became you; the rest of it, along with some of your mantle and crust, became the moon. Dear Mother, the moon is a part of you, as beautiful as an angel. She is a kind sister to you, always following you, helping you slow down and keep your balance, and creating tidal rhythms on your body.

Our entire solar system is one family, revolving around Father Sun in a joyful and harmonious dance. First there is Mercury, metallic and cratered, closest to the sun. Next is Venus with her intense heat, high-pressure atmosphere, and volcanoes. Then there is you, beloved Mother Earth, the most beautiful of all. Beyond us orbits the Red Planet, cold and desolate Mars; and after the asteroid belt there comes the gas giant Jupiter, by far the largest planet of all, attended by an assembly of diverse moons. Beyond Jupiter orbits Saturn, the spectacularly ringed planet, followed by Uranus, tilted on his side after a collision, and, finally, distant blue Neptune with his turbulent storms and high winds.

Contemplating this splendor, I can see that you, Mother Earth, are the most precious flower in our solar system, a true jewel of the cosmos.

It took you a billion years to begin to manifest the first living beings. Complex molecules, perhaps brought to you from outer space, started to come together in self-replicating structures, slowly becoming more and more like living cells. Light particles from distant stars, millions of light years away, came to visit and stay a while. Small cells gradually became larger cells; unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular organisms. Life developed from deep within the oceans, multiplying and prospering, steadily improving the atmosphere. Slowly, the ozone layer could form, preventing harmful radiation from reaching your surface, and allowing life on land to prosper. It was only then, as the miracle of photosynthesis unfurled, that you began to wear the exquisite green mantle you do today.

But all phenomena are impermanent and ever-changing. Life over vast areas of the Earth has already been destroyed more than five times, including sixty-five million years ago, when the impact of a giant asteroid caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs and three quarters of all other species. Dear Mother, I am in awe of your capacity to be patient and creative, despite all the harsh conditions you have endured. I promise to remember our extraordinary journey of eons and to live my days with the awareness that we are all your children, and that we are all made of stars. I promise to do my part, contributing my own energy of joy and harmony to the glorious symphony of life.”

let us all do our part by generously contributing our energy of joy and harmony to the astonishing light symphony of life…

today marks the closing of the season of peace; just as the season opened on the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, we close on the day Martin Luther King was killed, so, today is dedicated to peacemakers, to earth angels… today is an auspicious portal day of 4-4 called the great awakening and may it be so… so much to share on this day so i invite us to take this moment to celebrate light and love and rebirth and liberation and justice and crystalize these energies into our being peace in this moment of eternity, in every moment of eternity…

fifty-six years ago today and exactly one year before his murder, the prophet and poet, Martin Luther King, Jr delivered a rousing call to action in a speech/sermon entitled, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, to an overflow crowd at Riverside Church in New York City… Dr King’s challenge to engage in a radical revolution of values holds as true now as it did then and is so in keeping with our coming together today and the call we each need to answer, let us breathe in his words and then walk this talk with our every step, thought, word and deed…

“I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment do decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”