Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/art/page/18/)
At tables, during holy days, occupy our hearts with something new:
Let us risk a conversation in which debt is not considered shameful.
Grant us mutual release of any embarrassment that we aren’t rich yet.
Release us from the nasty shame that says debt is our fault.
Remind us to keep our resumes at home.
… I liked “Argo” but would have preferred “Lincoln” or “Les Misreables.” The latter has a score and presents themes of love and revolution that stir me every time….
I don’t understand the mathematics behind the gomboc. But my intuition suggests that its shape has some kind of eternal, universal quality about it, as does a sphere or a cube. In some way, it must be a shape that describes gravity itself. It’s a shape that represents, but also actually embodies, one of the fundamental relationships forming the cosmos.
Perhaps also it evokes the shape of the soul, tumbled about by this rough world but created to right itself in relationship to its divine Source. Had Bodhidharma lived long enough, and meditated deeply enough, perhaps his body would have melted further into the shape of the gomboc. Then the daruma doll would need no extra weight at the bottom to get it to return to “center”!
As a photojournalist, Syed wants to show society how “covered” women can relate to more secular American women. Syed wanted to expose readers to these powerful women’s personal lives. “I want them to see themselves,” says Syed.
I do think that the best cure for the paralyzing helplessness that can follow reading the news, a despair I have been prone to at times throughout my life, is not so much reading the good news, as getting stuck into work that helps people.
Still, the good news can help. So maybe the ship is going down. But in the long run, we’re all dead, the planet fries and the sun explodes. And today, it helps me to concentrate on the work I can do, to recall how despairing I was about the world population explosion, global poverty and child mortality forty years ago, and then to realize how much has improved, due to the work of people who didn’t allow despair to paralyze them.
Masterfully crafted and impossible to put down, this book should be required reading for anyone over the age of ten. Augie, like Alex Libby, is an amazing person with fascinating interests, incredible courage, a wicked sense of humor, loving compassion for others, a willingness to forgive other people’s weaknesses and bad behavior, and he can be a lot of fun to be around if you take the time to get past the surface. Augie, though, unlike Alex, has such severe deformities that it takes a lot more work to get past his surface.
Juliane Okot Bitek knows the power of narrative. An award winning writer living in Vancouver, Canada, Okot Bitek is also an Acholi woman who calls Gulu in Northern Uganda home. Considering the civil war (1986- 2006) that plagued northern Ugandans, it’s no wonder much of Okot Bitek’s passionate writing focuses on social and political issues. In the last decade, through her poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and opinion pieces, Okot Bitek has fought both to make sense of, and to expose the tragedies of her homeland.
My mom told me she’s a lesbian
and it rained for a week,
not because she told me she’s a lesbian
but because sometimes it just rains like that
Burning injustice into memory was a huge inspiration for Lee and burning images into newspaper seemed almost a meta-narrative pathway of burning memory into our collective consciousness—a way of burning the image of these murder victims into history, a way to imprint their image into the news where they were largely forgotten.
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Taxes are sexy. Yeah, I said it. I know that most times you hear about taxes – from Obama to the latest Tea Party wingnut to your local city council bureaucrat – that conversation is boring, it’s policy-wonkish, and it’s usually pretty conservative. Well, it’s time to change the debate. Meet the Millionaire Tax Virgin.