She walks in beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.

Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)

When we choose the spiritual life, we most make it real and vibrant.

When we are imbued with the true spirit of consecration,
all our activities are turned into worship.
All tasks before us,
small and big,
become of deep significance.
When our heart is thus filled with
the consciousness of the ever-living
and all-blissful Deity, we no longer feel
the weary weight
of life.

Paramananda

Tom the dancing bug
Fooooni sheeeet mon

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo

I think that there won't be
many skeletons dancing in the street today.
The mask of fear has replaced them.
Calderon has put a ban on the holiday's,
In Mexico,
The may pole has gone limp.
Catholic Mass has ended,
due to the gravity of the situation.
Physicists say there is a black hole in the center of the Milky Way,
and the gravity there must be very intense.
But, God must have a plan,
the doors to the cathedrals remain shut,
while they discuss it in private.
***
This winter, one of the cats killed a wild Finch.
I put the carcass next to a lavender,
holding it by its tail feathers.
I told them,"If you are going to kill birds
you should at least eat them."
I wondered,
if Native Americans had cats,
would they have more small feathers in their Regalia.
I found its skull today;
a delicate mossy parchment,
thin and light as a breeze.
The Vice President on America says,
that it is dangerous to fly in confined spaces.
I think I should tell the birds.

From the Dusk to the Dawn.

A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange;
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
—From the Dusk to the Dawn.

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
In The house of Suddhoo (Rudyard Kipling)
The Gutenberg Project

Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life.
It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics
and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds.
But on the other hand,
those who believe in love for all creation
must realize clearly the difficulties involved
in the problem of a boundless ethic
and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind]
the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us],
but allow [us] really to experience them.
To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation
-- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.

Albert Schweitzer

15 years after Rwanda genocide

April 7, 2009, marked the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.
On this date in 1994, Rwandan Armed Forces and Hutu militia
began one of the most intensive killing campaigns
in human history with the mass slaughter of
more than 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis
and moderate Hutus. First forced to
witness the annihilation of their
families, many women were then
subjected to unconscionable forms
of sexual violence – gang rape, rape
with sharpened objects, sexual mutilation.
In the aftermath of the destruction, many female
survivors learned that they had been impregnated
by their captors, contracted HIV/AIDS, or both.

I first traveled to Rwanda in February 2006
on assignment for Newsweek magazine
with then-health editor, Geoffrey Cowley,
to work on a story about HIV/AIDS on the
25th anniversary of the disease’s identification.
It was then that I met Odette, a woman who had been
brutally raped multiple times during the genocide.
She described how her entire family had been killed
and recounted the abuse she experienced, in detail.
The ordeal resulted in a pregnancy
– a baby boy –
and HIV/AIDS.
It was the most powerful and saddest interview I had ever witnessed.
Odette’s horrific story led me to return to Rwanda
to document her story
and those of others
like her.

Intended Consequences: Rwanda’s Living Legacy of Violence and Healing

Story and Photos by Jonathan Torgovnik

Global Health magazine artical

foundation Rwanda