One million dollars was raised in 31 hours by 40,000 people!

Collectively, with small acts of love, we have the power to create miracles.

You can read more about the aid already given from the donations collected during a 24 hour “Love Flash Mob” in November in (my heroine) Glennon Doyle Melton’s moving post. http://momastery.com/blog/2015/12/18/saving-lives/

“We have a plan. You are a part of it.

Today’s refugee crisis is the worst humanitarian emergency the world has seen since World War II. Just as the Greatest Generation’s response to the holocaust defined them, so will our response define us.

We want to be remembered as the generation that chose Love over Fear.

As you read this, thousands are fleeing terror and war – forced from their homes into tiny boats with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the children in their arms. They will cross the sea, walk for days, holding tight to their families and their hope for safety and a future.

This moment in time is asking us a critical question. How will we respond? Let us answer: with compassion.

Compassion will guide us. Compassion is humanity’s North Star. It will always guide us out of the dark, back toward peace, hope and each other.

Today’s Questions:

Should starving women be fed?
Should homeless babies be sheltered?
Should freezing men be warmed?
Should drowning children be saved?

If your heart says YES: Join us.

Join us in a circle of humanity standing shoulder to shoulder, together saying:

In a fearful world, I stand with love.

WE ARE THE COMPASSION COLLECTIVE.

Our symbol is the compass. We vow to let compassion guide us, one step at a time.”

And an update from Elizabeth Gilbert:
“WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

Dear Ones –

I want to tell you the exact reason why I am trying to raise money right now to help with the refugee crisis.

I want to tell you exactly why I’ve gathered together with my friends Brene Brown, Cheryl Strayed, Rob Bell and Glennon Doyle Melton to try to meet the audacious goal of raising a million dollars for this emergency.

I’m doing it because of this quote, which came to my attention through an organization called HELP REFUGEES, whom we are partnering with, and who are working on the ground in Greece, right at the heart of this crisis. This quote came from a volunteer doctor they are working with, who ended a recent phone call from the island of Lesvos with this desperate plea:

“There are thousands of children here and their feet are literally rotting, they can’t keep dry, they have high fevers and they’re standing in the pouring rain for days on end. You have one month, guys, and then all these people will be dead”.

I can’t know about this situation, and not do something about it.

I can’t know about children facing the winter — cold, homeless and hungry and with rotting feet — and not do something about it.

I am doing this because of kids like the beautiful little boy in this photo — who our team has already assisted — because they need our help.

I know you want to help, too…and you can!

Already today, over 10,000 people from this Facebook page (and Rob’s Facebook page, and Brene’s Facebook page, and Cheryl’s Facebook page, as well) helped us to raise almost $270,000 toward our goal.

Over a quarter of a million dollars…in just a few hours!

Not a penny of it will be wasted.

This is where your money is going:

BLANKETS.

BABY CARRIERS.

LIFE JACKETS.

FOOD.

WARM CLOTHING.

FLOOD LIGHTS (for pulling people out of the water at night)

LAMPS.

WOODEN SHELTERS.

LIFE.

This money is going to to life — to save human lives.

Like: IMMEDIATELY, in real time. You have no idea how efficient these people are, who we are working on the ground, helping out. They’re amazing.

Let’s save more lives.

Let’s keep going, Dear Ones. Let this be your best Christmas gift, dedicated to the poeple you love most. IMy own donations are in the names of my beloved family members.) Let’s use our holiday hearts full of love to show up for some of the most desperate people in the world right now. Let’s make a difference.

Keep donating, keep giving, keep caring.Most of all, keep SHARING these posts, and inviting the big-hearted people in your lives to stand with love.

The more you share, the more love will pour in.

Those of us who are warm and dry and safe and well-fed must show up for those who are cold and wet and endangered and hungry. That’s a rule of life. Every ethical and religious and spiritual tradition in the world agrees on that rule.

Nothing matters to me more right now than helping these people.

My entire Christmas this year = THIS.

Please join me in this miracle of love.

THANK YOU!

Here is the link, to join us, and to donate:

http://bit.ly/1NyoLf1

LOVE YOU ALL,

LG”

“Bring On the Dark
Why We Need the Winter Solstice”

By CLARK STRAND
DEC. 19, 2014

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — When the people of this small mountain town got their first dose of electrical lighting in late 1924, they were appalled. “Old people swore that reading or living by so fierce a light was impossible,” wrote the local historian Alf Evers. That much light invited comparisons. It was an advertisement for the new, the rich and the beautiful — a verdict against the old, the ordinary and the poor. As Christmas approached, a protest was staged on the village green to decry the evils of modern light.

Woodstock has always been a small place with a big mouth where cultural issues are concerned. But in this case the protest didn’t amount to much. Here as elsewhere in early 20th-century America, the reluctance to embrace brighter nights was a brief and halfhearted affair.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. But few of us will turn off the lights long enough to notice. There’s no getting away from the light. There are fluorescent lights and halogen lights, stadium lights, streetlights, stoplights, headlights and billboard lights. There are night lights to stand sentinel in hallways, and the lit screens of cellphones to feed our addiction to information, even in the middle of the night. No wonder we have trouble sleeping. The lights are always on.

In the modern world, petroleum may drive our engines but our consciousness is driven by light. And what it drives us to is excess, in every imaginable form.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the availability of cheap, effective lighting extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day — for work, for entertainment, for discovery, for consumption; for every activity except sleep, that nightly act of renunciation. Darkness was the only power that has ever put the human agenda on hold.

In centuries past, the hours of darkness were a time when no productive work could be done. Which is to say, at night the human impulse to remake the world in our own image — so that it served us, so that we could almost believe the world and its resources existed for us alone — was suspended. The night was the natural corrective to that most persistent of all illusions: that human progress is the reason for the world.

Advances in science, industry, medicine and nearly every other area of human enterprise resulted from the influx of light. The only casualty was darkness, a thing of seemingly little value. But that was only because we had forgotten what darkness was for. In times past people took to their beds at nightfall, but not merely to sleep. They touched one another, told stories and, with so much night to work with, woke in the middle of it to a darkness so luxurious it teased visions from the mind and divine visitations that helped to guide their course through life. Now that deeper darkness has turned against us. The hour of the wolf we call it — that predatory insomnia that makes billions for big pharma. It was once the hour of God.

There is, of course, no need to fear the dark, much less prevail over it. Not that we could. Look up in the sky on a starry night, if you can still find one, and you will see that there is a lot of darkness in the universe. There is so much of it, in fact, that it simply has to be the foundation of all that is. The stars are an anomaly in the face of it, the planets an accident. Is it evil or indifferent? I don’t think so. Our lives begin in the womb and end in the tomb. It’s dark on either side.

We’ve rolled back the night so far that soon we will come full circle and reach the dawn of the following day. And where will that leave us? In a world with no God and no wolf either — only unrelenting commerce and consumption, information and media … and light. We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us. And the earth, too, needs that rest. The only thing I can hope for is that, if we won’t come to our senses and search for the darkness, on nights like these, the darkness will come looking for us.

Clark Strand is the author of the forthcoming book “Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/why-we-need-the-winter-solstice.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1&referer

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is currently three years into a seven to nine year foot journey, tracing the route of human civilization from Ethiopia to the southern tip of Patagonia. (What a treat for us! An excellent writer on a fascinating journey! How did I not know about this?!). In this article, he answers the question of whether he is “tired” or rather, bored of walking. Although his journey involves much more variety and daily problem solving skills than hikes on pre-formed trails, his answer is the same as mine. Every day is different and unique in a life of walking!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/exploring-the-world-on-foot.html?_r=0

BAKU, Azerbaijan — IT’S an odd feeling: being aware of the Earth rotating beneath your feet.

It happened to me near the Turkish city of Tarsus. The Anatolian countryside was an antique flag that fluttered under the summer sun: dusty green olive groves, soil as red as burgundy wine, cornflower blue lakes — the old hues of the Fertile Crescent. My boots scared up grasshoppers from the brittle grasses. Whirlwinds of swallows swooped to feed. And I felt it: The burning horizons were creaking up to meet me. I was walking, effortlessly, atop a gigantic ball.

I felt it also trekking the Rift Valley of Ethiopia and crossing the Caucasus range of Georgia. I feel it now all the time: a kind of hyper-attentive trance. When it overcomes me, I feel capable of walking to the edge of the world where the water falls off.

And yet, a London friend, an urbane world traveler, keeps emailing me this taunting message: “Aren’t you tired?”

She is referring to my project, the “Out of Eden Walk.” I’m a journalist. I’m three years into a seven-year (or eight-year — O.K., maybe nine-year) foot journey from Africa to South America. I’m reporting stories at boot level along the pathways of our species’ first Stone Age exploration of the Earth. What my friend actually means, though, is: “Aren’t you bored?”

I get a lot of this. Readers frequently ask what strolling across continents is really like — as if they’re secretly hoping to hear that plodding from horizon to horizon (I’ve clocked about 5,000 miles so far) is mind-numbingly dull. As if commuting by car or subway to a desk job wasn’t boring. As if gorging on the ersatz stimuli gushing from our hand-held devices wasn’t ultimately, at the end of each digitally bloated day, somehow tedious. From the global walking trail, my answer is an astonished, “No.”

Walking for weeks, months and years in the outdoors, calipering the vast physical and human stage called landscape with my legs, is the opposite of boring.

The land changes and challenges with each footstep. (Given my 30-inch stride, I take about 40,000 steps a day.) How do I hopscotch through a Turkish marsh? How do I approach an Azeri farmer and his snarling dog? How to scramble out of a spontaneous rock-and-rubber-bullet fight between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank? How do I alert authorities — and navigate the chambers of my own heart — when I stumble across the bodies of migrants killed by thirst in the Djiboutian desert? Where do I locate my next meal anywhere?

Every dawn I fling myself, bodily, into the world. One hundred puzzles, existential and prosaic, confront me throughout the walking day. None of these pedestrian dilemmas are repetitive. Each requires a novel solution. I am not so much pacing off time zones as problem solving — improvising — my way through them.

Psychologists define boredom as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” Brain studies suggest that boredom occurs whenever the taps for serotonin and dopamine, the pleasure and reward hormones, run dry. (Chronic boredom is associated with depression, addiction and attention deficit disorders.) How long have humans endured such listless mental doldrums? Long enough for regional inflections of boredom to emerge, from what the French melancholically call nausea to the German’s disappointed weltschmerz.

In “A Natural History of Human Emotions,” however, the cultural historian Stuart Walton argues that boredom, as a Western cultural trope, was basically invented yesterday. It dates, Mr. Walton says, from the mid-19th century, when the angsty concerns of the European leisured classes were immortalized in dissections of ennui such as “Anna Karenina” and “Madame Bovary.” (One suspects the anonymous Industrial Revolution proles who supported this enervated elite grappled with their own debilitating variety of boredom, albeit inside the murky warehouses of soul-crushing, robotic labor.)

The classicist Peter Toohey digs deeper. In “Boredom: A Lively History,” Mr. Toohey cites a plaque unearthed near Naples that honors a Roman worthy named Tanonius Marcellinus for having “rescued the population from endless boredom,” probably by sponsoring gladiatorial games. (Our salvation from boredom has evolved from spilling real blood in sand arenas to spilling pixelated blood in Mortal Kombat. Let’s be charitable and call this progress.)

But what about way back when? What of the ancestors whose forgotten migrations I am following? The nomadic Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who populated 95 percent of human history and who conquered the planet for us? Life in the Stone Age was hard. It was short. But it probably didn’t lack for idle afternoons.

Many anthropologists note that hunter-gatherers spend far less time “at work” than we do. African nomads like the San of the Kalahari Desert devote between 12 and 19 hours a week to securing their basic needs for food and shelter, as opposed to a harried 40-hour-a-week American.

I happen to think the seeds of boredom were planted along with the first wild cereals sown, possibly somewhere in the Near East, around 12,000 years ago: with the rise of agriculture. Farming rooted us to one spot and locked us into the treadmill of circular, monotonous lives. But clearly, there is more to boredom than what clinicians and historians can tell us.

As I prepare to set out on the next phase of my long trek, into the colossal steppes of Central Asia, I think about my past 1,000 days on foot.

My “work,” such as it is, is simply this: to be awake. You can sleepwalk your way through a relationship or a soul-smothering job. (I have.) But you cannot sleepwalk your way across the scorched Hejaz dune fields of Saudi Arabia. Because if you do, you won’t come out the other side. Naturally, this doesn’t preclude states of reverie, wakeful dreaming, which are long associated with foot power and are anything but boring.

I take a step. And then another. Each is new. Each is a gamble. Each is a negotiation with the substantial world that occasions an immediate, irreversible and tangible reward: I do not fall. And I move forward. Or, should I fall, I must overcome the obstacle with the most primordial collaboration of all: between mind and body.

“The hunter is the alert man,” writes the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The hunter knows, Ortega y Gasset adds, that “the solution might spring from the least foreseeable spot on the great rotundity of the horizon.”

The walk is a hunt. It is a quality of alertness. There is something supple and deeply satisfying about this. Walking as a lifestyle is a moment-to-moment intellectual exercise that seems recollected, familiar. It electrifies the Stone Age brain that we all still carry with us: a restless brain, a brain that thirsts not just for change — our information age technology drenches us in novelty — but for tangible instead of symbolic progress. It is a brain that abhors routine. It is a brain that does not know boredom.

No, I’m not tired yet.

The Logic board in my computer died. This is apparently worse than the hard drive dying. In order to retrieve my data, I have to pay a third party rescue center. I also need to buy a new computer.

I am open to any help from the universe!

It might be awhile before I can post again…