Morning Verse
We are visiting our family in San Francisco to celebrate our youngest granddaughter’s 5th birthday. Yesterday when she came home from school she recited the morning verse that the children say each day at her kindergarten. (It’s a Waldorf school.)
This is our house, so good and so strong. With windows, a bright yellow door and the floor made out of wood.
Come in my neighbors, and come in my friends, I greet you most kindly and I give you my hands.
Good morning to everybody and good morning to everyone.
We greet you merry sunshine, you chase the night away.
Good morning happy children.
Let’s work and sing and play!
Morning has come, night is away, we rise with the sun to welcome the day.
Down is the earth, up is the sky. There are my friends and here am I.
When the sun sends down its glow, children, animals and flowers grow.
With love that the sun does give, light and warmth that all may live.
My own heart is like a sun giving light to everyone. Lovingly it shall unfold, opening out its shining gold.
May everything we do and say be kind and strong and true, oh golden sun like you.
Good morning dear earth, good morning dear sun, good morning dear stones and flowers everyone.
Good morning dear beasts and the birds in the tree.
Good morning to you.
Good morning to me.
Imagine a world where we all heard children sharing this message each morning. That’s a world I want to live in.
Posted 8 November 2024 by Mark ·
Devastated But Not Done
Tuesday, November 5 will forever be remembered as a day of infamy. Like Pearl Harbor day, or September 11. Only this time, the attack did not come from a foreign enemy but was rooted in our own racism, misogyny, and ignorance. Americans voted for a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a racist, and facist to be the 47th president of our nation. It’s devastating to learn that we are not the nation so many of us hoped we could be. Not the land of the brave and home of the free. The candidate who was elected to lead the nation prevailed by preying on our fears. We are apparently not a nation committed to empathy for our neighbors, not a nation rooted in the ideals of freedom and justice for all. Not the welcoming nation that Emma Lazarus foresaw in poem:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
But we are not done…
We can still be that nation. We can still live up to the ideals that we claim to embrace. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Now is the time to renew our zeal to work each day towards the kind of nation we hope to become. We have done it before. We can do it again. We must, as Abraham Lincoln charged, work to ensure “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”
Be courageous. Have empathy. Be kind. Love one another. Work for justice. Welcome the stranger.
Posted 7 November 2024 by Mark ·
Rhapsody
Posted 29 October 2024 by Mark ·
