goingplaceslivinglife

Travel, Food, and Slices of Life


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Reaping What You Sow

Karma…..many of us know the pretty relaxed concept…..what goes around comes around. You actions, good or bad, will come back to you later in time. send out get back

Taking that concept…let’s look at some of the things I saw on my Facebook feed today.

Now this one is probably a concept many agree with. This person is expressing to the best of her ability her fear with the President’s announcement last night to define, by Executive Order, part of the current immigration policy that the House of Representatives failed to work on. It is an important concept and one many support. While I personally don’t see the need to have an “official” language in this country, I do think it is smart for immigrants to learn English in order to achieve the best success they can. I also urge native born Americans to learn English as well.

English language

If you agree with her message, does her misspelling disturb you or do you think the message is more important than the method?

Many of the undocumented workers keep themselves apart and do not mingle but there are many people of all kinds who may be working at low paying jobs and just have a hard time making ends meet. This is food insecurity and it exists in your neighborhood. Here in McMinnville we  have soup kitchens that operate that provide at least one hot meal a day.st barnabus soup kitchen

The local food bank recently reduced what food the soup kitchens could purchase. This leaves their budgets strained. If you can, give.  If you can’t afford to give, go help.

Related to the latest political wrestling match I still saw a number of these today.exec order

The reminder was not only that Republic Presidents had gone ahead to clarify immigration issues through Executive Order, but they also had done it legally.

And speaking of Republican Presidents who used Executive Orders, I suspect the one that used it to make the largest change in our American history was Lincoln. Although Mathew Brady and others were beginning to use photography in the days of the Civil War, it was assumed no photograph of Abraham Lincoln existed until a plate was found and examined closely.Lincoln

Almost 90 years after the Gettysburg Address, Josephine Cobb, the chief of the Still Photo section at the National Archives, discovered a glass plate negative taken by Mathew Brady of the speaker’s stand at Gettysburg on the day of its dedication as a National Cemetery. Her perseverance and dedication to the task helps us get a better feeling for the events of that charged time.

In the midst of difficult times, some people hunker down. Others feel rules don’t apply to them I heard a lot yesterday of the difficulty the Buffalo area was having because as streets were cleared, people broke the travel curfew, ventured out and got stuck, needing to be rescued and their cars cleared from the streets.  It is hard to repress curiosity, for sure, but I hold this person in high esteem.3 feet of snow

Not only did he or she venture out, but they left us something to enjoy. Art wins.

And finally, something to ponder.potential

How do you chose to express yourself?

 

 

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Love Your Neighbor

The people here in McMinnville, Oregon, our new home since September, do an amazing job feeding the hungry. Four evenings a week the Episcopal Church, St. Barnabus, serves dinner. Other days are covered by other churches in town.  Typically, each meal serves about 300-350 people, including take-out meals.  The annual total at St. Barnabus is very close to the population of this city, 33,000.  The need is high, even here in Oregon where the economy seems to be so much healthier than West Virginia where we had been living.DSCF5875

Imagine my reaction when our tour in India included a Sikh Temple.  After receiving head coveringsDSCF5873 and removing our shoes,DSCF5874we wandered around admiring the architecture, bathing pool,DSCF5881 and listening to the chanting, which had tonations that reminded me of Torah chanting. (Something to look into, as the Sikh religion is about 500 years old and when the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE the people moved west into Europe and east into Asia…would be an interesting study to understand the influences of how the Sikh religion started.)DSCF5887

Then Arvind lead us into the soup kitchen and we learned they feed the hungry three meals a day, a total of 22,000 people each and every day. DSCF5905

We saw volunteers chopping vegetables DSCF5906

baking the chapati DSCF5899to serve with the vegetable curry simmering in huge vats. DSCF5898

Don’t get hung up on the fact that this work is done on the floor; yesterday’s blog should have brought you up to speed that the concept of sanitation is very different in India. Focus, instead, on the service being done.  Pretty amazing.