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Sheltering Walls

Bare Trees in Fog

Cognitive Dissidents


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This "New Hypocritical Version"* written on plain brown cardboard, mimicking the everyday street person's sign, speaks for that silent majority among us.


Stepping back from the growing crowd of dissidents gathering in the public square, a bigger picture can and should be seen:


Tariff "wars" are a constant distraction from true tragedies happening in our country daily, like two children dead from measles in the USA in 2025, and two-hundred young men grabbed without question and incarcerated in a foreign gulag forever. They were stripped, literally and figuratively of human rights, and those children of their future lives.


Breaking News: Another tariff twist and turn.


In the meantime, and this is a very "mean" time, one student after another in our land's highest educational enclaves are being nabbed from campus by masked men and women, then imprisoned down South for saying what they think at a "think-tank". While others remaining on campus live in fear that they may be next , or that their financial aid will be cancelled in the middle of their degree programs.


Breaking News: Stock market plummeting and rising as tariffs pivot from country to country.


Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American civil servants were fired, just when longtime safety nets, like social security, and food stamps, designed specifically for whenever regular paychecks disappear, are about to be "disappeared". Some of these faithful people have found themselves at food banks for the first time, only to find empty shelves.


Breaking News: On second or third thought, tariffs are paused for 90 days. Stay tuned!

Today's tragedies are tomorrow's losses, and those losses are mounting by the day while every magic trick in the playbook is performed to fool everyone. Let's not be fooled into believing what we know in our hearts to be the truth. Let's not wait for someone else to speak up. Being brave when one is afraid is the meaning of the word courage from the French word "corage" which comes from the Latin, "cor", heart.


Take heart, for these days are not only a matter of the head, not a cognitive exercise, but a proverbial "love thy neighbor" from your heart moment. One does not have to follow a faith tradition to follow one's own heart.


"When did we see You hungry and nourished You? . . . When did we see You a stranger? . . When did we see You ill, or in prison and visited You? . . . "


Breaking News: . . . as you did it to one of the least, you did it to Me".


*(Matthew 25:37 - 40 )



 
 
 

"Somethin's Happening Here . . ."

A thousand people in the streets . . .


Everyybody look what's goin' down . . .




from St. Augustine, Florida the oldest city in the nation

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To Historic Boston Mass where it all began!







 
 
 

Danger, Danger!!!

An expert in authoritarian regimes, Sarah Kendzior captures the danger like this:  

Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.  

Authoritarian regimes, she says,  

… can take everything from you in material terms—your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely. They cannot take away who you truly are. They can never truly know you, and that is your power. But to protect and wield this power, you need to know yourself—right now, before their methods permeate, before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.   

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We are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave—and it is often hard to be brave—be kind. But most of all, never lose sight of who you are and what you value. [1]  


Take note of the date of this original post.

[1] Sarah Kendzior, “We’re Heading into Dark Times. This Is How to Be Your Own Light in the Age of Trump,” The Correspondent (online news platform), November 18, 2016. 



 
 
 

© 2023 by Marie Laure

​Six Stages of Pilgrimage:

  • The Call:

  • The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

  • The Separation:

  • Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

  • The Journey:

  • The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain and sacrifice of the journey itself.  This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

  • The Contemplation:

  • Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation like walking a labyrinth.

  • The Encounter:

  • After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling and blisters, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin veil where humans live in concert with the Creator.

  • The Completion and Return:

  • At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world. "Seeing the place for the first time . . ."

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