verbena-19

Seasons Greetings - Peace and Cairns of Hope

I wish a very merry Christmas to all those visitors to my site who are celebrating this Christian holiday. To all of you who are celebrating Hanukkah, Eid ul-Adha or any other seasonal celebration, I extend my sincere best wishes. And to those people who are not celebrating anything special, I wish you happiness and peace.

May all of you have love in your heart and peace toward your fellow human beings. And may you also love and respect our Earth, our home.

Please remember all those thousands of people who are living in conflict zones whose lives are torn apart by war, and those who are poverty stricken, sick or alone. Reach out and help someone in any way you can. A kind word or a caring gesture can make a difference and bring a ray of hope...

I am also asking you to reflect upon "Peace on Earth", what it means to you, and how you can do your part in helping achieve it...






Read: Peace On Earth: Cairns of Hope (CommonDreams.org, December 23, 2004)

Here is an excerpt:

Peace on earth. The empty words bounce off department store walls and dribble from mailboxes translating themselves in the lexicon of consumer language as - let’s go shopping. Now more than ever “Peace on earth” ought to be our collective prayer. It is a prayer which crosses all religious, ethnic and social boundaries. Who among us does not desire peace? This seems a rhetorical question but sadly there are those who fear peace and desire war. In the United States we have seen that mammon and the sword are the capital being spent to buy an empire. This is a small powerful minority but, around the globe there is a mighty majority who call for peace. Power and greed fuel war and consumerism distracts from the simple message of “peace on earth .“ How can we humbly unite and stand in solidarity?

Some of us connect on the internet through various forums as the world wide web links us and allows us to understand how similar we are. All of us value our families, our traditions, our landscapes, and our understanding of the Creator. Mothers stay up at night nursing their ailing children, fathers are concerned for the safety of their families, children are learning to walk and talk and become members of their communities. We laugh, we cry, we pray, we dance, we bury our dead and we seek peace on earth. So how can we come together across the globe to publicly proclaim our desire for peace? We need a way to identify ourselves to one another, a way that transcends our differences , a movement that does not rely on media or politics and can not be bought or manipulated. A movement of simple people with a common goal of living daily in support of peace.
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Read rest of this wonderful article by Karen Horst Cobb here.

posted by Annamarie at 6:20 PM