“Tonight I am asking for your help. I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being to prove that we are a human race. To prove that our love outweighs our need to hate. That our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame. That our sensitivity to those in need is stronger than our greed. That our ability to reason overcomes our fear. And that at the end of each of our lives, we can look back and be proud that we have treated others with the kindness, dignity and respect that every human being deserves. Thank you and God bless.”

From her 1993 Academy Award acceptance speech by Elizabeth Taylor (1932 – 2011), actress and activist, born on this day

Maha Shivaratri

“Mahashivratri is the day of Shiva. Wherever there is beauty, truth, and benevolence, there is Shiva. And, there is no place where the Shiva-principle is absent. But, Shiva is not a person. It is that principle which is the summum bonum of the whole creation and pervades the entire universe. This principle, called the Shiva tattva, is the quintessence of life and is present deep within every living being.

On Mahashivratri, we celebrate the Shiva tattva by going deep within us, meditating, and rejoicing in the Shiva energy. There are certain days and time frames in a year when one’s mental health and spiritual faculties are enhanced and Mahashivratri is one such precious day…

Today we pray with our heart and soul for peace in the world, peace and progress in society, progress of knowledge, and happiness for every individual.

The divine accepts you however you are. If you feel like you are like a thorn, you are still accepted. If you are like a leaf, you are accepted. If you are like a fruit or a flower, you are accepted. However you are, and whatever stage of evolution you are at, the one divinity accepts you, and that is truth and that is beauty.. Shiva is benevolence, truth and beauty, and the three are inseparable.

Tonight is the celebration of nature rejoicing the presence of benevolence, truth and beauty.”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Image by Kartick Dutta

“When fallowness strikes, it is important to place it in the context of the creative cycle. After the period of conception – an exciting period during which we sparkle with ideas – comes the time of gathering and preparation, when things get moving. This is followed by a period of growth, which cannot be hurried, and then by the moment of ripeness, when the idea must manifest or the project get off the ground. This is followed by a time of enjoyment and appreciation when we can share our manifest idea or plan with others. Then we must let our idea go to make its ways through the world. After all that has happened, we come to the time of fallowness.

To honor our own creative cycle and patterns, we must respect this period and learn to be as empty and receptive as we can. After any birth and manifestation, we are too tired to immediately reconceive: we need this time of rest when we lie as fallow as the unplowed field that the farmer sets aside for several seasons to regain its fertility. Let us honour our fallowness, our uncreating emptiness, by cutting ourselves some slack and giving mind and heart time to recover their former savour in a new season. Fallowness is the ground of our conception: when the soil is ready, the seed will fall and germinate.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

“What should I say about your tendency to doubt your struggle or to harmonize your inner and outer life? My wish is ever strong that you find enough patience within you and enough simplicity to have faith. May you gain more and more trust in what is challenging, and confidence in the solitude you bear. Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right in any case.”

From Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move alongside our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day’s doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labours
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.”

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 12 by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

“The greatest gift in life is consciousness. Not positions, not the dollar, but that the Almighty Spirit gives us life and we have a rational mind with which to see all the wonders of the universe…

I would not forget that the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God’s creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. Here, in a fleeting quiet, I am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal’ mantle, vibrating with His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fringes are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars.”

Zitkála-Šá (also known by her Anglicized and married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonni), Lakota writer, musician and activist (1876 – 1938), born on this day

“What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.”

Nina Simone (1933 – 2003), singer-songwriter and civil rights activist, born on this day

World Day of Social Justice

“Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights…

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright..”

Angelina Grimké (1805 – 1879), abolitionist and women’s rights activist, born on this day

“Today is the birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus [1473 – 1543]. The Polish astronomer dared to assert that the earth revolved around the sun, when the entire spirit of his time affirmed that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

What do you believe simply because you’ve been told – and what have you taken the care to investigate firsthand? What would you do if all your observations of the world contradicted what others had taught you all your life? Can nature itself give you the courage to believe what it tells you?”

From Earth Bound: Daily Meditations For All Seasons by Brian Nelson

“We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. And to deny it is to lie in prison. Oh yes, there’s cruelty, and cruelty, because it destroys the perpetuator as well as the victim, is a very mysterious thing. But if you look at the world as one long brutal game between “us” and “them,” then you bump into another mystery. And that’s the mystery of the tree-shaped scar, and the canary that might sing on the crown of a scar. And unless all races and all ages of man have been totally deluded, there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony — all of which are wholly free, and available to us.”

From A Humanist View (1975) by Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019), born on this day