Reflecting on Russia and Palestine
Thirty years ago, I traveled to the Former Soviet Union as part of a Women’s Leader exchange and later I hosted a group of our Russian counterparts in Minnesota. It was a different world in 1992 . . .
Life’s Ebbs and Flows
The violence in Nablus and Palestine has decreased with the conclusion of the Israeli election and the olive harvest. Borrowing from Reed: “it has been a cauldron of simmering conflict, oppression, resistance, protests and sporadic violence whose origins go back a millennia or more, but whose wounds are as fresh as yesterday.”
Lockdown
Fourteen checkpoints block the exits out of Nablus. As I write this we are on the 10th day “under a tight Israeli siege.”
Israeli forces instituted “Break the Wave” two months ago, a crack down on Palestinian militant groups who are too young to remember . . .
Back in Palestine
The scent of jasmine fills the September air. Fruits are ripening on the trees--figs, pomegranates, almonds, apples, pears, and olives grow on rock ledges in the deep valley behind the six-story apartment building.
Memories and Prayers for the Ukraine
In June 1999, I had the privilege of visiting the Ukraine as part of a community collaborative training exchange. Watching the horrifying images on the news sent me to the back of my closet to search through my journals, trying to remember where I was. (I've kept them since Mr. Hemmert's creative writing class, sophomore year of high school.) We visited Lviv…
Let in the light
The challenges of our times are hard to escape. Here in the US: collapsing buildings likely related to climate change with encroaching oceans and poorly maintained infrastructure, sweltering temperatures in the Northwest, and reportedly appalling conditions in the detention centers where asylum seekers are housed on our southern border. Elsewhere the horrors of COVID and the delta variant continue as wealthy nations' slowly respond to…
Seeking hope
You can’t miss the anniversary discussions about a year of COVID: the lockdown, the losses, the old life still yearned for, but the new routines becoming more familiar.
This week, both COVID immunized, Reed and I took a trip to watch an ancient spring event in northern Indiana: the migration of the Sandhill cranes toward their nesting sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota and further north. We were seeking a change of pace and the magic of taping into nature’s majesty…