Help your local Food Bank at Xmas

For 40 years, food banks have been dedicated to helping Canadians living with food insecurity. Over 3,000 food banks and community agencies come together to serve our most vulnerable neighbours who – last year – made 1.1 million visits to these organizations in one month alone, according to the HungerCount report. Over the years, Food Banks Canada shared food and funding to help maximize collective impact and strengthen local capacity, while advocating for reducing the need for food banks. They have a clear vision: create a Canada where no one goes hungry.

Food Banks Canada has advanced this vision through the efforts of a task force of representative members, focused on how they can, collectively, best serve Canadians. There is power and potential in the food banking ecosystem, which is a complex network of interconnected and interdependent systems, focused on feeding those living with food insecurity. The whole truly is greater than the sum of our parts and this strength must be fully leveraged to meet the growing demand across Canada.

Unfortunately demand for food banks remains stubbornly high. During this time of economic uncertainty, the people running your local food banks and doing the hard, front line work, day in and day out, often under trying circumstances. Week after week and year after year, food banks are there for families in need. These people are front-line workers who because of their inspiring dedication and tireless work, help your neighbours move toward a Canada where no one goes hungry. Please support your local Food Bank.

Dark and Scary times

 As we move through the journey of life, we face many dark and scary times. Some of these dark times are caused by others and events over which we have little or no control. A car crash, a power outage, a hurricane, a sudden unexpected death, or the realization that a loved one has a chronic or terminal illness.

With help, we get through these dark and scary times because we know that there are those who we can lean on and who will support us. Some of those we lean on in these dark times are family and friends, sometimes they are strangers that reach out to us. For all the help we are grateful, and we use the strengths of others to persevere and succeed.

However, there are dark and scary things that we create within our minds and those dark and scary things are those that can defeat us. They defeat us because we walk into the dark alone, without, we believe any support. We keep those dark and scary things secret and we feel ashamed that we do not have the strength to overcome. 

We forget that we are not alone and never are alone if we only reach out to those around us. When you finally realize that you are not alone, you will make that call, meet that person, walk that walk, and live that dream and you will overcome the dark and scary moments that you faced alone. Do you think you'll even care that there were a few dark and scary moments in a journey where you were successful? No, you will not even remember, but you should and when someone reaches out to you think about your own dark and scary moments and extend the help that someone gave to you.

The Power of Music

Gathered here are uncommonly beautiful reflections on the singular power of music by some of humanity’s greatest writers, collected over years of reading

 “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts — it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure — and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.” Susan Sontag

 If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC   Kurt Vonnegut

 

I can whistle almost the whole of the Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is “green pastures and still waters” to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is. I find that lately more and more my fingers itch for a piano, and I shall not spend another winter without one. Last night I played for about two hours, the first time in a year, I think, and though most everything is gone enough remains to make me realize I could get it back if I had the guts. People are so dam lazy, aren’t they? Ten years I have been forgetting all I learned so lovingly about music, and just because I am a boob. All that remains is Bach. I find that I never lose Bach. I don’t know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry. Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

Without music life would be a mistake…. God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful. Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Music, the combiner, nothing more spiritual, nothing more sensuous, a god, yet completely human, advances, prevails, holds highest place; supplying in certain wants and quarters what nothing else could supply. Walt Whitman:

 

Everything is interesting if you pay attention

 Everything is interesting if you pay attention is advice that is important to listen to as we move through life. What matters is that we believe that everything is as interesting as everything else. We are always given choice even when we don’t believe we have one. Some of us believe that our lives are a script and all we do is complete the lines. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who believe that we have total can complete free will and we can do what we want when we want and how we want.

Both extremes are false. Our lives are not scripted, and we do not have total free will. We are bound by our own personal paradigms about how we view life and the rules of life. The term “paradigm” was first invented by physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn to mean, “a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline.” Over the years many have used the term to describe how individuals view the world and a few years back I read a book called the Paradigm Shift. If I correctly remember the book talks about recognizing our own rules and concepts and then taking steps to shift or change the way, we view the world. Our own worldview is not developed in a vacuum, over time our worldview is shaped by first our parents, our siblings our extended family. As we mature, we learn to incorporate into our world view, the view of our neighbours, and society. We are taught that our rules are what help us survive and thrive in this world, even if our rules are wrong. In the musical South Pacific, there is a song called “You've got to be carefully taught” and in the play, the song is preceded by a line saying racism is "not born in you! It happens after you’re born, which caused the song to be seen by some as controversial in its time. Today we understand the song and the line to be true."

We have some control and free will, so when given the choice, think about smiles rather than frowns, laughter rather than crying, health rather than sickness, gains rather than losses, and income rather than expenses. After all, your loved ones are anxious to know how tomorrow's going to turn out and you should always try to look at the “Summer Side of Life”.