randomness hepburn: March 2012

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

China lead pollution poisons 160 children: report (Reuters)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - Lead emission from factories and the natural environment in China's manufacturing heart of Guangdong has poisoned 160 children, Xinhua said on Sunday in the country's latest case of unfettered industrial toxins.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/parenting/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120305/hl_nm/us_china_lead_pollution_poisons

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Monday, March 5, 2012

Daisy Hill, Indiana Tornado: Small Town Slammed By Twister

DAISY HILL, Ind. -- This is a town that's almost impossible to find, even if you're trying. But a massive tornado did.

Daisy Hill's name evokes beauty, winding along Blue River Road before it eases into Honey Run Road. But a twister nearly swept the tiny Indiana enclave away, leaving its mark with fickleness by what it tore apart and what it left unblemished.

"There ain't nothing left," said Rick Stansberry as he took a break from the chain saw he used to clear away a once-towering pine tree that toppled onto headstones in Daisy Hill's cemetery.

Many of the small towns dotting the southern Indiana landscape felt the brunt of Friday's violent storms that barreled across the Midwest and South, killing more than 35 people.

But at first glance, the devastation here might go unnoticed. You have to go past the small waterfall and up the dirt road that slopes sharply skyward before you get to a crest. That's when the startling damage of this otherwise scenic trove of about a dozen homes comes into view.

Miraculously, no one died in Daisy Hill. They hunkered for cover and held on until it passed.

Dorothy Nelson and her daughter Lisa Yates ran into the basement of their brick home and hid beneath the cedar steps in a bathroom hardly larger than a closet. Each put pillows over their head and braced. Yates grabbed the sink while draping herself over her mom.

When the air grew quiet again, the women made their way up the stairs and were smacked with the aftermath.

The roof was gone. Foam insulation covered the floor and kitchen table, so saturated by rain it felt like sand. A ceiling fan dangled above the living room couch. Glass shards were everywhere. A downed power line snaked across their front yard.

On Saturday, as the two counted their blessings and picked through the rubble, Nelson held up a chunk of dishware, then wondered: "This is my good china. Where did that come from?"

Equally curious were her eyeglass lenses left on the kitchen table. The frame on the floor. In a hutch, her finer dishes were untouched.

"You want to see something amazing? Look at that flower," Nelson implored as she pointed to a potted purple-and-white bouquet, unscathed on the counter. "That flower didn't move."

Nelson then cried as her thoughts turned to her husband, the household's handyman before his death a year ago. He put in the basement bathroom because it was in the sturdiest place in the house, as if he had a premonition that someday it might be put to use and save lives.

"We're still in shock," Yates, 46, said. "But we have family, and we're gonna be all right."

Across the narrow road, amid a debris field with mattresses and occasional heaps of everyday life that looked like they went through a blender, Cindy Lanham bundled up against temperatures in the 40s as she helped her family rustle up their belongings. Only the foundation of her home of 12 years remained intact.

Her scrapbooks, the house's insurance papers and her quilts were nowhere to be found. But she had her life and credits the cellar for that.

As the storm barreled down, she and husband crouched in the basement corner, put their arms over their heads and held on. Moments later, they looked up and saw only sky through where the floor had been.

Debris gashed her husband's head, though on Saturday he still gritted it out without the stitches his wife believed he needed. Lanham escaped with just a cut arm.

"We came out, and it was kind of a blur," she said, choking back tears. "Of course, it was all gone."

Their basement was inundated with rainwater a couple feet deep. A rocking chair rested toppled in the muck, along with an overturned water heater.

Lanham shook her head before her son handed her the keys to her Ford Explorer. It had been found in a neighbor's yard, at least 100 yards away. The discovery gave her an instant of joy.

"That's what I was looking for," she crowed.

But rebounding from the tornado could be a challenge for Lanham, whose mother died three weeks ago just 11 days after being diagnosed with cancer.

"It ate her up," she said, crying before collecting herself and pressing on.

"We prayed for sunshine today," she smiled. "And we got it."

View photos of devastation across the U.S.:

Vehicles damaged by a tornado lie in the parking lot of the Henryville Jr./Sr. High School in Henryville, Ind., Saturday, March 3, 2012. A string of violent storms demolished small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early season tornado outbreak killed more than 30 people, and the death toll rose as daylight broke on Saturday's search for survivors. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Sexuality ? Our shame to bear! Spirituality ? Our gift to share!

As we near the edge of the 2012 vibrations, the energies that are represented by the cosmology of our times, we feel the intensity increasing in our bodies and minds.? This energy has to have some sort of expression, most of which is acted out through our spiritual connection to self and others, often involving our sexuality.? We have many ways of viewing our sexuality as it is interwoven into our spiritual approach to life; authoritatively, secretively, awesomely, childishly and morally, only to mention a few. We cannot discount the way we were introduced to our bodies in the form of sexual expression, nor can we ignore the moral background issues that were present in the family as we were initiated into what would ultimately become our sexual exploration and expression in this life.

This is not an easy subject to embrace and as we move forward into this complicated framing and reframing of sexuality and spirituality, we must open our minds and hearts in a way that centers around our own safe exploration into self/Self.? Learning to hold the tension of opposites within our own psyches is a huge learning curve.? Most often we decide that we cannot do this any longer, hold the yin/yang in our own system, but must have another become part of the outer marriage rather than first having a balance of yin/yang within, finding our own coniunctio, often called the mysterium coniunctio by those with an alchemical mind, via Carl Jung?s works. It is the inner marriage, the inner completion of the male/female, the Sol/Luna (Sun/Moon) within that creates the dynamic of completion in this life, correlating exactly with the creative spiritual experience, in as much as one completes this process. The alchemists describe this coniunctio, the inner marriage in the following passage (excerpted from Jung?s analysis):

?Luna and Sol often appear as White Queen and Red King (note these colors? corresponding stages of transmutation; the symbol of this relationship is a rose). This relates to their symbolism as the anima, the female principle within a male personality, and the animus, the male principle within a female personality, respectively. (Jung called this aspect a ?medium between the ego and the unconscious). This is reminiscent of Rubedo, in which Luna becomes a man, whereas Sol becomes a woman. According to Jung, both aspects are crucial to their corresponding Self, and their realization is achieved through relationships with people of the opposite sex. The alchemical concepts of Sol and Luna seem to be the unconscious projections of the animus and the anima.?

All of this may be a bit heavy to bite off of, but the dynamics in our psyches are ever present even if we don?t fully understand them.? We get our anima (infused into the male) from the feminine and our animus (infused into the female)? from the masculine and those inner images stay with us a lifetime, forming a very integral part of our persona and how we view relationships, especially intimate relationships.? Intimacy can include sexual expression, but not necessarily?.still being part of our sexuality.? In-to-me-see!? So who in your life or better yet, your existence as a ?soul? have you downloaded into your psyche representing these images of anima or animus?? These aspects definitely color your relationships and your expression within those relationships. We have inner images that literally determine our relationships and those inner images are derived from past soul experiences, and mostly in this lifetime by those who role modeled the opposite sex.? The same images are present no matter what our sexual preferences are.

Our expression of ?love? inclusive of our sexual spiritual connection is one that infuses creation and creativity into the ?one? holding that love; Teilhard De Chardin put it succinctly in this piece of prose:

?The day will? come when, after harnessing the winds,

The tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God

The energies of love.? And on that day, for the second time

In the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.?

Can we find a place inside of us that bursts with creativity, with the need to express oneself wholly, fully and without compromise? Will we allow love to flow freely between ourselves and others and learn how to function in our sexual bodies, fully understanding the opposing forces that live within us and have been represented in our outer relationships?? Our creative ?fires? are caught up in all of this and in order to spring forward with purpose and passion, one must find the flames that burn within and are able to be ignited by our own doing.

We have been watching the compromising that comes along with free expression of love and sexuality in the polyamorus version of ?Big Love?, a take off on the polygamous communities of the FLDS, Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.? Why has this received so much national attention, when we know that there are multiple affairs, bigamy in nature, and rampant polyamory going on in our society, but kept under wraps.? How about looking at the polyamory that is in fantasy if not in reality, in each and every one of us, either through some repressed guilty expression or full out expression as in this HBO presentation or by those of the multiple Pagan communities?? What if our nature is polyamorous as represented in mythology, in the Bible, and in a multitude of other literature, not to mention other cultures? We, indeed, have choices to create a monogamous life style or one which includes our polyamorous nature.? Have we lost you here?? Hopefully you will see how this works through our society and into the morality issues that surround us in our everyday life. We may experience all of these things that are mentioned, but keep most of it to our own private thoughts, or go to the movies and live it out in the fantasy world represented by the film industries.? Sometimes we have difficulty seeing the difference between the real and the other dimensions that represent us.? Is there a difference?

We are looking for love, acceptance, excitement, passion, pleasure and free expression in our sexual/spiritual experience or we shut down completely.? It is a choice, to be complete or incomplete and some of us have made that choice willingly and happily.? This treatise is to explore the needs of those of us who are still looking for an ecstatic connection to our passion for life, love and the pursuit of happiness.? So let?s keep our judgments aside and move toward understanding the roots of our being, the multi-dimensionality in which we all exist.? Are we living in those dimensions as eternal souls or do we just have this one life, this one existence to prove ourselves?? We must learn to see ourselves in other parallel worlds, in other dimensions of time and space, to encounter that purpose that we all hold inside, to become spiritual beings inhabiting the body, mind and soul of ?the now?.

Source: http://gwynnemayer.com/2012/sexuality-our-shame-to-bear-spirituality-our-gift-to-share/

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