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When Jesus said, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last,” I highly doubt He meant that the first and Greatest Commandment should be the last thing on our list of things to do.

As a youth I was fascinated by a custom practiced among Pacific Northwest Native Americans called the Potlatch. I capitalize the Chinook term here, though my OED does not, because it seems every bit as sacred as Christmas and Easter.

Having accumulated much, a person (often a chief) would give away or burn all possessions and start afresh. Though my dictionary implies this was a show of wealth and prestige rather than generosity and humility, I’d say Christmas or any show of charity and humility is practiced with similar mixed motives, so why quibble?

This picture has been going viral lately.

It is easy to draw conclusions from it. You see a homeless man with a sign asking for money. Standing next to him is a Wal-Mart employee with a “Hiring” sign. The Wal-Mart employee is looking right at the homeless man (as if to invite him to apply), but the homeless man is not looking at the Wal-Mart employee.

Winona LaDuke speaking on the Rights of Nature at the University of Oregon November 19th, 2016.

In May 2017, people from all over the world will gather in Portland, Oregon to share knowledge and wisdom, learn from each other, celebrate, be inspired, and find the tools needed to create and enliven local movements within our communities. Together we will explore sacred oneness, Christ consciousness, eco-spirituality, social justice and the way of universal and personal transformation that honors the Divine in all.

As a survivor of anorexia, abuse, and depression, I can say that I have let the overwhelming pressures of filling media/society’s expectations of “how a woman should be” overwhelm and silence my inner voices – without even realizing I was doing it. Until… I just couldn’t breathe anymore. As I live more days on this planet now, I can say with full confidence that there are no standards or rules worth crushing our soul bones to fit into. Life gets better when we just… let it out.

But no one knows me no one ever will
if I don’t say something, if I just lie still
Would I be that monster, scare them all away
If I let the-em hear what I have to say
I can’t keep quiet, no oh oh oh oh oh oh

I distinguish between the “gift” of celibacy and the “call” to celibacy, which I will come to later in this post.

The gift of celibacy is a debatable proposition. Is someone “blessed” with that gift or simply avoiding intimate relationships? Is it a rejection of God’s gift of sexuality and more broadly sensuality and embodiment, or a prioritizing of one’s energy and involvement and commitment?

Winter has come to Standing Rock in North Dakota. The pipeline is still under construction. 6,000 people are staying on site to protect the water. “Millions” of human beings and all things of nature will be affected if/when the pipeline leaks the toxic chemicals used to move the oil through the pipe.

Thanksgiving has always been a puzzle to me. As a German exchange student in 1993 in Virginia I remember it mostly for the empty campus. While people went home to overeat, the rest of us looked at closed restaurants and college food services. Later, when I was a grad student in New Jersey, the international students on campus staged our own improvised Thanksgiving, with our own cultural foods, mostly to stave off the sense of being left out of the celebration. As a foreigner, one is often left out of the traditions that most signify a culture. The only positive I have found in my years in the US is being introduced to pumpkin pie—and even that was an acquired taste.

Now is the time to arise, in truth and love, and declare unequivocally: “No more war for oil! No more war at all!”

The abuses at Standing Rock must be seen for what they are: war crimes against a sovereign nation.

Now that I am venturing onto the terrain called “aging,” I would like a do-over in how I responded to people over 65 when I was their pastor.

I don’t think I began to comprehend the complexity of aging. I viewed it as a single-track pastoral problem to be solved by regular home visits and the occasional group event, like a bus tour. I tended to treat the elderly as needy, more like patients in a hospital than self-differentiating adults. Some were hospital patients, of course. But I missed seeing the rest of their journeys.

Amy Goodman is an award-winning broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. In September 2016, an arrest warrant was issued for her as a result of her coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota. Charges were dismissed on October 17, 2016, and Red Queen Media was there. In this excerpt from the forthcoming documentary END OF THE LINE: THE WOMEN OF STANDING ROCK, Amy discusses the roles of journalists and of women water protectors.

The tension between “bricks and mortar” and “mission and ministry” is never easy to navigate. Facilities seem so real and practical, while mission and ministry tend to be ambiguous and unmeasurable.

The tension gets especially complicated when facilities are enshrined as “historic.” Some constituents derive personal status from things historic, whether or not it is deserved, and the old implies a certain continuity that many desire.

Oct 17, 2016- Democracy Now: On Saturday, hundreds of people temporarily stopped work at multiple construction sites at the site of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. One person reportedly delayed work for up to six hours by locking to an excavator. At least 14 people were arrested. Democracy Now! began covering the action just after dawn, from the main resistance camp in Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

In honor of our future generations, we fight this pipeline to protect our water, our sacred places, and all living beings.

Find out how you can participate in creating a new economic system that helps humanity to live in harmony with each other and the planet: Sustainable Human.com

  Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English anchoress, or religious hermit, wrote: “He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a …