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Day 8 ~ As the temperatures have started a slow dive around here, I am so grateful to come home to my warm house and comfortable bed. If you need me, that's where I'll be bundled.
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 8: Sustainable Food Center
Day 7 ~ Today was a simple gratitude for the sunrise-kissed grass along the side of a busy road on the way to work. There really is beauty just about anywhere, when you allow the time to look for it. Bonus gratitude...that a phone can capture said beauty. That will never stop blowing my mind.
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 7: Doctors without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres)
Day 6 ~ Best Camping Buddy...
Car camping, walk-in, shelter, backpack-in, tent, hammock...it doesn't matter...I'm so grateful that my girl is game for anything. She's a talker, a listener, a reader, hiker, swimmer, and just be-er. We've had some great trips together this year, and I'm counting the days until the next one. <3
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 6: Central Texas Food Bank
From their website:
Thanks to a thriving business sector and unparalleled economic development, Central Texas is among the fastest growing regions in the nation. But amid this growth and prosperity, many of our neighbors are being left behind.
The rising cost of housing, utilities, transportation and healthcare leaves many of our neighbors to make impossible choices and painful sacrifices. Two-thirds of the people we serve say they had to choose between buying food and paying for housing in the past year. Eighty percent say they had to choose between food and medicine.
Hunger affects people from all walks of life. Working families, retired seniors on fixed incomes, grandparents with custody of grandchildren, the chronically ill and the disabled all turn to the Food Bank for help in emergencies or as part of their regular meal planning. As we work together to ensure all these people get the nutritious food they need, we’re counting on you to help educate the community and dispel myths about hunger around us. Please share your knowledge with others.
Day 5 ~ Today, as ever, I am grateful for the nudge towards stillness I feel when I read these words by Wendell Berry:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day : Austin American Statesman Season for Caring
Day 4 ~ Today there is only overwhelming gratitude that the Army Corp of Engineers denied the easement to continue the Dakota Access Pipeline as it was planned. The tireless dedication and activism of those members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the thousands of different indigenous people and activist allies that have stood together, have brought forth an historic victory for the Native American people and for the earth. What a day. <3
http://standwithstandingrock.net/standing-rock-sioux-tribes-statement-u-s-army-corps-engineers-decision-not-grant-easement/
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 4: Circle of Health International
From their website:
Circle of Health International (COHI) is an international humanitarian organization founded in 2004 with the mission to work with women and their communities in times of crisis and disaster to ensure access to quality reproductive, maternal, and newborn care. COHI has responded to eighteen humanitarian emergencies and served over three million women, both domestically and internationally. COHI has worked alongside midwives and public health professionals in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, post-hurricane Louisiana, Tibet, Tanzania, Israel, the Philippines, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, tornado-affected Oklahoma, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Sudan, Haiti, and Afghanistan.
COHI currently supports maternal child health clinics in Haiti, midwives in an indigenous women's forum in Nicaragua, midwifery students and sexual health advocates in Nepal, a clinic for refugees in the Rio Grande Valley on the Mexico/US border, Syrian midwives both inside and outside of Syria, the last remaining hospital in Aleppo, Syria, and works with survivors of human trafficking around the globe. Finally, COHI is a leader in Austin's social enterprise community through its program to address poverty through income generation initiatives focused on textile production of maternal and newborn health related products.
Day 3 ~ I spent the day at my mama's house, the house my father died in years ago. I went by myself, sitting in spaces (his spaces) that pull forward an tugging undercurrent of grief....my own grief and the grief that I feel for my family's loss, for my mama's loss. I didn't go there for that, but that is what I got. There aren't constant reminders. The house is not stuck in time. It's not any kind of mausoleum or memorial to him, it's very much her space now, and so when I happened upon the occasional small thing that was his, I found myself clutching, smelling, feeling the weight of it in my hands. I might have imagined that I was catching his scent under the detergent on his favorite purple turban. Maybe it's just that I can still remember exactly what he smelled like. His jewelry felt so heavy in my hands. Heavier than I remember. When I spend time in this space, I am reminded of the loss, for us, for my mama...and also of the magical family mythology that binds us to each other and also to him. Today I am grateful for these words by Lucille Clifton:
she lived
after he died
what really happened is
she watched the days
bundle into thousands,
watched every act become
the history of others,
every bed more
narrow,
but even as the eyes of lovers
strained toward the milky young
she walked away
from the hole in the ground
deciding to live. and she lived.
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 3: Mobile Loaves and Fishes
Day 2 ~ Our sweet Flyer. Through the blindness and the diabetes and the thyroid...after all of these years, he's been the loyal-est....
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 2: Hospice Austin
Intertwined with the scar tissue around the (mostly) healed grief I experienced when my father passed some years ago, is the immense gratitude I have for Hospice Austin and Christopher House. The healing work, that they bring to the difficult path that is end of life care is immeasurable. From their website:
Our Mission Hospice Austin is a nonprofit organization that eases the physical, emotional and spiritual pain of any person in our community facing the final months of a serious illness by providing expert and compassionate care, education and bereavement support.
Our Vision We envision a community in which people with serious illness live their final months with comfort, dignity and peace.
Just reading those words makes me burst into tears. This work that they do, is so incredibly important. Comfort, dignity, peace. <3
Day 1 ~ These words by Mary Oliver....
Moments
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
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Fighting the Good Fight, Day 1:
From their About Us page:
Casa Marianella provides shelter, food and full supportive services to homeless immigrants. Two clusters of shelters in renovated houses in residential neighborhoods in East Austin serve women and children escaping violence and adult immigrants. Our shelters are home-like facilities designed to meet emergency or transitional needs so vulnerable and injured people can resolve their immediate crisis, get stabilized and once again become independent, which then opens up space for new residents. In 29 years, our population has evolved from survivors of the Salvadoran war to asylum seeking refugees and other immigrants from over 40 countries.
Casa Marianella from sonia singh on Vimeo.
From their About Us page:
Casa Marianella provides shelter, food and full supportive services to homeless immigrants. Two clusters of shelters in renovated houses in residential neighborhoods in East Austin serve women and children escaping violence and adult immigrants. Our shelters are home-like facilities designed to meet emergency or transitional needs so vulnerable and injured people can resolve their immediate crisis, get stabilized and once again become independent, which then opens up space for new residents. In 29 years, our population has evolved from survivors of the Salvadoran war to asylum seeking refugees and other immigrants from over 40 countries.
