FEATURED PIECES
- The Dreamkeeper TV Miniseries; Dec 28th & 29th on ABC
- You Don't have to be Christian ......... to get useful spiritual wisdom from the teachings on Christmas by Mathew Fox & Thomas More
- You don't have to be Jewish ...to learn from Chanukah: Celebrating the World's First Recorded National Liberation Struggle
- New Years Resolution
QUOTE OF THE SEASON
"Keep my words positive. Words become my behaviors. Keep my behaviors positive. Behaviors become my habits. Keep my habits positive. Habits become my values. Keep my values positive. Values become my destiny."
- - Mahatma Gandhi
RHINO HERE:
You may know that bears are not the only ones to hibernate. Rhinos hibernate too.
Well, some Rhinos do... sometimes. Accordingly, this...
RHINO'S HAPPY SOLSTICE HOLIDAZE BLOG
WILL BE THE LAST BLOG ENTRY UNTIL JANUARY 5TH, 2004
My family & I wish each & every one of you
our sincere wishes for a happy, healthy & meaningful
Year End & New Year
RESPECT JUSTICE & LOVE
Gary Rhine
AKA - The Rhino
KNOW YOUR HISTORY
Christmas Eve, 1955 -- A Purple Xmas?: Aldous Huxley takes his first acid (LSD) trip. Ho, ho, ho!
Christmas Day, 1946 -- First of several years of White House Christmas demonstrations seeking amnesty for conscientious objectors (COs) convicted for refusing to fight in World War II.
New Years Eve, 1970 -- The U.S. Congress repeals The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, thus finally fessing up to having been hoodwinked by a pack of lies the US military, NSA & the government had used to convince them to support the war in Viet Nam. Well over 100,000 Americans dead.
New Years Day, 1934 -- Alcohol prohibition ends in the USA.
RADIO TIP OF THE SEASON: Native America Calling - Dreamkeeper
Friday, December 26, at 1PM Eastern, 10 AM Pacific
Legends are an essential and vital part of Native American traditions. These tales are not just trivial stories, but provide important life lessons such as the importance of leading a spiritual life, the importance of acceptance and the dangers of greed. A four-hour epic television miniseries will be aired this weekend on ABC, on Sunday and Monday nights, called Dreamkeeper. The program will share traditional legends from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, Crow, Mohawk and Blackfoot Nations, as told by a Lakota grandpa to his gang-member grandson as they travel together.
Guests include actors, consultants and producers of this Hallmark Entertainment production.
MORE INFO AT: http://www.nativeamericacalling.com
TV TIP OF THE SEASON: The Dreamkeeper Miniseries
Night One: Sunday, December 28 at 9/8 Central
Night Two: Monday, December 29 at 9/8 Central
I want to tell you a story as it was told to me. So begins a remarkable journey of the soul between two generations of men-a gift of life from the heart of the Dreamkeeper . Old Pete Chasing Horse, otherwise known as Grandpa, is the storyteller of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Nearing a century old, it's Grandpa's duty to share the legends of his people, lest the stories lose their power. One boy who could use the wisdom of the stories is his grandson, 17-year-old Shane Chasing Horse. A member of the Dog Soldiers, a Native American street gang, Shane is a world apart from his elders. At the request of his mother Janine, the boy's been given a chance to prove himself worthy of his honorable heritage by delivering Grandpa to the All Nations ceremony in New Mexico. Shane agrees, but he has a good motive - he owes his gang money. Getting out of town is a good bet, even if it is with an old man, and a broken-down pick-up truck (aka Many-Miles-With-No-Muffler).
MORE INFO AT: http://www.hallmark.com/Website/hk_entertainment.html?lid=HPLNC1
INSIGHT OF THE SEASON:
According to the Alaska Dept. of Fish & Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-december. Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa's reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen, had to be a female.
We should have known. Only women, while pregnant, would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night, not get lost, meet an impossible deadline, and do it all out of good will.
You Don't have to be Christian......... to get useful spiritual wisdom
from the teachings below on Christmas by Mathew Fox & Thomas More
Tikkun Magazine, Dec 2003
For those of us who grew up as Jews, Muslims or other non-Christians in America, the experience was often so culturally coercive that we needed to protect ourselves. Jews typically did that in two ways: to insist on the secular nature of the holiday, and then celebrate it with everyone else, or to resolutely ignore it as much as we could. But there are some valuable spiritual ideas in Christmas, and it would be a shame if the commercialization and coercive aspects of the holiday kept us from learning from this tradition just as we in the Tikkun Community seek to learn from the wisdom of all the deep traditions of the human experience. Following excerpts are writings which appear in the current issue of Tikkun Magazine:
The Divinity of Christmas , by Matthew Fox
Tikkun spoke with Matthew Fox about the meaning of Christmas. What follows is an edited transcription of his comments.
The Christmas stories are just that, stories. They are not historical stories-the material about the manger, the Magi, the animals surrounding the birth, the angels announcing good news to the shepherds-but they are rich and profoundly archetypal stories which draw upon the Biblical material that was well known to many. In one such story, Isaiah talks of the way that the people of Israel don't know God as well as the ass and the ox do-"The ox knows its owner and the ass its master's crib, Israel knows nothing, my people understands nothing." (Is. 1:3) This a message that is repeated throughout the Gospel. Sometimes four-legged animals are closer to God than even the chosen people, and divinity arrives among the ani'im , among the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised. God at times may be closer to those who are at the bottom of the ladder than to those who act arrogantly at the top of skyscrapers. So the news of Jesus's birth goes out first to the shepherds, the people at the bottom of the totem pole who smell like sheep because they hang out with the sheep. It is the ani'im who are the first to really know God and know where God's glory really lies...
MORE AT:
Divinity of Christmas
The Eternal, Holy Night , by Thomas Moore
It is no accident that the festival of Christmas occurs at the time of year when the darkness has reached its low point and winter light begins to appear. Christmas is the honoring of light and the hope that comes with the end of nature's and the human soul's dark night. In the symbolic turning of time, Christmas is that part of the annual cycle that invites us to leave darkness behind and enter a new way of being, to start a new "year," that is, a new era of enlightened decisions rather than unconscious acts. The most stirring songs of the season, "O Holy Night" and "Silent Night," and the popular verse-tale "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" explore the emotion of night, especially this night on which light once again shows itself. We honor this mythic night full of hopeful appearances-angels with their song, flying reindeer, kings bearing gifts of gold and spices, a lowly stable aflame with the brilliant arrival of the divine child.
MORE AT:
Eternal, Holy Night
You don't have to be Jewish...to learn from Chanukah
Chanukah: Celebrating the World's First Recorded National Liberation Struggle
(Evening of December 19 to December 27, 2003)
by Michael Lerner, editor of TIKKUN, in memory of his beloved mother.
Tikkun Magazine, Dec 2003
The Story
(The non-mythologized version you may never have heard)
When King Cyrus of Persia allowed the remnants of the ancient tribes of Judah and Benjamin to return from the exile imposed upon them by Babylonian conquerors in the seventh century before the common era (BCE), they formed the kingdom of Judea. As part of the Persian Empire, and later as part of the empire of Alexander the Great, Judea had relative autonomy to shape its own internal religious life. When Alexander died at the end of the fourth century BCE, his empire split into three rival factions, and Judea was caught between two of them: the Seleucids, centered in Syria, and the Ptolemies, centered in Egypt. For the next one hundred and fifty years, these two kingdoms warred and each sought to incorporate Judea as part of its empire. Although the battle was largely military, there was an important ideological dimension....
MORE AT:
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/pdf/tikkun_chanukah.pdf
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