Aung San Suu Kyi – A force for democracy in Burma, she is an opposition politician who spent 15 of the past 22 years in jail for her activism.

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature and is widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century

Rosa Parks – In December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, age 42, refused to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. She was later known as the first lady of civil rights and the mother of the freedom movement.

Somaly Mam – a Cambodian author and human rights advocate, focusing primarily on needs of victims of human sex trafficking.

Agatha Christie – British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary…

Sometimes you just have to pick up a Crayola

There is no heroism
In tormenting the weak
Ganging up against those
You dislike or do not understand.
To ruin a thing you can’t have!
It only throws the limelight
On your weakness, cowardice
How scared you are of failure
Or something you can’t
Grasp, control or have.
If it was not so
You would have simply co-existed
With that thing that just is not
You or yours
Like flowers co exist with thorns.

Sharmishtha Basu
4.3.13

David Kanigan, over at Lead.Learn.Live, this morning posted this excerpt from a book by Tony Schwartz .  I read it and commented.  I’m reposting my commenting here as well, because it goes to the heart of what I write about on this and my other blogs.

http://davidkanigan.com/2013/02/28/the-addiction-of-our-times/

“I believe this is a very special moment in history, a kind of perfect storm. There is a growing recognition — to borrow language from AA — that our world has become unmanageable…The addiction of our times is digital connection, instant gratification, and the cheap adrenalin high of constant busyness. The heartening news is that more and more are beginning to recognize the insidious costs of moving so relentlessly and at such high speeds. Just below the surface of our shared compulsion to do ever more, ever faster, is a deep hunger to do less, more slowly. I saw proof of that a…

MAGPIE’S SONG

 by Gary Snyder

Six A.M.,

Sat down on excavation gravel

by juniper and desert S.P. tracks

interstate 80 not far off

between trucks

Coyotes—maybe three

howling and yapping from a rise.

Magpie on a bough

Tipped his head and said,

“Here in the mind, brother

Turquoise blue.

I wouldn’t fool you.

Smell the breeze

It came through all the trees

No need to fear

What’s ahead

Snow up on the hills west

Will be there every year

be at rest.

A feather on the ground–

The wind sound—

Here in the Mind, Brother,

Turquoise Blue”

Photo: “Magpie in the Sky,” shot with pinhole camera by Gwen Deanne, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

“Magpie’s Song” by Gary Snyder is included in BRIGHT WINGS: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, Edited by Billy Collins with Paintings by David Allen Sibley. This gorgeous, uplifting, inspiring book is available…