Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, honors the millions of lives lost in Hitler’s death camps. When one group of people or one characteristic gets defined as “not us,” “not normal” or outside the common bounds of humanity, terrible consequences can ensue.
Who do you see defined by our society as “not us”? What do you do to welcome outsiders into the fold?
You know you want to. One big puff and the seeds will scatter in that satisfying burst of flying fluff that you remember so well from childhood. Only now you know that you would be planting hundreds of dandelions that you would only have to pull up later.
What looks different to you now than it did in your childhood?
Vines flower on the face of ancient walls. Trees grow in the cracks between alpine rocks. Wherever, however, life manages to find a way.
How have you managed to create beauty in an inhospitable environment?
Did you think that bananas were long and yellow? So much of the world is beyond our experience, and so beyond our comprehension, or even our imagination.
What will you do today to broaden what you know of the world?
Ching Ming is a Chinese festival in which families go out to care for the graves of their ancestors, and to offer them burnt gifts of paper replicas of money and material goods. The ancestors are cared for as the family celebrates, the living and the dead together.
What do you offer to those who have gone before you?
