Wake Up

The last year has made us really value touch.

Years ago I wrote an article about the children in a Romanian orphanage (the shocking conditions made the news at the time); the children were left in their cots all day, left to cry, left unhugged.  We can only imagine the damage this will have done to them psychologically, but Lockdown has given us some idea.

The Power of Touch | Jane Anderson | TEDxUofM – YouTube – Jane Anderson, The Power of Touch Ted Talk looking at why touch is so vital for us.

BBC Radio 4 – Anatomy of Touch – Nine things we learned from the world’s largest study of touch – Radio 4’s Touch Test results and what was learned from the world’s largest study of touch.

What the bleep do we know – the movie – YouTube  – seeing the body and life in a very different way, looking at the power of self hate….. and self love

Yesterday we woke
To two perfect young thrushes
Lying together motionless

Outside our back door
Not even a year old
Pristine white breasts
Delicate spots not fully marked
Beaks never to feed again
Eyes never to see
Voices never to be heard

They are buried now by the old garden shed
Soft earth surrounds them
Leaves cushion them
A twigged cross
A sprig of rosemary in remembrance
A bunch of bright red berries
To mark their resting place

A Taisé song of Peace sung for them
In place of all the songs they will never sing to us…

Let us do all we can to protect our birds…
Food throught the year
Clean water
ice broken when frozen
In harsh cold weather
Places in the garden for shelter
Wormy lawns and bits of dead wood
Untidy corners for foraging
Bird-friendly grasses, flowers, plants, trees,
Seed heads left to over winter
All providing food and shelter.

No poisoned land which in turn poisons them

We wake to dawn choruses
We go to sleep with the curlews crying
Across the bay
We watch a myriad of birds throughout each day

Searching

Scratching
Serenading
Nesting
Nurturing
Gathering
Coming and going

Let us make sure this continues
May we always wake to the sounds of these amazing companions🙏

Two Organisations who inform on and protect birds in the UK and Ireland:

www.rspb.org.uk

www.birdwatchireland

• Wake Up … to a lot of work profiled over 4 years which shows people CAN do something.
• Wake Up is the essence of what the TIA website is about.
• Be one of the Wake – Up’ed.
• Wake Up to all that’s going on in the news.
• Wake Up to questioning what’s going on.
• Wake Up to your own judgement of the news / info being put on and sent out.
• Wake Up and Act with your Imagination.

What we focus on gets bigger – on the world stage it’s created by mass hypnosis!

Basic law of our Universe, ever loving and giving, simply gives us more of what we focus on. Doesn’t judge or condemn, it gently accumulates more and more of ‘stuff’ we’re putting attention on – wanted or unwanted!

Media People understand how the brain works. ‘News at Ten’ is a classic example:

1. Spinning discs, colour red, dramatic music draw us in, starts hypnosis process.
2. Headlines announce dramatic scene, followed by loud noise (anchors drama to brains).
3. Serious faced presenter tells us bad news (adrenaline – addictive – floods body).
4. We’re mesmerised by photos of other peoples’ suffering (relief it’s not us).
5. …ends on short story of something light hearted (body – endorphin hit – addictive cycle completes).
6. We crave more!
7. Our collective attention makes the whole situation worse.

Mosques and temples are helping to assist the elderly and the vulnerable in their towns and cities.

As the countrywide lockdown takes hold within the first week many religious and community organisations have been helping ALL members of their community. 

The army of volunteers have been collecting food and essentials to ensure those people that need the most help at this time of crisis are being cared for. 

At many times they are putting themselves in harm’s way.

The Bolton Hindu Forum said they are leading ‘a joint Coordinated Community Help Program to look after elders living alone and who have no immediate family and those who have family but they are out of town and not able to help as they would in normal circumstances’.

The Masjide Noorul Islam (Blackburn) have already recruited 250 people to help the elderly and vulnerable in isolation.

Kamal Hussein’s story is in Kutupalong, world’s largest refugee settlement –  late August 2017, thousands of refugees arriving daily. Many children were separated from parents and Hussein’s mission was to reunite families.

Hussein decided to act after a woman asked for help finding her child.

“I rented a microphone” relaying a description. His broadcasts worked – someone returned the child; his mission was born.

Charities gave audio equipment and a booth to broadcast the names of separated children and urge parents to collect them.

 “The new refugees don’t know the camp, they get lost here,”

Myanmar’s campaign of persecution and violence drove 740,000+ stateless Rohingya from their Rakhine homes. Now, 1,000,000+ Rohingya are in Bangladesh.

A refugee himself, he was separated from his parents when a boy.

“As a child, I had a lot of pain in my life but doing this work, I feel at peace with myself.”

www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2019/11/5dc3fd334/rohingya-mans-mission-reunite-parents-lost-children-new-film.html

• Forestry Commission Report 2018- 2019. Progress made towards target 11 million newly planted trees in England 2017- 22, including The Northern Forest.
• Government objective: increase area of woodland to 12% in England , by 2060
• Woodland Trust Young Peoples’ BIG CLIMATE FIGHTBACK, planted 10,000 trees in Derbyshire 2019
• Woodland Trust since founded 1972:- planted 13 million trees, 1089 mill trees saved, 3k rescued.
• READ HERE – www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/people-behind-our-work-cumbria/
• Multitude of small- scale planting projects by local groups eg Trees for Cities, Brighton  – bhgreenspaceforum.org.uk

Photo – A younger Manu Berardi demonstrating against local tree destruction by Developers

• first know thyself
• listen
• practice foregiveness
• laugh

• Two in five trans people (41 per cent) and three in ten non-binary people (31 per cent) have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months.
• More than a quarter of trans people (28 per cent) in a relationship in the last year have faced domestic abuse from a partner.
• One in four trans people (25 per cent) have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.
• One in eight trans employees (12 per cent) have been physically attacked by colleagues or customers in the last year.
• More than a third of trans university students (36 per cent) in higher education have experienced negative comments or behaviour from staff in the last year
• Two in five trans people (40 per cent) adjust the way they dress because they fear discrimination or harassment. This number increases significantly to half of non-binary people (52 per cent).
• Two in five trans people (41 per cent) said that healthcare staff lacked understanding of specific trans health needs when accessing general healthcare services in the last year.
• Three in five trans people (62 per cent) who have undergone, or are currently undergoing, medical intervention for their transition are unsatisfied with the time it took to get an appointment.
• More than one in ten trans people (11 per cent) have gone abroad for medical treatment to alter their physical appearance, including buying hormones over the internet from other countries, with many citing the barriers they currently face in accessing medical treatment in the UK.

https://www.stonewall.org.uk/system/files/lgbt_in_britain_-_trans_report_final.pdf

In the Dalai Lama’s most recent writing, A Call For Revolution published in 2018, he says

“I am calling on you to bring on a cultural revolution of compassion!”

“When I call on you to bring on the Revolution of Compassion, I am calling for the mother of all uprisings to begin.”

Speaking to all humans as Citizens of the Earth, he says,

“The problems facing you, whether to do with climate change, violence in general and terrorism in particular, were not created by God, Buddha or extra-terrestrials. They did not fall from the sky, or rise up from the ground. Humanity is entirely responsible for being at the root of the problems that have caused these crises. Which is good news. Because if we have created these problems, it is logical to believe we have the means to resolve them.”

On March 15^th 2019, in 25 countries around the world, an uprising of people from all walks of life began taking non-violent direct action in a bid to save our planet from catastrophe. In London, Waterloo Bridge was turned into a garden, Marble Arch became a campsite and learning centre, Parliament Square an information centre, Oxford Circus a speaker’s platform, Piccadilly Circus a youth centre. Songs from the soul, rhymes of reason, music of love and hope, theatre of passionate pleas were played out through the streets of our capital city.

This rebellion was a culmination of many years of the peaceful work of many individuals and small groups of citizens of this earth, who wish to see her beauty and nature thrive for future generations.

We do not all wish to be rebels, activists or protesters. There are many ways to quietly join with those of like-mind and create change……..

https://britishpilgrimage.org

https://wisdomkeepers.earth

http://lawyersfornature.com

https://shaktisings.org

https://SOULand.org

www.earthlawcantre.org

www.glenniekindred.co.uk

June 2019