I’ve begun the new year reading a book by Lynne Twist, entitled, The Soul Of Money.  It was one of those books that I got two recommendations for in the same day in completely unrelated conversations.  So, I knew I needed to look into it.  I have not been disappointed.  Ms. Twist weaves in her decades of experiences as a leading fundraiser for The Hunger Project with her experiences traveling all over the world, visiting indigenous South American cultures and participating in the Beijing Women’s Conference.  From these experiences she creates a tapestry of universal truths about money and its role in our lives.  Her book is provocative, inspiring, and challenges us to fundementally shift our view of money in our lives and in our world.  I’ll be writing more about this book in future posts.  For now if you are interested in checking out the book, here’s a link.

 At a recent fiftieth birthday party for a friend, one of the guests shared this photograph of our planet as seen from Saturn.  It gave me pause.  We are so puny, so tiny in the universe.  Our planet looks like a station in the outback, remote, out of reach.  And if our planet is that small, then we humans are infinitely smaller in the universe.  Hard for us earthlings to imagine how insignificant we are in size when compared to the size of the universe.  We take ourselves so seriously most of the time. 

The perspective this photograph offers humbles me.  Yet, I affirm that our existence does matter.  It matters how we live each of our nanosecond long lives.  It  matters that we give it our best shot, that we leave our miniscule area of this universe a bit better than we found it.  That we clean up after ourselves. 

It’s when I listen to the evening news on the radio that I keep this image of the earth viewed from Saturn in my mind.  It helps me put all that information in perspective: the political scandals, the heads of state traveling here and there, the stock market going up or down.  In the end what really matters? 

If I were standing on the rings of Saturn, I would look at this blue planet called earth and I wouldn’t hear all the noise, I would only see its blue hue offering me hope, curiousity, and goodwill–an invitation.  I would wonder if there was life on this planet and how this life interacted.  Were they kind to their young, were they loving or were they violent, were they respectful to the planet that nurtured them with life?  This is what I would wonder.  How about you?  What matters then?

For a better look at this photo go to this New York Times article.

This evening my family and I were at a meeting of the Transracial Adoption group that we get together with from time to time.  The group had planned to watch a film created by the Mavin Foundation called “chasing daybreak.”   We huddled in a room to watch the film– all of us adoptive parents (or parents to be) of multiracial kids and/or part of multiracial families.  I found myself oddly choked up as the documentary began.  I looked around the room at all our white faces, eagerly wanting to learn about what it means to live “mixed race” in our society.  It is the immensity of our love for our children that brings us white adults together to explore and learn about this new world.  We sit in anticipation hoping that we will hear good news too, that what we hear of the challenges won’t be so overwhelming that we won’t feel able to be supportive and understanding when things get rough.   Our children of mixed races from the ages of 6 months to 6 years play just outside of the room where we watch the film.  We could hear their giggles and squeals–their joy. We hope that we will have what it takes to be able to celebrate and to cry with them as they (and we) pioneer a new way of being in this still very broken world.