New hope for India's poor

Their bright, young faces radiate with a newfound hope.Their futures shine with the genuine expectation of success.   Due to the unwavering courage and compassion of a young man who envisioned a way to wipe away their tears and despair, there is, finally, a way out of India's terrible poverty for thousands of children and adults. 

Perhaps inspired by the legacy of Mother Theresa, a newly ordained priest in the late 1970s saw serving the needs of the poorest of the poor in India as his highest calling. But in 1980 when Tom Chitta, then a Roman Catholic priest, found his response to the devastating poverty in India thwarted by church officials, he took off the collar, married Geetha Yeruva, and together they founded the Foundation for Children in Need. 

Since 1980, Tom and Geetha have been working in the villages in the State of Andhra Pradesh in South India. Through many years of experience and with the encouragement and support of friends in the U.S. who have adopted or sponsored children from India, there grew a desire to pool the resources to reach out to the needy in India.

Tom and Geetha facilitate the sponsorship program assisted by part-time staff and volunteers in the U.S. and by teachers, social workers and staff in India. They organize and supervise all the FCN programs in India assisted by FCN staff and volunteers.

Through FCN, they are able to help more than 2000 desperately needy children, college students, and 50 elderly persons in the rural villages of India. As a tax-exempt non-profit, FCN is meeting life-saving needs such as medical care, health education, women development. 

Child labor is a serious problem. Often older children have to stay home to look after the younger children so that parents can work in the fields. Through sponsorship, children are helped to go to school and parents are motivated about the importance of education. Malnutrition is another problem. Most of the people in the villages do not eat a balanced diet. The health and sanitation conditions are very poor. Sponsorship provides better living conditions.

FCN has also established several schools, a few boarding homes for boys and girls, St. Xavier’s home for the Aged, Sneha community health center and training for women serving the needy in rural areas of India.

There are thousands of stories of lives saved and enriched by the generous and compassionate outreach of so many who have sponsored children through FCN.

Here are just two stories, among thousands:

Shiva Kumar Kattimani ’s father, Mohan Rao died of a heart attack when he was very small. His mother, Mahalakshumamma is taking care of her children while also working every day. 

Shiva has five siblings, three elder and two younger brothers. Shiva’s two brothers earn a little. With a meager amount of money, the family struggles. Education, clothes and food was a distant dream for the family. Shiva’s brother Eshwaraju is attending his Inter second year. Shiva’s younger brothers, Govardhan and Suresh are in the fifth grade. They are all struggling to provide food and education. When they lost all their hope FCN Sponsorship lit a light in their dark life. Through Sponsorship, Shiva is now able to continue his studies without any hindrance.

Priyanka Sirivella is in ninth grade. Her father died three years ago due to Jaundice. She is staying in the hostel. Her mother Subbalakshmi is a day laborer. She goes out to work in the field for the maintenance of the family. 

Priyanka's sister, Tejaswani. is in sixth grade. FCN has come to their rescue and is supporting their education.

And there are more, many more nameless and voiceless impoverished children in India, who thanks to the priestly call of one man, now have an opportunity to go to school, and pursue a more prosperous future.

More information is available at FCN's website: http://www.fcn-usa.org/index.html

Special thanks to Thaddeus for sharing this information with Tiger Lilies and his supporting sponsorship of FCN.

Let the whole world rejoice, all together!

There is only the One, the All in all, who whispers to us softly within our hearts and minds and calls us to Himself and to each other. You will know Him in your love, and in the peace within your mind.

He is the beginning and the end, the All in All, forever and ever.  He has no name.  He is in you and you know him in the quiet of your mind, the peace in your life, and in the sweetness of life all around you.  He leads you to love.  He is the way to love, to life, and that way runs through you. 
That is the truth, the only truth, and that truth is the One who is you, and in you, and in all of us.  Let nothing, absolutely nothing, separate us. We are all his beloved children, regardless of race, religion, tribe or perceived sense of value. We are all on a continuum of growing awareness.  Reach for awareness and it will come to you, and lift you higher into greater levels of light.

His everlasting love knows us, deeply and profoundly. And, loves us more than we can imagine.  We are all so dearly called to reach for that awareness and live with it as we hold it closely to our own hearts and those around us.

Let Us All Be Blessed.

Mercy Ships

Mercy Ships delivers free, world-class health care services to the forgotten poor in developing nations. More than 1,500 crew members from around the globe serve annually. Each one volunteers his services to help fulfill the mission of Mercy Ships.

One outstanding crew member, Sebastian Uriarte, is serving as Third Officer on board the M/V Africa Mercy until August. His goal is to raise $5,000.00. I encourage you to support his courageous effort to step up to the call to help the poorest of the poor. You can go here to his donor page, or here if that link doesn't work: http://mercyships-us.donorpages.com/crewmates/SebastianUriarte/

Also, Sebastian will be updating us with reports from his Mercy Ship Africa mission. Stay tuned.

"We belong to each other"

My son, Matthew, shared this wonderful, sensitive, and wise Ted talk with me recently.  I share it with you.  It will awaken and touch you even more deeply.

Gardens of life

Written and dedicated to the memory of my father

Today, the world is so focused on traumatic news that terror has become the new normal. Our sense of dignity and divinity is only a dim memory. How do we deal with all that is happening and not lose our humanity?

As we respond to the rising tide of corruption and destruction that threaten our world everywhere on the planet, we must do that while still carrying within our hearts a lamp lit by beauty, left by heaven within us as a kind of fighter fuel. 

Our goals are to light the world, not be darkened by it. It seems to me the way to that is to hold on dearly to the beauty in our lives and not be overcome by the wickedness that stalks our world, shattering our souls and sanity with fear. All of us are blessed by a beauty we did not create but found ourselves born into. If we look for it, we will find it. It may be found in the sound of a loon calling on a damp, early spring morning on a Minnesota lake, or the innocent laughter of a child in the playground or of a couple strolling hand-in-hand along Lake Erie at sunset. For me, it is all of these and one even more endearing, drawn from the deep well of childhood itself. 

Wherever beauty is sleeping in your memory, it is whispering to you, beckoning you back to the beautiful, holy, human being you truly are. Where beauty is, peace, kindness, and goodness live alongside it deep within your heart. We have to remember it. We have to reach for it and free it to fly out into the world spreading its wings, courageously as it soars far into the dim light of our darkening skies. 

If we forget, the light will go out and if the last person forgets, then the light will go out forever.

On one particular morning a few years ago, I remembered a place of such beauty. On that morning, as I stood in line at the bank, the cable news network showed a raging fire engulfing the steeple of a beautiful old church in Baltimore as a crawler under the scene reported that rats were over-running a province in China and that’s all before the news of the war in Iraq came on. I turned away.

My heart was lingering in another place, another time, lost forever to this time and place and yet vibrantly stirring deep inside my memory. It was a place of such inexpressible beauty, it would always be the nearest physical example of heaven in this life. 

Maybe there were faeries, or angels, among those tall languid lilies and colorful Irises in the fragrant flower beds stretching throughout my grandmother’s garden. The entire place remained frozen in time, stilled by an invisible presence. An entire family with all its activities of living and working, growing up and moving away and even dying had all happened before leaving it for another generation to live in wonder about all who had lived there.

There was always a kind of mystery about the place. It reverberated with voices and laughter whispering in the silence. It was clearly like coming into a room after the party was over. To know that family, one could wander in and among the beautifully manicured gardens, a number of horse barns, an old tennis court and a swimming pool, dusty paths that must have borne them barefooted at play. My grandparents had died long before I was born, but the estate was there and perhaps the same old gardener whom my grandmother had instructed still tended her magnificent gardens.

Only silence remained where there had once been so much life. Yet, the gardens were not overgrown. They were perfect. The tall hedges, the huge rounded flowering bushes behind which I played with my dolls, the long beautiful, even dusty, paths to all kinds of mysterious hidden places with garden sheds and greenhouses rich with the humid floral scent of geraniums all enraptured my maternal grandfather who held my hand as we explored together.

I was born while we lived there. I spent my early childhood in this summer place of flowers and its timeless old mansion with rooms upon rooms and a steep staircase winding up to the bell tower. There were tiny hallways that led mysteriously into other parts of the old mansion. Naturally there were rooms we couldn’t enter, and the old original Victorian-era vintage furniture was still there. It seemed to me, as a young child, this was the most wondrous of places, a place that had always been there and would always be there.

Black and white photos of my father’s family garnished the bookcases. Some were of a woman with curly dark hair whose resemblance I see every day in my youngest daughter’s face. One was her wedding photo. Others were memoirs of a triumphant tennis match won by my father, then an athletic, handsome young man. There were others of him on a horse having won an equestrian event. Later, my father would come clean on his disdain for horseback riding. He’d fallen once, and while quite badly hurt, was reprimanded harshly to get back on the horse and ride. He never rode after that. 

Other photos were of three lovely, sun-kissed children clustered for the photographer on a stone wall on the property. They were my father, aunt, and uncle. My beautiful grandmother lovingly holding a baby in a long white christening gown was another photo among them. Occasionally there were photos of a stern-looking man in a wheelchair. They are all from a time so long gone that even now as I recall my own young summers there, tears come fast to remind me of a time so deeply personal. They are so beautiful but are so far away. Yet, on a deeply intuitive level, I knew that to find the strength to live in this time, I needed to remember where I came from, and reconnect with my earliest memories steeped in the essence of that time and place. 

Even then, we lived in the shadow of another time. My parents and my sisters and I lived in the gardener’s house, which was a tiny picturesque cape-cod style house attached to the main greenhouse. I remember old fans in the room my sisters and I took our afternoon naps, and straw matting for flooring. I remember the old desk with a mirror over it as you first stepped in the little house and a square table in the middle of the room at which we ate our meals. I can see my grandfather writing a postcard at that desk. I remember my purple-flowered cotton bathing suit with a little skirt attached to it. I remember having to wait, along with my sister who was only a year younger than me until our baby sister woke from her nap so we could go swimming. 

The place was a magical place, full of everything to awaken a child’s imagination. The silence that stretched almost hauntingly across the beautiful place must have absorbed and dissipated whatever sadness might have been there before us. 

Whatever pain the man in the wheelchair might have endured, or the loss experienced by the beautiful dark-haired woman when her two babies died, were long forgotten, left to slip into the abyss of time. All that remained were memories of sunny days, florid treasures of what is now a most sacred precious beauty. Their hearts and minds were cured by that beauty. They had to have been. They must have gone there to hold each other and heal from life’s tumultuous times. There are always tumultuous times. There always were. There has never been a time when men didn’t start wars, cruelly torture and kill each other and leave babies to starve.

For that family then, two world wars, a great depression, hard times where my grandfather worked, the deaths of their own two infants all must have weighed heavily on their hearts and minds. They needed a place of beauty in which they could restore and renew their broken hearts and weary minds. So, they created one, a place that would remain, long after they had gone, to comfort, heal and speak to today’s hurting world, a world so broken that it doesn’t even realize how desperately it needs to come home to a place of silence, peace and vibrant flower gardens and graceful ponds and fountains and roadside stone walls, a place where sweet kisses in the sparkling moonlight are commonplace, a place where cruelty is nonexistent and kindness is everywhere.

How could they have endured their lives without that place? How does one live in a world rent open by bombs, poverty, hatred and war without beauty? Beauty is the cornerstone of civilization. It is the place into which we allow God to breathe new hope and life into our lives. Beauty is cultivated by the Spirit, and left for us as gifts from heaven to remind us where we’re going and from where we came. If we forget beauty, if we fail to be healed and uplifted by the experience of beauty, if we have become so hardened, so numb to the sublime healing essence of beauty, then we are lost. The dreary darkness of death has taken over and snuffed out of our souls any light from heaven.

Recently, something inside me has longed to return to that place. Today’s tumultuous times, wars and too many horrors to mention, has overrun our collective consciousness. 

We have come to accept the unacceptable, seeing the terrors of the day as common fare and forgetting this nightmare, this darkened world, is not where we should live. While I truly believe we need to be sensitive and responsive to the suffering among us, our hearts are hungry for a much more beautiful, sacred, and profoundly deep experience. We have all, despite our childhoods and even difficult life experiences, experienced beauty.  Life is full of it, if we look for it.  For me, it was a profoundly sacred kind of beauty that filled my childhood with an experience that has informed my life with fragrance and color and peace ever since.

That beautiful place I experienced briefly as a child marked the end of an era which I was fortunate to have experienced. I had the rare gift of peeking in on a generation before my time, a stolen glimpse of a past that contained a jewel of such beauty, it would sweeten even the dullest days of my future life. Never again would I ever experience such beauty and such rich silence as I did as a child roaming around my grandparents Canadian home.

As a child, that place, memorialized iconically by life-sized

sculptures of two little girls playing in the large fountain in the front garden of the house, reminded me of those times when my sister and I played among them, often slipping into the cool water of the algae-covered fountain. It contained an exciting essence of wonderment that formed my early consciousness that still whispers to me. Some things are timeless and as essential to the soul as water is to the body. 

I hope you, as I, will allow the beauty in your heart to transform you and make you more human, so you can transform the world and make it more divine.

(Originally written in July 2007)

The way, the truth, the life

Looking back, behind me, I could see the Cross, glowing golden in the setting sun, radiant from this side of it.  On the other side, I could still see the others who knelt and wept at the foot of that enormous, rough-hewn, dark wooden bloodstained Roman cross, used for capital punishment. 

He was so much more than any of us thought.  He was a good man in every meaning of the word good. He was a rare man of courage and heart, possessed by a passion for the truth, and he would not be silenced.  The price he paid for his courage and passion was his life.  Yet, he knew and might even have smiled at the thought that the sting to the Romans would be that their plan to silence him would backfire, and backfire badly. Not even death would silence him, and that incredible courage has stood the test of time. 

I wondered why they were still there.  I thought they would see the path he left, lighted by his Truth that opened the door to eternity for us. Didn't they see it? Didn't they understand? And, why is it they are not also on that path, following his light, into an infinite rainbow of truth spiraling around, above and beneath us? 

"What trapped them there?" I wondered.  I wanted to run back and tell them, gather them together and lead them beyond the cross that stood darkly in front of them.

Slowly, I turned around.  I had to go back and tell them.  I couldn't let them just stay there, kneeling and weeping forever. I saw dark clouds of an approaching storm on the eastern horizon. "Quickly," I thought as I hurried back down the path. He had said it all.  I wondered why they didn't understand.  

As I emerged from behind the cross, some of them looked up at me with surprise through their tears.  Who did they expect to see?  He wasn't there and he wasn't going to return the way they thought.  He was operating on an entirely new dimension of ultimate reality. My compassion for them was all I had and I hoped that would be enough. I understood so well what brought them here and what they needed to understand to move on.

Some of the children ran to me, as their mothers chased after them. I sat down on the dry, hard ground.  The children asked me where I'd been and why I was there.

I asked them to get their parents because there was something they needed to hear.

The women and men slowly, one by one, came near and sat down.

I asked them, "What is your greatest fear?"

One man shouted "death," another shouted "rejection." On and on they all started calling out their fears.  They lived in so much fear that those fears had become familiar to them. No therapist was needed to help them get in touch with their feelings.

"So, what is rejection?"  I asked back.

"It says you're not good enough, you're not wanted, you're cast away.  It means ultimately that you are wrong, bad and should be left to die," the old man said.

"So, there are two thoughts here, and one of them is a lie," I said, adding, "and that lie makes the other a lie, also."

"Here's the truth. You are all worthy. You are all loved - so much more than you yourselves can love.  Your feelings of rejection are real feelings, but falsely based. You all feel rejected by your countrymen, your government, and all those who hold the purse strings to your livelihood," I said.

"But, it’s a lie that you are rejected, or deserve to be rejected," I continued. "It's a terrible, terrible, evil lie that you need to stop believing right now."

"This good man who died here a couple days ago was rejected simply because he spoke a truth that no one wanted to hear.  They were all in denial about the truth and wanted to kill anyone who challenged the illusion they lived under.  You have followed his truth and because of that are also being rejected and you feel that rejection bitterly - right down to your swollen and bruised knees you've been on for three days."

"But, here's the whole point and you will languish here until you get this. There is no rejection and there is no death. Our father who considers us all his sons and daughters, as was that man who died here, loves you completely without any pre-existing conditions and never will ever reject you. 

"Those who use rejection to abuse and control are the ones who are powerless really, and in their lack are preying on you.  It's called projection and it's an unconscious behavior. They belittle you to control you so they will feel powerful. They are projecting their weakness onto you - only, again they don't know it. They wouldn't need to do that if they already felt powerful.  Real power looks a lot like humility.

They were arrogant and unaware of their weak, empty, fearful hearts and circumstances, which is why they killed him. They thought his teaching would usurp what little power they really had. They were unconscious of their own motives and need, which is why he forgave them.

"When that understanding sinks deeply into your soul, it will change your life completely. Then, you will rise with him into the light that leads you on the path to the ultimate truth which is eternal life and joy."

"What do you mean there's no rejection," a young mother asked.

"It means that it's an irrational emotion you have been taught, forced into your subconscious like brainwashing which has oppressed you so you would be malleable by those who seek to control you and take your power, your money, and your life.  It is what burdens you day and night, takes your life from you, and leaves you impoverished - financially, spiritually, and physically. It's what 'they' use to control you,"  I said, watching her as she looked away and down.

"I get that," she said, slowly smiling, looking down at her little dark curly head son in her lap.

"That's it, exactly."

"So, his message is that God doesn't judge, condemn, or ever reject, that God's love is beyond anything we can understand and is the ultimate power. This cross on this side is a symbol of that fear, rejection, and death. But, when you see it for what it represents, which is a warped manipulation by the controlling power brokers, it can't control you anymore," I said.

"What you're saying is we have become slaves to them out of the fear of rejection which is a fear of death really?" the woman asked.

"Yes, exactly, but now that you know this you will be aware and it can't control you anymore. You may still have to work for them, but in your mind, you will be free. And, that's the beginning of a beautiful new life. There's such a huge difference in this. You can laugh at their efforts to control you through rejection now that you understand their tactics - their game. Then, you will become more aware and empowered," I said, 

"And that's just the beginning. Once you take back your mind, reclaim your power, you will grow into the powerful, free, enlightened children of our Father. That's what he taught and wanted for us and died teaching."

"So, now - all of you - do you see this?  Do you understand that this cross on which He died, is a symbol forever of the dark powers' attempt to subject, control, and reject you?"  I added. 

"Now you can choose to be aware of their game and stay in ownership of your own sense of value, and can just step over their rejection, and live in freedom and in power, controlling your own minds and destiny?"

"And, once you realize this, you need to move on beyond this tired old cross into the light of the freedom this understanding and awareness brings you. Then, an exciting and life-giving new empowerment will envelop you; free you, eliciting so much joy. It will open the path to enlightenment, wisdom, and eternal life. And, when you are on that path, that way, you will see him again.  That is for sure.

"It's simple really. Do you see this? "

"Yes, I get that,” a wise old man said, standing up, and glancing around at the others who were nodding thoughtfully.

"We all need to move into that new awareness, that bright new consciousness, which is a kind of enlightened, truth-imbued space, and live where there is no death and no rejection," I added. 

"I see what you mean," the old man added, rubbing his eyes from the dust of the day."If there is no death and if we are all loved with an unfathomable love, and never rejected or judged, then those who judge and marginalize us are afraid of our power, then they are liars, thieves - the criminals? I can see how both rejection and death are fallacies. They are the tools used by those master criminals to whom we've been chained with fear, kept weak, limited, under control - all in the dark." 

"Yes. Exactly! It's simple to understand. Now, the work is unlatching your thoughts, minds and emotions from the habit of being controlled and marginalized by them," I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off my jeans. 

"Just remember it is those who abuse, reject and try to kill you who are weak. Why else would they bother?  What is it from you that they want? They think you have something they need and so they sneak up on you and attempt to steal it. So, ask yourselves, what do you have they want? You have love and spirit, joy and freedom. Do they?"

A rich pause followed my words. I waited hoping they would receive his message, which I had once struggled to understand. They slowly began talking to each other. Soon, an energy began to pulse through the large group. 

A young boy started to play the flute, sending its sweet sound drifting through the increasingly more animated group.  I heard singing as I slipped unnoticed back behind the cross. 

Didn't He say He played the flute for us and we didn't dance? Today, we dance.

The path ahead seemed brighter than before. Thankfully, I listened to my heart. I knew I wouldn't be alone on this path much longer. Soon, everyone would be on the way, also.

I smiled into the radiant amber sunset. What a glorious, awesome thing this all is - this life - this real life.  

Awakening to your dream

Daydream your life into being. Do what you love.  While today you might only be a cub, who knows who you could be tomorrow.  

There is a beautiful statement, almost surprising, in the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus states, "Don't do what you hate."

I was surprised when I first read that. I wondered, is everyone doing what they love or what they don't love, or worse, what they hate?  How much do you love what you're doing?  If you are thinking, talking about and doing what you don't love, obviously, you're not thinking about, talking about or doing what you love.  And, if you're not doing what you love, why not? Why aren't you at least thinking about it? 

As you analyze that question, the answer may be buried in your distant past.  Something in your early life may have stopped you in your tracks.  When we're children we need a lot of support, encouragement and empowering from the adults in our life. If the significant adult in your life lets you down, even if you didn't realize it at the time, your dream goes down the drain because you weren't able to see it through. 

Sometimes we need our parents to take us by the hand and help us walk through the finish line on an idea. Unfortunately, sometimes parents don't do that and when we don't ever see the other side of the finish line, something in us teaches us that we won't ever see success. So, right then, in our childhood disappointment, we accept the sad lesson that we won't see success, and naturally as children we think it's our fault.  We feel guilty, vaguely unaware of why.

But, today, in the bright sunlight of awareness we need to find, recover and finish our dream. We may need to go back and find that moment where we hung up on ourselves and our dreams, and we have to give ourselves the support and encouragement, even empowerment, we never received.

Back then, in our unacknowledged disappointment, we typically felt - and were - victims.  We had two choices back then.  Either we accept our role as victims, even honor it, make it a noble quality, and resolve to become professional martyrs, OR, we choose to stand and fight, figure out what we need and go for it.  Which choice were we taught to make? Which choice were we able to make?

There is a whole subculture in our culture of those who have embraced martyrdom, claiming it is more noble if we slave away at a job we don't love.  Have we become puppets without questioning it? Do we somehow think we don't deserve to be doing what we love?  Or, even worse, could it be deep down we don't think we have the skills or ability to do what we love, or even deeper down at rock bottom, is it possible we don't know what we love.

I think the clue is in that early childhood experience in which we were disempowered or let down by a significant adult in our life who failed us, and taught us to fail ourselves. That, in my humble opinion, was the path to codependence, which is professionally going nowhere. Codependents are rather selflessly supporting those who are. 

There are so many well-meaning, good, kind, loving and generous-to-a-fault people, who have somehow along the way come to believe that the "more blessed to give than receive" idea means they should not give to themselves and that in giving their time and talent in service to another, they are more Christ-like.  

So, it is to those folks, I invite to read again, "Don't do what you hate. Go back in time, find that moment in time when you were derailed and get back up on the horse."

Or, to frame it more positively.  Do what you love. It seems it's a holy mandate.

Think about what you love, even if you have to begin a breadcrumb trail to it.  Day dream, pipe dream, follow every rainbow, and wonder what this or that would be like, follow every thought, every single creative thought to some kind of expression, and spend a moment there, at least thinking about it, wondering about it.  

Then, ask yourself why can't you do it more often?  What would it take to do it?  How might your life be different? Do you like that difference?  Does it resonate with something you once dreamed of as a child?  You know.  Doodle a bit on a blank piece of paper the next time you're on a long hold with Comcast, or while you're in a line at the bank.  Get in the habit of day dreaming, thinking outside the box. Invite the Divine to whisper your heart's desire into your heart. 

Then, just do it, because someone out there will discover a way to heal our global climate situation, find a realistic energy alternative, a cure for cancer, a new political/economic paradigm, clean water and food for the children everywhere, but especially in Africa, a way to save the animals threatened by extinction due to  global warming, and the many great issues and concerns of our times.  

Recently, a friend said if she were younger she'd go back to school and study interior design. She said she loved it. Instead she continues to work in a going nowhere office job. I suggested she throw away the idea that she was too old and reach out for her dream to do interior design because it gave her joy.  She just shook her head and said she was too old. Rather than change her course, she opted to wait out her life doing what she didn't love.  She tossed in her chips. 

What's too old?  Is 80, 90, 100 too old?  One of the runners in the Oregon marathon was over 80 years old. My friend is only in her 50s. Sometimes it takes a life time to peal off the heavy layers of responsibilities we load ourselves down with to honestly own up to what we love. 

I think what we love is what keeps us up all night creating, doing the things that seem like a minute has passed but it was hours. Wouldn't the world be filled with passion, more empowered, solution-based, optimistic, joy?  Wouldn't everything be different?  

And, I can't help asking, "if everyone did what they loved, then, who would want to waste their time making war, when they could be doing what makes them feel alive and empowered?"