north to south

well life seems to be getting too full for blogging. this is probably a good thing. the last few months have been full of travels, hard work and happy learning from myriad interactions with different beautiful members of the human race...

yang xiao and i went to three academic conferences, two of them in New York City...

And one in Atlanta where we ate some good old southern home cooking...
beets,
okra, fried green tomatoes, collard greens, mac & cheese, and peach and berry cobbler for dessert.

while in Atlanta we also immersed ourselves in important American history and culture...
we made our pilgrimage to the MLK center for nonviolent social change. what a moving experience. it should be a required trip for ... well for everyone in the world really.

"We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and our relationship to humanity." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy...I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"In the final analysis the white man cannot ignore the Negro's problem, because he is part of the Negro adn the Negro is part of him. The Negro's agony diminishes the white man, and the Negro's salvation enlarges the white man...I doubt if the problems of our teeming ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, through genuine emphathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negroe's daily life." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We happened to be in Atlanta on the day of the anniversary of Dr. King's death.

While in Atlanta we also made it to Sunday morning program at the Baha'i Unity Center. Wow!! What powerful spirit in the South ...soulful music, soulful speakers. Baha'i communities in the rest of the United States are urgently in need of the brilliance, spirit and passion of their African American brothers and sisters.

As a result of having the opportunity to hear the New World Unity Ensemble at the Unity Center I have a new cd that I am listening to over and over again--David Guillory's "Thy Name is My Healing." Mm mm beautiful.

Escola came with us on our trip to the Baha'i Center. She has only been in the US for a short time. She and her family are refugees from Burundi. I just wonder what this quiet stoic little tender soul has witnessed and experienced in her life. Please keep her in your prayers.