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March Blooms, Antisemitism, And Seven Pillars Of Wisdom

March Blooms, Antisemitism, And Seven Pillars Of Wisdom

Last updated on: March 2, 2017 at 1:11 am by Tom Swiss

March Blooms, Antisemitism, And Seven Pillars Of Wisdom 2017-03-02T01:11:05-04:00 Tom Swiss

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Welcome to another Random Wednesday here on The Zen Pagan. Today’s episode is being written from the employee lounge of an undisclosed spa in Columbia, Maryland, where I recently picked up a weekly massage shift. There will usually be some writing time in between clients, so, here’s to a new way of doing things.

March Blooms

I like spring as much as anyone. More, perhaps; I hate the cold, get a little seasonally disturbed affect from the dark, and in general greet the spring with relief.

However, flowers blossoming on the first day of March is not something that should occur in these climes.

Daffodils greet me
On my morning run — March 1st
Beauty, climate change

march_blossoms_fb

Antisemitism

I have, in the past, said that I couldn’t see antisemitism again becoming a significant threat in the US.

After more than a hundred bomb threats against Jewish community centers in the US and Canada already this year, and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, I must withdrawal that claim. The threat is real. (That threat, however, does not in any way justify support for criminal actions by the state of Israel, or unconstitutional actions taken here against the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.)

But what’s interesting and hopeful is seeing Jews stand up for the rights of Muslims in these troubled times — and vice-versa, as Muslim groups raise money to restore vandalized Jewish cemeteries.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Many years ago I a saw a quotation go by on the net (back when that meant USENET):

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. — T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

I had no idea what the cited source was, but I promptly added it to my own quotations file. Then a few years ago I was walking down a Manhattan street and spied a vendor with a table of used books. My primary weakness! I was unable to leave before browsing for a quarter hour, and one of my finds was a copy of that book. It’s the war memoir of Thomas Edward Lawrence — a.k.a Lawrence of Arabia — about his involvement in the Arab Revolt during World War I.

It finally reached the top of my reading stack a few days ago, and I’m about a hundred pages in. As a story about how the war between European empires that planted the seeds of the current situation in the Middle East, it is an amazingly apropos book for our time. Recommended reading. It is available for free via the Internet Archive.

You can keep up with “The Zen Pagan” by subscribing via RSS or e-mail.

You can help send me to Japan this spring for a once in a lifetime event!

Details TBD, but I will be at the Free Spirit Gathering and the Starwood Festival this summer.

If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on “Zen Paganism” I’ve set up there. And don’t forget to “like” Patheos Pagan and/or The Zen Pagan over there, too.

Random Wednesdays

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