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Exploring Creative Power
Awakening Spirit-Sense™
Specials |
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2010 January/February March-April May-June 2009 July August September October November December
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To think big, one must first think big about oneself.
Any individual act has
an impact of gargantuan proportions because of the ripple effect.
Here's how:
So don't simply say, 'I can have an impact on someone,' say instead, for it is indeed true, 'I do have an impact on everyone!'
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Matthew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek, known to the world simply as, Mattie, lived a full life for the 14 years he was here on earth. Never for one moment did he let his debilitating illness, Dysautonomic Mitochondrial Myopathy, stop him from gifting his heartsongs to a world in need of his message of peace and unity. His poetry wrings the truth from our hearts and then gives us permission to be our best selves. He lit up the lives of millions with his engaging smile and artless style. Since he left us, the ripples of his message have been gathering strength. Now, if we all step into the light he created, and become the change we so desire, Mattie’s dream of a united world would be a reality.
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The Boy who Harnessed the Wind is a must-read!
From the moment young William Kamkwamba read the book, Using Energy, he dreamed of building machines to bring electricity and water to his drought-plagued village in Malawi. The villagers teased him, called him crazy, but William refused to give up this dream. He’d already had to put on hold his dream of studying science, when famine hit in 2002, decimating his family’s farm and forcing him to drop out of school to forage for food.
Armed with amazing determination and a motley collection of old science textbooks, William contrived to build, out of scrap metal, tree limbs, and bicycle parts, a windmill that provided his home with electricity, and a solar-powered water pump to supply drinking water to his rural community. From village joke to resident genius, William became a global beacon of hope.
For more information on how you can help William, click on http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/.
May you continue to light up lives for a long time to come, William!!
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If you have ever thought to yourself: I'm only one person, or I'm only a child, or I'm too young to make a difference, here's a story that will inspire you to step beyond those limits into more powerful possibilities for yourself and others.
At the turn of this century, 150,000 children from all over the world voted for the first ever recipient of the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. A young Pakistani boy whose actions had captured minds and hearts worldwide, was chosen. His name was Iqbal Masih. His family was poor and when Iqbal was just four years old, he was sent to work for a carpet manufacturer to pay off a debt his family owed. Iqbal was now part of the bonded labor work force, and the year was 1987.
Iqbal's work day started at 4:00 a.m., and alongside other children like him, he worked for fourteen to fifteen long hours in the carpet factory every day, six days a week. There at the factory, he and his mother were powerless; Iqbal was often ill-treated and was sometimes chained to his loom. But ever so often, he and some of the other children managed to run away. On their return, however, they were always beaten. On his one day off (which was not always honored), Iqbal liked to play with his friends – he loved cricket.
Over the next several years, the debt Iqbal had to pay off grew from 600 rupees ($12) to 13,000 rupees ($260), too large for him to repay. And it seemed as though the odds were against him and that he would have to work in the factory all his life. But in 1993, when he was ten years old, something important happened. A new law was passed in Pakistan banning bonded labor and canceling all such debts.
Catching wind of the news, Iqbal ran away from the carpet factory to attend one of the village meetings about the new law. There he met Eshan Ullah Khan, the president of an organization dedicated to educating people about the new law. To Khan, Iqbal looked like a six-year old, so undernourished was he. After the meeting, Iqbal insisted on and got from the organization's lawyer, a freedom letter releasing him from bonded servitude. Courageously, he took the letter back with him to the factory, presented it to the carpet manufacturer, and was freed!
Iqbal then began to attend a school opened for children like him, but he remained concerned about the other children still not free. So, traveling with Khan, he began speaking out, telling his story in the villages and urging the children there to follow him to freedom. And thousands did. By his actions, Iqbal saved not only the children already bonded, but children who would have been enslaved by unscrupulous merchants ignoring the law.
News of Iqbal spread, and he was invited to Sweden and the USA to tell his story to school children there. He spent a month or so in Lidköping, Sweden, and then in December, 1994, he spent a week in Quince, USA speaking to children his age. He told them his story and spoke eloquently of his conviction – that the children in his country needed to trade the carpet weaver's tool for the pen, the tool of education. He told them of his dream to become a lawyer and fight for the rights of children in Pakistan. But that never did come to pass, for just four months later, while bicycling with his cousin in his home village, Iqbal was shot and killed. He was 12 years old.
Although the world lost a bright, strong and courageous soul, beautiful things began to happen as Iqbal's dream took wing in unexpected ways, and as he became the inspiration for yet other dreams:
v President Clinton was able to fulfill a request of Iqbal's, when he signed into law, a bill making it illegal to import goods into the USA from manufacturers using children as bonded labor.
v In Lidköping, Sweden, the school children started a tradition which continues to this day. On a very special Saturday in April, we will find the children and the entire city celebrating Iqbal Day to commemorate his life and work. The city's children and youth also formed two organizations dedicated to the rights of children, and began working to build the Iqbal Masih Freedom Centre for the Rights of the Child.
v And in Quince, USA, at the Broad Meadows Middle School where Iqbal spoke, each new wave of students daily continue their commitment to support the School for Iqbal that was built in 1997 in Iqbal's honour with funds they raised themselves. And if you ask them why, they will say: 'Because a bullet cannot kill a dream'.
Children can and are making a difference – a significant difference for good in the world. They are some of the world's most powerful, persistent and effective change agents on this planet of ours!! http://www.katedudding.com/newsletters/mar-2007.shtml Iqbal Masih and the Crusaders Against Child Slavery by Susan Kuklin http://www.quincypublicschools.com/schools/broadmeadows/main_page.shtml
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When a major hurricane threatened to devastate an US coastal town a few years ago, B was listening concerned, as the evacuation order went out to all those in its path. How do you evacuate so many people from so large a city? She wondered.
While on the phone speaking to an old acquaintance, she learned that his daughter and her family had to evacuate, and that their only option, given the circumstances, was to head clear across the state to some distant town, anywhere that would offer refuge. In that instant, B opened her heart and her home. She offered sanctuary to people she had never met. In her warm and eminently sensible manner, she said simply: "Tell them to come to me. We have space." B lived with her husband C in a quiet Texas town out of harm’s way.
And so, a family of five and a dog, changed plans and started towards the hometown of kind strangers, not knowing what they would find when they returned home after the hurricane. The roads were clogged with evacuees fleeing the city, and the going was tough. A journey which should have taken a couple of hours stretched into almost one full day.
Finally, weary and frazzled, but grateful, the family arrived at B and C’s modest home, with its little herb garden. The house was bursting at the seams, with the number of occupants swelling from 3 people to 8 people and a dog. But it was wonderful pandemonium, for one family was safe, and beautiful new and lasting friendships were formed.
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Daisy gazed up at the mountainous challenge before her. The thought that her physical limitations might create a problem, or that it was, perhaps, a little too late in the afternoon for such a venture, never crossed her mind. Boldly, she started up. They were no trails, so she picked her way through the bushes, thinking only of the splendour that would lie below her once she got to the top.
At last, she stepped onto the plateau above Sedona and a feeling of utter joy swept over her. The breeze was gentle, the sky cloudless and vast, and the red rock buttes standing guard around the valley, awe-inspiring. Time dissolved as Daisy watched the birds drift in lazy circles above the distant city, and marvelled at the hand of nature that had carved out the shape of a bell in one rock, a cathedral in another, and a coffee pot in yet another. Sunset was spectacular, painting the tips of the buttes an unbelievably brilliant gold.
Then night fell swiftly, jolting Daisy back to reality. She looked around. All the tourists had left, except for four slightly dodgy looking men. It was time to go. A short way down, she got stuck. This was not the way she had come, and the moon offered little light to guide her. Trying not to panic, she called out for help. The four men came to her rescue. Weaving their way through the bushes, always staying within earshot, they talked her down, joking and laughing to put her at ease. Gratefully bidding them goodbye at the foot of the mountain, Daisy realised that angels come in many forms!
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Everyone in sunny GT calls her by the simple endearment, 'Granny', and everyone knows if you’re hungry, it doesn’t matter what you look like or what you’ve done, or even if you are the tenth person for the day to rap on granny’s gate: down the stairs she’ll shuffle with a bag of goodies and a smile, despite the pain in a leg twisted out of shape by arthritis. Her cheese may be running out, her box of crackers almost empty, with a week to go before her next pension check, still granny will almost always have twelve crackers, a square of cheese, and a tumbler of water for you. Chances are you’ll even get some five-finger (carambola) drink, a banana, or a mango, if she can spare them.
Says a well known city con – a likeable rogue: “I want to wuk, but I’s can’t always find a job, so sometimes I’s get hungry bad! But I always know when I come to granny, she gon put somet’ing in me belly. She’s a saint.” This man has stolen from her, and conned her many times, yet she would never let him go hungry. Some people call her the Mother Theresa of Georgetown. Granny just celebrated her 86th birthday. May her light continue to shine for many years to come!
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After driving several hundred miles from the US to Canada, then parking your car at the airport to fly to another city, the last thing you want to find when you return tired a week later, is a dead car. But that is what happened to a woman at Pearson International recently. Little did she know that she was due for grace that day.
RM had just seen his sister off and was returning with his wife to his car, which was parked two spaces down from the woman. With a desperate look on her face, she appealed to them for help. They were late already for another appointment. Yet RM immediately grabbed the jump cables, which he sensibly keeps in the trunk of his car, told his wife to bring the car around to the space which had miraculously opened up in front of the dead car, and between them, they got the woman's car started.
It was a particularly satisfying moment for RM’s wife, because three months earlier, her car wheel dropped into a manhole while she was visiting Guyana, and two angels from the Lands and Mines Ministry rescued her. She got a chance to pay it forward!
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Ro, a great young man from Asia who, out of the blue, at the age of 4, began gathering the homeless off the streets, and taking them home for his startled mother to feed, has recently become a doctor! May he continue to light up lives!
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