Caring for Mother Earth and Her Creatures

Add a Comment

Comment by The Ancient One on November 24, 2009 at 9:21am

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Comment by JAGODA on October 21, 2009 at 7:10am

Comment by Jenny on September 23, 2009 at 12:50pm

It sort of looks like a mutant preying mantis!

Comment by Dragonhawk /|\ on September 14, 2009 at 7:19pm

Comment by Natalie Zaman on September 14, 2009 at 8:57am

New broomstix is up www.broomstix.com cool stuff for fall :) xxNat

Comment by Jeanette McDermott on September 10, 2009 at 10:39pm

Thank you, Herbert, for your blessings for Miracle.

Comment by Jeanette McDermott on August 25, 2009 at 1:16pm

Art by Lupe Fiacre, Art Action Union

ATTENTION ALL JOURNALISTS: Here's a Miracle for you. Her story awes and inspires. Read on ...

Miracle was born on a Korean bear bile breeding farm in the spring of 2006. The farm is run by Mr. and Mrs. Lee, an aging Korean couple. Bear bile farming made them rich, but they are getting old and ill and don't want to continue the bear bile business. They want someone to buy all of their bears so they can retire. The bile farm is small, filthy and miserable for bears. For Miracle, it was a torture chamber. The couple fed her pig’s food, and sometimes even meat from the flesh of other bears. All day and night she laid in her own filth, locked in a tiny cage so her bile could be drained from her body to make Chinese medicine. The pain was unbearable and she nearly went mad from the agony of imprisonment and torture. Next to her, in another cage, a traumatized 3-legged moonbear cub succumbed to madness and now wrestles with his young tormented mind. One day, no longer able to cope with the pain of bile extraction and agony of mental terror, Miracle somehow escaped and swam across a river, where she found freedom in the wild.

But ...
Korean authorities want Miracle back; she's an embarrassment to their pride. They set traps for her and sent 30 armed hunters with 10 dogs chasing after her. When that attempt to capture Miracle failed, they sent another 110 hunters with 40 hunting dogs to track her down in May. Miracle has alluded them all. She's been living off wild honey, farmers' crops and chickens and the shear will to survive. Current plans to capture Miracle have been suspended until fall, when food supply gets low and the forest becomes thinner. If captured alive, Miracle could end up back on Lee's bile farm or the farm of another Korean bile broker. Bile farms are a fate worse than death. On these farms, bears are locked in cages too small for their bodies, "milked" for their bile through a torturous procedure twice a day, and dismembered for their limbs because their body parts can be sold for a small fortune to China, where bear paw soup is a prized delicacy.

A True Story
This is the story of Miracle. It is a true story about a courageous young moonbear. It is a story that astounds and awes, and compels all who hear the story to find a way to help her. One animal welfare organization in South Korea is dedicated to saving Miracle’s life. But they are having a hard time getting the media to help tell the story because there are no photographs or video of Miracle. Without images of the bear, the Korean media won't broadcast the story over television, on the internet or in the newspaper. Please blog about Miracle to overcome this problem.

Miracle Needs Creatives
In addition to needing journalists and bloggers to tell Miracle's story, we need artists, animators, graphic designers, musicians, widget makers, web designers, online merchandise gurus and other creatives who can put an identity, a face, to Miracle. With creatives who can tell her story, we can draw the media’s attention to Miracle's tale of imprisonment, torture and escape, so the whole world becomes riveted on her. If the international community is watching and following Miracle’s story, no further harm will come to her if she is captured. The government recently overturned its order to shoot her on site, but now wants to return her to a bile farm when she is found. And that is a fate worse than death.

Your story could help save her life, and the lives of more than 9,000 other moonbears that are imprisoned and tortured on bile farms. By drawing the world's attention to the horrid practice of bear bile farming, we can dismantle the bile industry. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) has produced a comprehensive guide detailing herbal alternatives to bear bile for traditional Chinese medicine. The guide includes statements from world scientists and global healing practitioners who believe that bear bile has no place in traditional Chinese medicine.

Can you help? Will you help?

Contact me on my profile page, or you can find me at

Comment by Kallisto on August 20, 2009 at 4:44pm

Comment by Lady pinesunsets on August 13, 2009 at 7:59pm

New here. janie

Comment by Jenny on July 27, 2009 at 3:57pm

Hello all, just joined this group and it looks wonderful. I have always been close to the outdoors and feel more connected with Her critters sometimes than Her humans. I am trying to instill this love and respect for Mother Nature in my two kids as well.

• First
• Previous
• Next
• Last