There was a lot of ministry in Quaker meeting this Sunday about areas of massive disaster… areas of war… areas in deep suffering.

When I hear of the suffering in Haiti, in Iraq, in Chile, in Poland… I feel a desperate desire, I mother’s desire to make it all well, to make it better. I physically crave to touch those in pain, to sooth the soul, to hold and hum away the hurt. I think I could leave… I could just get on a plane and go there… I could serve those in such great need, recovering from such destruction, devastation, loss… I think of the connections and commitments I have here. What trail of destruction would I leave behind by walking out the door, going to the airport, getting on a plane and being gone for months, years… I can go and sooth the child who has lost a mom by orphaning my own children, support a parent who has lost a spouse by denying my husband his own partner, I could work to rebuild by leaving a hole in my own company. Yes, there are ways and those who co go, who do balance, who do give so much to put the world back in the place for those who have been rocked to their very core. And it is a choice… I could go. I choose today to stay… and still I am left with the physical longing to do… something.

I sit in the silence of Quaker meeting and wander through my choices. I could and do send money… the great American way of doing… feels like handing a Scooby-Doo band-aid to a Haitian who has just lost everything… everything, every person, every item, everything.

I could simply pray.

The simplicity of it at first makes my scoff. Prayer… I could just sit here on this bench, not move, not give, not anything… and pray. That’s not doing anything my mind battles with itself.

Love. Send love. Love is always the answer, not matter the question. Find it inside, connect to it and send it out on a prayer.

I connect to the Great Connection. The force of Love that connects us all and I know, know in every cell of my being that a prayer is the most powerful thing I could do. I pray for those in suffering and in sorrow. I pray for those who are leaving home and country and loved ones to go and render aid. I pray that they will all find the strength they need to keep moving forward. I pray that they will all feel some sense of peace, if only for a moment. I pray they will feel a mother’s love, the touch of the Great Mother Spirit, watching over them. I send love out on the wire… and I know it will make a difference. It will help to make it all better.

(Thanx! for the pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdave/459210631/)

I am a Quaker and I love me some oatmeal! I also love to envision a world where no one goes hungry. So, I LOVE that Quaker Oats is mixing fun and giving with their Create Your Day Campaign. Big, HUGE thanx to Rachel over at A Southern Fairytale for shining a light on it…

Quaker has created an application that allows you to Create Your Day.   Go to their website and create the perfect breakfast for you, for a friend, your child’s teacher, your husband.. whomever you’d like.   Using their application, answer a few questions and it creates a fun card with the ideal oatmeal to get them revved and ready for whatever lies ahead of them that day.  It then allows you to share it via email or facebook.  For every dish that you create (4 per day) through March 31, 2010… they will donate $1 up to $25,000 whoops… $25,o0o has already been donated!!! So they’ve upped the ante to $50,000.

Let’s make Quaker eat that $50,000 and up it to $75,000.

Please help me in this.  No child, no family, no person in this country should go hungry.

The App is super cute and fun… I could play around with it all day… @thisisnotapril says I am like a cat… which is so totally a compliment in our neck of the woods.

So here is my super cute Create Your Day story…

(How did they know peaches and cream is my favorite oatmeal? It’s like oatmeal magic!)

Anyway… whether you are as entertained by this as I am or not… go check out the oatmeal magic… create your day… and help Quaker Oats do a little towards ending hunger.

Go on now… go… now>>> oooo… and then tell me what kind of oatmeal did you get… I wanna know – and then go tell Rachel cause she’s got some cool stuff to give away!

~ Ora na azu nwa ~

Fab!Hubby and I have been blessed to spend our adolescent, young adult, and early marriage years within a support community full of love, acceptance, safety and diversity. This group of friends, guides, and mentors are not necessarily our family… they are the people we chose to love us and guide us in our transition into adult hood, married life and parenting… and these are the people that now make up the village helping to raise our children.

Karl and I have often talked about how there is no way we could live the life we have without the support of our village. We as a family – each of us individually – are better off with the collective influence and love we find within our village.

I, as a mom, would not be as happy, inspired, grounded and loving if were not for the help and guidance I find within this group. Grateful is the word to describe how I feel… but I think it would have to glow and blink and leep off the screen and hug you and leave a trail of glitter behind to really do justice in describing how grateful I am to our village.

I work within the world of marketing, PR, design, social media… and at the root of it I spend a heck of a lot of time online. I got started building sites to pay for college and left with a degree I have yet to use professionally, a love affair with the web, and the know-how to land a job you couldn’t even go to school for. And here I am – 13 years later – still in love with the web… and man, has it changed.

There are people who will say and studies that will prove that the amount of time we spend engaged with multi-media is disconnecting us… and I think that there is truth to that… I believe there comes a time to turn the cell phone off and actually be at the table having dinner with a friend – the world can wait. I also believe, passionately believe, that the Internet is a tool bringing us into connection with each other in ways that 10 years ago were hardly imaginable.

This past springs post by Her Bad Mother is an amazing example of this… here is one woman, writing one blog post, that connected moms all over the world… if I EVER had a moment where I felt alone in the world of mothering this would certainly help me to see I am in good company. (Yes, she had lots of inspiration and help… that’s the point of a village)

Call me a bleeding heart liberal, or a hippie, or a new age-er, or a pie in the sky ridiculously, hopeful optimist… I believe the Internet will help to heal the world. I see it give disenfranchised groups a voice,  I see it help inventors and entrepreneurs with world changing products find their niche, I see children here in the US and in remote villages across the world connect to each other and to the whole wide world, I see people who would never cross the room to talk to each other for all the things that make them different – connect online for all the things that make them same.

I for one have found healing around a miscarriage, hope when my brother was deployed to Iraq, peace in a recipe that makes my dinner hour less hectic, laughter on days when I wanted to turn my back on the world, inspiration on days the blank canvas was overwhelming, serenity on days of turmoil, chore charts on days I wanted to pull my and my kiddos’ hair out for the toothpaste on the counter AGAIN… I have found beauty and heartache, joy and sadness… I have found lost best friends from high school… and quirky new favorite artists.

I see the Internet as this amazing tool of serendipity, connection and healing. Sure – just like the  twice the size of Texas – floating island of trash in the Pacific (which you can see thanks to the magic of them there inter-webs) – there is a ton of crap online. And just like life – I chose to give all my energy and focus to the good in it.

This week is the Mom 2.0 Summit – and I am moderating a panel where some very lovely, smart, connected women will be sharing about their experiencing with cyber-villages. If you are attending the conference – I look forward to seeing you in the panel and connecting with you and hearing your thoughts on cyber-villages. If you are not attending – I would love to read your thoughts right here… leave a comment… tell me what ya think… share one of your favorite experiences from your online support community. I wanna read ‘em!

Best of 2009 cont… December 30 Ad. What advertisement made you think this year?

I actually stumbled across The Girl Effect right before the  2009 new year… I have lost track of how many times I have watched it… I still can’t watch it without crying.

If you are a woman or you have a mom, sister, aunt, grandmother, daughter, etc… WATCH THIS NOW! I truly believe healing the world is possible and programs like this are what are going to get us there.

Gwen Bell’s #best09 cont… December 8 Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?

There is a space of time when I staff a Woman Within Weekend that I walk out onto Mother Earth and ask her to hold anything that is distracting and keeping me from me being present to the moment. I so look forward to that moment… I visualize all the little and big things in my life at the time… things that are not happening right now… things I won’t be able to do anything about for 3 days… and I release those things into Mother Earth’s loving care – knowing she will hold them tenderly so that I can be totally present – mind, body and soul – to the healing that occurs on “The Weekend”. We only hold the Woman Within spiritual retreat weekend here in our region 4 times a year and I always try to staff because it is nice to be reminded at a cellular level every 3 months that the world will continue to turn, Fab!Hubby will take amazing, loving care of ours boys, client work will get done the exact moment it is meant to get done, etc…  while I take time to be available to myself and to other women who are seeking to find themselves and change their own lives for the better.

Thanx for the pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31157339@N00/176161917/