Category Archives: Hope
Maybe There’s Hope: Simon & Garfunkel Are Friends Again . . .
Maybe—
This wasn’t written on the subway walls, or some tenement halls;
It isn’t a mashup of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme;
Or the boxer, humming ly-la-lye while homeward bound.
But maybe . . . it could turn out to be a Bridge Over Troubled Waters . . .
‘I was a fool’: Art Garfunkel describes tearful reunion with Paul Simon
Singer describes recent meeting where Simon said he was offended by an old interview, and pair reconciled
Art Garfunkel has described a recent tearful reunion with Paul Simon, in which the pair moved past old enmities.
Speaking to the Times, Garfunkel said: “I actually had lunch with Paul a couple of weeks back. First time we’d been together in many years. I looked at Paul and said, ‘What happened? Why haven’t we seen each other?’ Paul mentioned an old interview where I said some stuff. I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him. Looking back, I guess I wanted to shake up the nice guy image of Simon & Garfunkel. Y’know what? I was a fool!
“We’ve made plans to meet again. Will Paul bring his guitar? Who knows. For me, it was about wanting to make amends before it’s too late. It felt like we were back in a wonderful place. As I think about it now, tears are rolling down my cheeks. I can still feel his hug.”
Continue reading Maybe There’s Hope: Simon & Garfunkel Are Friends Again . . .
Rebuilding After the Earthquake, and A Birthday Rainbow
This post was delivered as a message in Spring Friends Meeting on Eighth Month (August 11, 2024).
Today after meeting, Wendy and I are going to a small family birthday party, for a great-granddaughter who has turned seven.
That quiet gathering will be a very modest landmark in what has been a very intense and weird month.
For that matter, this last four weeks have been vivid pieces of a weird patchwork quilt that raggedly covers eight long years.
Or nine years actually. It began as I watched an almost surreal ride down a golden escalator. From there it set off an improbable clamor that reached its first peak in an earthquake on November 8, 2016.
Not a geologic earthquake, but a political and cultural shaking every bit as real. Continue reading Rebuilding After the Earthquake, and A Birthday Rainbow
Giving Thanks for Those Defying Hell & Sowing Hope — “From the River To The Sea”
New York Times
OPINION – THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
#1 – The Rescuers
Rahat, Israel, a Bedouin town in the Negev Desert.Credit…CreditPhotographs by Ofir Berman for The New York Times
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Rahat, Israel
I confess that as a longtime observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I aggressively avoid both the “From the river to the sea” activists on the pro-Palestinian left and the similarly partisan zealots on the “Greater Israel” Zionist right — not just because I find their exclusivist visions for the future abhorrent but also because the reporter in me finds them so blind to the complexities of the present.
Continue reading Giving Thanks for Those Defying Hell & Sowing Hope — “From the River To The Sea”
Gwynne Dyer: Three Wars — Any Victories?
Wars have stolen our attention from a looming climate catastrophe
We’re still in the game, with a slim chance of holding global warming below a catastrophic level through the rest of the century, Gwynne Dyer writes.
By Gwynne Dyer –
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
You would think that all human energies would be focused on avoiding a potential climate calamity, including those of Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians. Especially the Israelis and Palestinians, whose disputed homeland would become uninhabitable by the end of the century in most “runaway” scenarios,
With practically all the media bandwidth for non-local news taken up by two tribal territorial struggles that would not have seemed out of place in the 15th century AD — or indeed the 15 century BC — you may have missed the latest release from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
That would be a pity, because it’s a lot more important than Gaza and Donetsk. The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook is the best one-stop guide to where we are now in the attempt to keep global warming below a disastrous level.