Your Wishes Can Change the World

This year, as we watch the world around us collapsing, we are learning that Christmas is not about money. Christmas is about loving each other, about gifts that have nothing to do with the green folding stuff, or even silver and gold.

Our money is melting down into worthless goo. Stores are closing; cameras are going up at intersections across the country. This morning I received a call from a friend in Florida who argued for twenty minutes at her bank where she has done business for twenty years. The problem? They wanted to photograph her eyes biometrically. She refused, but not many are as determined as she.

The things that really matter will endure. Gifts like compassion, empathy, humor, familial love and friendship, last a life time and cannot be devalued. This Christmas we need to hold on to those things.

Christmas is being family. It is coming together to create communities. It is being conscious of how our actions and lives touch through time.

For months, years, I have been writing about what was going to happen to our nation and to the people we love. Last year I predicted the end of the world as we know it. Every week I have hammered on the same subject and on what needs to be done so that we can change direction. I have been writing and thinking about the problems for what seems like a life time. What I write is generally politics, but this time I want you to see why I know that change is possible. I know what it is like to feel helpless and lost.

Christmas is loving each other as we are loved by One Who Loves Absolutely.

When you find the strength of love anything is possible. This past week I took a story I had originally written for my children and rewrote it for you. Is a story about a time when I was lost and desperate. Instead of giving up I found the Christmas that glows through the hard times, endures through hardships and seemingly insurmountable problems.

The Star for Christmas was my response to circumstances beyond my control in 1979. There is always strength to sustain us, if we reach beyond ourselves to That One Who Loves Absolutely. Today, we are all reaching. When we extend ourselves we grow spiritually, finding things more wonderful than we could possibly have imagined as long as we do not give up. One of the things we will find is each other.

In 1979 I experienced a time of terrible anguish but I still had small children who needed me, needed to feel the wonder of Christmas. I reached into my own past and found strength from the memories of someone who had taught me the importance of courage, of holding on to my dreams and wishes.

The Star for Christmas custom began that year, drawn from the memories of wishes I had shared with James Dean. In 2001 I began writing the book explaining the custom to my children soon after Thanksgiving Day. Ayn, my youngest daughter, had asked me a question as we sat around the table after dinner. It had been a perfect holiday filled with happy memories revisited and cooperative efforts over turkey and stuffing.

The year was sliding towards the upcoming holidays. We were remembering Christmas' past.

Ayn asked me one of those questions that you never anticipate being asked. That question lead to many insights and eventually to their book and then to this one. The question Ayn asked was about the star in which our family had traditionally placed our wishes for the year to come on Christmas Eve. “When and where did this custom begin?” Ayn asked. She assumed it to be an old New England custom. Although I told her this was not the case it occurred to me that I had not actually explained the custom's origin to my children. I did not share my pain of 1979 with them, feeling it would be inappropriate.

I promised to write the Star’s history for them.

Later, as I sat down to write, I revisited my thoughts that year the custom began. Seeking the Star’s origin became a quest into the dusty reaches of my mind and heart, then, via paper trails, to memories of people long gone. I had never revisited those events, simply sealing them off and moving on. Through this journey I found not just the Star but many more unasked questions. I also found answers to questions that I didn’t know needed asking.

My wishes of 1979 had been answered in ways I did not expect when I considered them. I had never understood the power of hope and the strength of my dreams until then. We need to look at the world, ourselves, and realize what really matters.

Our dreams and wishes can be transformational.

Let this Christmas become a time of renewal for all of us. Savor the love that extends your life into those around you. Bake cookies and let them melt in your mouth. Enjoy every bite. Then plan for a very different future than the one being planned for us. Your wishes can change the world.

A Star for Christmas benefits America Goes Home, a spiritual association dedicated to making tools available that you need to make your wishes reality. Go to Star for Christmas to read more and join our FaceBook group, Gifts From the Heart, to share your ideas for Christmas Gifting.

Will You Have Food to Eat Next Year?

Food that costs less and solves your health problems AND builds a new world for all of us.

With the economy tanking and the weight of fear hanging over us, the future looks bleak. Right now many Americans are facing the reality of becoming homeless and hunger and malnutrition will most likely become a reality to Americans who thought that impossible for even the poorest among us.

Like dominoes slowly falling onto their neighbors we are living in a web of causes that are less than obvious. Understanding how each thing relates to the others gives you what is needed to break out of the grids most of us accept as necessities of life. They aren't.

You need to take action now, starting with the most elemental issues that sustain life.

Americans depend on the food they get from the grocery store more than ever before. The unpalatable fact is that food from the local, corporate grocery store is going up in price so rapidly that people who have not shopped for a while are having sticker shock. The price you pay is only one issue, however. That food, and how it is produced, is also causing many of your health problems.

The grocery store food has changed since it came from local farms. The advent of factory farming converted the food we eat into the profits of corporations. Looked at from the viewpoint of a corporation, who have only one goal, to make money for themselves, each aspect of production becomes an issue of minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits. That hits you in ways you cannot imagine. Until now. You need to know so you can make an informed decision about what is best for your family and yourself.

We are going to look at what you are buying and what it is really costing you and show you ways to rebuild the economy while you rebuild your health.

Factory farms produce food that is designed to keep for long periods. Therefore factory growers identified varieties of plants that can be harvested green and ripen later. Monsanto has genetically engineered many of the foods used by factory growers to augment their profits and allow them to own what was once viewed as the property of God. Monsanto wants to own the DNA of the food you eat, making the seeds you buy sterile. They have taken steps in court and law to give them ownership through the twisted ideas of privatization, which is really an ongoing corporatization of everything we need to live.

Monsanto leaves no leaf unmolested in its quest for profits as this writer shows. “Monsanto scouts out farmers who it feels have unlawfully planted patented seeds, or who have saved seeds from one generation to the next, and collects damages by threatening legal action (through either infringement or breach of contract charges). The company claims to pursue as many as 500 infringement cases every year. But no farmer can control the wind, which indiscriminately cross-pollinates crops without regard for their genetic makeup. And some farmers, like Schmeiser, claim that Monsanto strong-arms innocent farmers who never wanted to grow GM crops to begin with.”

The seeds sold by Monsanto are not designed for your health. Corporations are not held accountable for the long range impact of what they sell. Factory food has been described as actually growing hydroponically, in soil that has none of the microminerals or organic content that the plants can use to ensure their own health – and yours. Pesticides used to diminish the impact of insects that are drawn to unhealthy plants like wolves are drawn to the diseased deer in a herd and killed through the use of pesticides that remains on the plant and becomes part of your dinner.

What is not healthy cannot nourish you or those you love.

Today the residue of such pesticides are everywhere and accumulating in the milk suckled by babies from their mother's breast. Yet healthy plants do not draw pests and do not need pesticides. Regaining the balance with nature makes those unnecessary; something that has been proven by Steve Tvedten, the author of The Best Control.

Pesticides originated from the development of weapons of war. Now they are killing us and still profiting the same companies.

Factory farming, plants and animals, are inherently unhealthy because of these kinds of practices designed to burnish that corporate bottom line. Profits.

So you need to know that a revolution is going on in America today. All across the country people who have taken a hard look at the world corporations are creating have said no and are changing how they, and those around them, eat.

You can join that revolution by learning how to grow your own and eat locally. On our show this Friday we will hear from one of the people who are leading the revolution back to locally produced food, Joel Salatin of the three generation Polyface Farm.

“IN 1961, William and Lucille Salatin moved their young family to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, purchasing the most worn-out, eroded, abused farm in the area near Staunton. Using nature as a pattern, they and their children began the healing and innovation that now supports three generations.

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and invented portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

Today the farm arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis. Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.

The Salatins continue to refine their models to push environmentally-friendly farming practices toward new levels of expertise.”

The Food Revolt is happening across the country. People who life in large, metropolitan areas are also finding the means to eat local contracting for food with farms not so far away. Local Harvesting, decent respect for the animals we eat, knowing where your meals originate, are becoming part of the direction for Americans who will survive the meltdown just starting.

And the food will be better than any meal you can remember because your body does know what is good for it. We need to remember that while the change over is scary and difficult that challenge is insignificant when compared to the benefits we will all of us enjoy.

Every time you climb off one grid point, turning off to some tiny extent, the profits of big corporations you are striking a blow for – freedom, community, and the kind of world you want to leave to your children.

Think about what you eat. It makes you what you are and it can make you free.