<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;">Easter to Gaia for May Day</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">Yesterday in Asia and today across
the international dateline, we celebrate the empty tomb’s power before
terminus. Today, we also mark Patriots’
Day (giving one’s life on behalf of) and the day after Gaia gets her annual dressing
we recognize Professional Administrators who get the wheels of corporate operations,
management, research, and development efficiently moving.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">I stick with the image of the power of
the empty tomb. Heir to the Reformation
through the Methodist Church in the Philippines, I grew up in the stark
contrast between the barren cross of the Christo Rei resurrected, and the three
hour of solemn silence on Good Friday that my Catholic friends observed in
subdued postures of penitence, penance, and avoidance of perdition; they
cowered through religious obligations and duties Friday onward, while the rest
of us downed our wine on Thursday and chased the bunny wabbit in search of
colorful eggs </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="4">and petite Church school teathers </font></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">early Sunday morn!</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hollywood treats tall tales of high suspense
and adventure with the secure knowledge that at the end of the telling,
characters that count “live happily ever after”. Most stories have happy endings. We Protestants go through the motions of
shedding crocodile tears on Holy Week assured that the pure white lilies </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="4">and daffodils </font></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">w</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="4">ill</font></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"> grace the altar on Sunday morning. The
existential high point in the Catholic liturgy is Friday afternoon when all the
lights go off and space is imbued in three hours of the sounds of mystery,
while the Protestants get up early Sunday morning to burst into celebrative
hymns as they worship looking east at the crack of dawn.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">Easter quickly deteriorates into a
Pollyannaish stance. I latched on to
the symbol of empty tomb as it does not offer an easy escape into the other
Other World where one accumulated brownie points for the chance to wear toga to
enter Peter’s pearly gates in the sky in the bye-and-bye, but to be flung back
into the wrenchingly fierce arena of authentic life (see you in Galilee) where the
meaning of life’s existence resides all along.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">I recovered Easter back as a meaningful
term when I discovered its Germanic origin of relating to <i>Eastre, </i>the goddess associated with spring. It is fitting that Easter this year is only
48 hours from Earth Day.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">A word on spring. I am in the temperate zone in China so we
have four seasons, but the common saying in <i>Dong
Bei</i> is that we have two days of autumn, two weeks of spring, two months of
summer, and all the rest is b-r-r-r winter!
In my four years in northeast China, this last one was the longest
winter, with the long john still within easy reach. Though the cherry blossoms on the two weeks
of spring are blooming and its petals flying freely in the air, dawn and dusk
are still stalked by old man winter.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">It was in 1969 that the first Earth
Day was suggested at UNESCO for a UN Peace Day celebration scheduled for March on
Mother Nature’s equipoise in the north.
A US Senator a year later sponsored a law to hold an environmental
teach-in on April, and the Earth Day title added a real definition for Peace as
protecting the environment and everything in it.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">May Day is also a mid-spring
celebration in the northern hemisphere, though it is the first day of summer in
warmer climes. The phrase is also used
in place of <i>Titanic’s </i>SOS (save our
ship), an international code for extreme distress, now a generic call by anyone
in trouble. Internationally, May Day is
workers day, a call on the captains of industries that lowly workers are human
beings with innate rights, too. It is in
this vein that we match the glory of the empty tomb to the gory state of our
devastated planet, and call on global workers, of which we consider our self a
part, to save the earth’s planetary ship!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">I zero in on the Keystone XL pipeline
that is deemed “not a threat” to the environment from a State Department study
(funded by you-know-who) to allow the hydrocarbons in the tar sands of Alberta,
Canada to flow into the processing plants of the Gulf of Mexico. It awaits WH approval, clearly, a decision being
considered between “a rock and a hard place”!
I am no doomsayer. Yes, the best
way of transporting bitumen is through a regulated pipeline, not to mention,
the labor opportunities in its construction and maintenance. But is that all that is involved?</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">We heard that the fracking of Ohio shale
is related to the recent earthquakes in the region as the tectonic plate
responds to the mining involving the literal shaking of the earth’s foundations. I continue to point to the current struggle
of China on petrochemical byproducts (benzene and p-xylene) as wreaking havoc
on health and the environment. Our call
re the health of the planet is the taken-for-granted-ness of all the
derivatives we have come to enjoy for more than a century as perhaps needing a
healthy dose of SOS rather than a singular focus on the commercial bottom line
before the whole Earthship turns to a story of gloom and doom for the human
race.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:">C</span></i><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:">onsider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin and yet Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 13pt; color: rgb(36, 39, 22); vertical-align: baseline;">said a sage of
old. Put </span><span style="color: rgb(36, 39, 22); vertical-align: baseline;"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="4">a lily in mama Gaia's ear this week!</font></span><u style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family:"></span></u></div>
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<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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