Sunday Salon ~ on St. Patrick's Day

I'm Irish, and my biggest claim to fame is that I speak fluent Blarney.  How 'bout you?

On Facebook yesterday, I shared a link about the Iraq War 10 Years Later: How Did We Let It Happen?

Hey, some of us were against the Iraq war from the beginning.  We didn't "let it happen" but tried to stop it.  And got called names — Pantywaist Protestors.  And about those WMDs?  I was quoted in a news article, saying, "Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction.”

While I stood on a Chattanooga sidewalk in 2007 with an anti-war sign in each hand, Bush's entourage swept past me toward the back of the building where he was to appear.  In the car following him was a man pointing a weapon out the window.  Right at me.  For a second, I was looking down the long barrel.  My two hands were already in the air, holding the posters, so there's no way I was a threat in any physical sense.  Yet that rifle — assault rifle? — could have killed me.  I felt threatened, and a shiver ran down my spine.  (I posted an expanded version of this yesterday on one of my other blogs.)

I do really need to read the book  Hubris : The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff, 2006.

Hubris takes us behind the scenes at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and Congress to show how George W. Bush came to invade Iraq — and how his administration struggled with the devastating fallout.  It connects the dots between Bush's expletive-laden outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, the outing of an undercover CIA officer, and the Bush administration's misleading sales campaign for war.

READING

Just finished

1.  The Promise of Stardust ~ by Priscille Sibley, 2013, fiction (Maine), 10/10

Currently

2.   Ming: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century China ~ by Robert B. Oxnam, 1994, fiction (China)

Up next

3.  Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe ~ by Benjamin Alire Saenz, 2012, YA fiction (Texas)

BOOK EXCERPT

Divinity in Disguise: Nested Meditations to Delight the Mind and Awaken the Soul ~ by Kevin Anderson

The nested meditations of Kevin Anderson are playful and prayerful examples of the art of everyday spirituality.  Here is one on the spiritual practice of joy.

I like you.

I, like you,
have many routine days.

I, like you,
have many routine days
and moments.

I, like you,
have many routine days
and moments
of sheer joy.

I'm not actually reading this book, since my library doesn't have a copy, but I was fascinated by this meditation I found online at Spirituality and Practice.  According to Amazon.com, the book itself is a "collection of nested meditations — not quite a poem, not quite a prayer, not quite like anything you've read before."

The Sunday Salon's Facebook page has links to other blogs.