A River Between

My friends Gary and Don renewed their commitment to each other this weekend at the Twin Cities Pride Fest. All God’s Children MCC Church held a mass commitment ceremony. I have a Pride Photo Gallery of my experience this year. I’ll admit, it took me longer to “get in the spirit” of pride, but seeing Gary and Don like this, helped me to understand it much better.
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The pond at my parents home in Memphis, MO.

My friend Gary came to speak to our Northfield People for Peace group last night, and spoke about his experience with HIV and how he’s soon to complete his 25th bike ride in the fight against AIDS. He’s raised over $100,000 to fight HIV and AIDS now! Incredible! This man is in his 40s and just incredibly healthy. A lot of what he spoke about was keeping his stress down, and keeping his life in balance. While there were other incredible pieces to his story that he shared, I came away with a sense of wanting more of a balanced life than I may have now. Also perhaps the need to be more adventurous.
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Today, June 21st, is the Summer Solstice. It is the longest day of the year for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Countless religions around the world have celebrations and holidays centered upon the Summer Solstice. It’s known as a day of harvest, reaping rewards for your labor, giving thanks and renewing your spiritual commitments. It’s a day of preparing for the future as our days begin to shorten and we begin a “Journey into the darkness” towards Winter Solstice. Today is also World Peace and Prayer Day.
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This evening I hosted our Northfield People for Peace and Goodwill (PPG) meeting, where we showed the movie, Wellstone!. It’s a great testament to the life of Paul Wellstone and the efforts for peace and justice that have been happening since his first days in the US Senate in 1991. It’s no wonder that I feel Northfield is an epicenter in the nation for peace and social change. Paul Wellstone lived in Northfield for 12 years, teaching at Carleton College before he ever ran for the US Senate.
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It’s funny how I now define the summer as “my time off” but it really isn’t. I’m taking some time off of the major projects I’ve been doing. Timbre is done for the season, the AIDS Walk is done, and I have more time to do those fun things for the summer.

Today I had the day off, so I went up to the Twin Cities to meet my friend Linda for coffee, and generally enjoy the day, and do some quiet writing.

Technorati Tags: peace

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One of my tasks as a board member and Co-chair of Northfield’s Center for Sustainable Living is to do their website and blog. Since I’ve been having so much fun with Wordpress, I found a great wordpress theme, and also gave the CSL a Flickr pro account! Oh, the picture above is of one of the composting units we have at the Northfield Village School.

Check out The Center for Sustainability’s new blog!

I’ve written in other places about this, but let me once again formally introduce you to this mighty softball team that I am on this summer. We are The Lumberjacks! Ok..”mighty” might not be the best adjective to use for us. This is a group of guys who play in the Twin Cities Goodtime Softball League. We’re all affiliated or loosely affiliated through a lot of mutual acquaintances in the “Bear” GLBT subcommunity.

A “Bear” can be defined many ways, but generally it’s just a stocky or bigger framed guy, maybe he has facial hair, some body hair, etc. So.. out of what was just one team of “bears” on the softball team, there were two, and hence The Lumberjacks were born.
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A good exercise I’ve seen other “bloggers” do - list out 100 interesting factoids about oneself. Hopefully you’ll find them amusing and hence, get a better glimpse into the eccentricities that are my life… I wrote these in early 2004, and surprisingly, have maybe only changed two things in this list.

1. Though I am an only child, my mother did have two other children after me who were stillborn.

2. I have sung in Carnegie Hall!

3. I generally crave a good Mocha all day long.

4. I do not smoke. Never have. Never will.

5. In the fourth grade I was “the little Democrat”, trying to convince everyone I knew to vote for Jimmy Carter for President.

6. Jimmy Carter is still my biggest hero.
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Well, it’s not a new blog, but rather I’ve begun using a new open-source solution called Wordpress.

I plan to make writing in this blog a more regular occurance now. I’ll write on the same topics of Sustainable Living, Peace and Politics, Music and the Arts, Coffee Shop babbling, etc. Some of the content from the old blog I will be re-posting, and some of it I will archive. I’ve been posting to a few too many blogs, and now it’s time to synthesize. One bit of warning, however. I sometimes take off the gloves and can be opinionated. I’m a passionate, liberal-minded, and often “strong-willed” person. I like discourse, and I don’t mind disagreement or debate. But, be respectful if you disagree and wish to comment. I don’t make personal attacks, and really, I don’t bite.

Oh, and a fun thing about Wordpress is that changing the look and feel can be a snap, as it has a new “themes” feature. Plus, unlike the program I was using previously, it uses standard CSS! I view my blog as a playground for my ideas. You might also see me using it as a playground to learn more CSS and web tricks!

I hope you enjoy this journey with me!

Peace.

Scott