It’s baby steps, I know, but Orange Shirt Day is making a difference

Robby Robin's Journey

Today, September 30, is Orange Shirt Day in Canada. (OK, it’s officially called National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.) This special day of learning and reflection about the enduring devastating impacts of the Residential Schools imposed upon Indigenous children (and their families) was first proclaimed in 2013, and I am cautiously optimistic that it really is making a difference. Oh, we have a long, long way to go, but awareness and understanding increases every year. And as it does, hopefully the Indigenous peoples in Canada are regaining their sense of identity, culture, dignity, and self-worth, of which they were purposefully stripped by the degrading treatment meted out in the Residential Schools.

I’ve written of in some detail of the shameful history of the Residential Schools – and the reason why it’s called Orange Shirt Day – in the last two years; if you don’t know the history you can bring…

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Peace and Gratitude, why do they continue to be so elusive?

A worthy cause for sure.

Robby Robin's Journey

Thanks to a lovely post by fellow blogger Rose Vettleson yesterday entitled Peace, Hope, and Coincidences  and a Facebook post by another friend (thanks, Shelley), I’ve discovered this week that September 21 is not only the first day of fall, my favourite season, but UN-sanctioned World Peace Day and also World Gratitude Day. You won’t be surprised to learn that the intent of both these designated days resonate strongly with me, but the sorry contradiction in the UN proclaiming such a noble day such as World Peace Day and then having the very same UN – in other words the world’s leaders – be so impotent at bringing about world peace is all too apparent.

This very week of UN-proclaimed World Peace Day the world’s leaders are gathered at the United Nations to discuss the war in Ukraine, with little expectation of any peace in the near or mid…

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Map Monday: Climate Change through the millenia … yikes!

Take some time to really read this and check out the links!

Robby Robin's Journey

Last week was jammed packed with news of a political nature: a turn in the tide of the horrific war in Ukraine (dare we hope), the announcement of a new prime minister of the UK (the 4^th in 6 years), the death of Britain’s longest serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, the succession of the new monarch, King Charles III, a new Conservative opposition leader in Canada, and continuing revelations and tussling about the huge numbers of classified documents recovered at Mar a Lago, to name but a few. But there were other stories in the news of a somewhat non-political nature, at least on the face of it; those have to do with the increasingly devastating results of inaction on curbing man-made climate change.

#1 among those climate-related news items is the utter devastation from flooding in Pakistan. Complete and utter devastation.  With considerable validity, that country is…

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Let’s All Kill Buddha!

Just a little something to think about.

Aging Capriciously

Years ago, I spent some time studying Zen Buddhism.  Some of this was the “fad” of the day during the sixties and seventies.  Zen was so different than the Christianity or Catholicism that I had grown up with.  Zen spoke in koans and paradoxes.  A koan is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.  For instance, “what is the sound of one hand clapping.”  Christianity has its parables and well renowned truths, but Zen teaches one to be skeptical of everything.   

Perhaps the most famous “truth” of Christianity is that Jesus was God incarnate.  In other words, Jesus was born a man but was actually a God.  This claim is indisputable among followers of Christianity.  Buddha never claimed to be a God.  Buddha never claimed to have any absolute truths.  One of the most famous lines…

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