Or who is taking your time, occupying your land and denying you liberty?
Residents of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine, gathered to protest the arrival of Russian troops on March 2 as Moscow continues its military invasion for the seventh day. Shots can be heard in the background of an amateur video shot by a protester who says, “They are trying to intimidate us.” The shots appear to be fired into the air by Russian forces in an attempt to disperse the protest, while demonstrators remain defiant.
We all take are freedom for granted as Boris Yeltsin says we don’t appreciate what we have when we have it. I would go further and say like oxygen we need it in order to sustain life and breathe. Some of us only can imagine waking up to the sound of shelling or even worse a shell falling on our home. But that is no longer left to the imagination in Ukraine.
Imagine waking up and finding an occupying tank from a foreign force on your doorstep, stealing from your county the right to vote, for who you believe in Your right to say and do what you believe to be right. Or go to where you want, when you want. These are all rights that as a reader of this article you and others in your country have and like air those rights are all around you and like oxygen your society needs them in order to sustain a healthy political ecosystem.
My brother would have been 50 this year but sadly he took his own life on 28th February 2015, 7 years ago today. It still seems unreal that he is not still here and each year my parents and I mark both his birthday and the day he died.
The pain that a parent goes through from having lost a son or daughter is a pain that I cannot comprehend. I don’t know how much their heart would break if they were ever to lose me too before my time was due to.
My brother was a spirit medium; he could see and communicate with the spirits of the dead. For those non-believers in god, the supernatural or life beyond this one you would think him delusional or at best misinformed. But my brother was a man of honour and a truth seeker as well a truth speaker. So I knew what he lived through and experienced from the other side was real.
My Brother Andrew
Although I don’t have his gifts to communicate with the dead I do like to believe I have a good relationship with god and am able to have a good insight into what god wants expects and needs from me and others and what is the right way to interpret gods teachings and what is a negative or self serving interpretation of Gods teachings.
I am no teacher or preacher and like to think I have a personal relationship with God one crafted through my existence from before the day I was born and hopefully to be continued after the day I die too.
To me god is love.
You can write a book and put it within a library of books all explaining what in fact god is and what that means and some people might still never understand a simple truth such as that and what it means to live a life that loves God.
As God is everywhere and knows everything, your deepest darkest thoughts and deeds, then you can’t just justify and hide the bad things you do to God or bullshit God. You can swindle, lie and cheat your way though this life in front of and behind the men and women you know or have power over or have power over you. But you won’t be able to cheat, swindle and have your lies be believed by God.
I think and hope that even though my brother took his own life that he still has a good relationship with God and I very much look forward to discussing this with my brother when I pass on to the other side myself.
There are many ways he could have survived the night that he died and it was not for lack of trying to save his live by some of the people that love him very much who tried to stop him from taking his life.
My brother also has or had a Native American spirit guide that he lived with and communicated and guided him through his life and I like to think he had a kinship with Native Americans. I have a photo of us as children playing Indians & Indians (no cowboys in our crew)
In life he was always the spirit warrior and I was more or a spiritual philosopher or truth seaker of the word of god. God bless you brother.
A grim milestone in the history of Russia as a ‘special military operation’ or invasion by any over name unfolds live on the TV. Watching the UN security council live on TV which crazily Russia happens to be the ‘chair’ of the council at present allowing people to speak condemning it. Chairing a meeting about its own aggression and war mongering seems most bizarre.
It seems more likely now that Putin will invade a sovereign nation or is as I type is invading a sovereign nation live. The 23 February in Russia was Defender of the Fatherland Day, it should instead be known as the blooding of thy neighbour day.
Inflicting regime change on Ukraine a sovereign and democratically elected state, government and people is basically a way of Putin sticking up two fingers to the rest of the free world, while again blooding his hands with the blood of his neighbours.
I am not a Christian but am a god fearing man and Christianity and Christ teachs us all a great deal at times of peace as well as things to reflect at a time when you know that one man (Putin) has ordered the deaths and is off to war with others.
As Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border and worries of the invasion grow, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to peddle a familiar Russian line about the conflict: that Ukraine belongs to Russia and that the two are “one people — a single whole.”
All men are created equal [but some are more equal than others]
Not only that but his peddling his hate for the west from his regurgitating of his view of the history of the world he also now extends his views into the perception that he is the enemy of the west and he is the righteous good guy in the unfolding history of the world. Democracy smocracy who cares if you have freedom of thought for your people, freedom to vote by your people, freedom of speech about people, when in the past you used to be the bad guys right you gave birth to slavery, Hitler and colonialism.
Russia on the other hand has in the past starved and murdered its own people under the leadership of past Tsars and Communist leaders in the name of power and progress. No one is innocent under the magnifying glass of a historian, whilst at the same time no one should be tard with the same brush and we should certainly not aspire to repeat the mistakes of the past. If Putin has no intentions of rights wrongs of the past it’s all about power it has only ever been about power and will always be about power.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. -John Dalberg.
In reality, Ukraine has long been distinct from Russia, and Putin’s current mythologizing of the Russia-Ukraine relationship fits a pattern of falsehoods designed to reconstitute imperial glory, and more importantly, to shield Putin from the threat of democracy in former Soviet republics — and possibly in Russia itself.
Putin is not the only old fossil on the block as he has huge reserves of natural gas to play with and presently supplies 40% of the European market. The more he has a hissy fit and continues to turn the screw on anyone he deems fit to then the greater the power to inflict pain on others he can flex.
Ukraine, for its part, is distinct from Russia in many ways and has been influenced by a number of different cultures, including by Central European countries in the west, and present-day Greece and Turkey in the south. Over the centuries Ukraine was also conquered by a number of different groups, including the Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Austrians, and Swedes, as well as, eventually, the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great.
You would not see Britain reinterpreting its own history to reinvade Ireland simply because some people in Northern Ireland see themselves as British and end up starting World War 3 off the back of it. Well that is exactly the position Putin is putting the world in due to his beliefs and propaganda around the Ukraine.
Having survived my teenage years of drug experimentation in the 90’s with an eye on the cool hippies of the 60’s I am very grateful to be alive today, without too many side effects emanating from my past. With that in mind now sleep is probably the main mind altering substance I seek to use these days.
An ode to Sleep
When my head is weary and my eyes tired too,
There is gentleness in the dark,
I can close my eyes and can no longer see a view.
Though I do not seek to live in darkness all my life,
I do enjoy the rest bite for a while,
I can find peace when I fall asleep at night.
Recharge my batteries for another day.
Without such darkness I might not appreciate what I see tomorrow,
The Lunar New Year celebration is intended to usher in a year of luck and prosperity. It’s time to close the chapter on the old one and welcome the year of the tiger.
It appears I find it easier to celebrate my websites birthday easier than I do my own. Congratualtions to me to writing in this space for another year, well done me! I don’t worry about my own birthday coming around so much, but I used to feel wow another year has been achieved well done, where as at the moment on new years day or my birthday it feels more like what the hell has just happened in the last 12 months, I hope that everyone that I care about is still ok. Whereas celebrating the maintenance and management of a blog is an achievement in itself.
As a dyslexic that struggles to write a word let alone find time to have the energy to write a word down I am pleased about what I do here. I have never been short of imagination or thoughts, or at least I don’t think have. People often describe people like me as someone that thinks to deeply or over thinks things. But I like to see myself more as having an ability to say and do the simple things that I sometimes think we should all do like speak or write the truth to power and friends.
You can always sugar coat a perception or opinion that is not one that a person sees or wants to see or might find hard to look at. At many times in many ways I think others view my perception on life as a little delusional perception of reality and at times they would probably be right but when you look at problems or ideas from different angel’s or view points you are nearly always bound to see something that the eyes of other either could not see or closed their eyes to.
After all it would be boring if we all did and said the same thing from the same view point. Our opinions and views are shapped and born along the paths we walk alone as well as influenced from the views of those we know.
Friends relationships seem to be shifting on rocket fuel at the moment, in such a fast motion it’s as if there is a huge hurry for those that can enter them and such hope and joy for them when things are going right and a huge disappointment for those that can’t or for when things go wrong.
I am very lazy and shy when it comes to relationships. I am very happy in my own skin and don’t want to jeopardise my somewhat fragile state of contentment, happiness and positive control over my own life. When it comes to make ups, break ups, heart missed a beat moments and heartbroken temper tantrums I have been there got the t-shirt.
There are still many strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that are out there in life. My job is tough at the moment but I accept that and make the most of it. It’s a place in time doing something that I want to do and would not know where else I could be and can’t really imagine myself doing anything different right now. But I still keep my eyes open to possibilities that come up.
Well that’s my kind of attitude to life in general at the moment. Duck and dive, roll with the punches and keep my eyes open for the next trick shot.
Imagine if a a photo can steel your soul what can a video camera do to it?
The Cherokee used to fear that taking a photo meant they would lose their soul in the picture( Ever wonder why so many indigenous people have the same beliefs?)
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