Things Have No Value, Only People Do

You sit here
for days saying,
This is strange business.

You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up
at the base of your spine.

You're some weird kind of gold
that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won't have to become coins.

From The Illuminated Rumi

Nicole and I took our wares - she took her wonderful cards and I took copies of my prayer book - to a winter fair hosted by a high school.

What struck me is how people did not meet our eyes, did not respond to a simple hello when they paused before our table, but like scared rabbits vacantly passed by, their eyes merely on the things before them.

Things are unimportant. There are billions of things. What makes life worth living is the smile, the kind word, the kind deed.

I think that commerce, that "free enterprise" and the rapacious ness of it, the constant advertising and beating consumers over the head with "buy, buy, buy" has created an expectation that everything is transaction, that everything is just dollars and cents. And people have an intolerance for the idea that they are just consumers, expected always to buy and have a terrible fear of the sales pitch since it virtually rules our lives.

Couple this with the fact that Wall-Mart has killed the craft trade in that, by paying Chinese laborers 49 cents an hour, there is no way an American or Canadian artisan or crafter can produce a pot or a card or a candle or a hand made purse cheap enough to compete with the prices in the discount stores.

Wal-Mart's owners, multi-billionaires - collectively the wealthiest family in the U.S. - and the share holders of Wal-Mart, most of whom are hugely wealthy, have stolen the lives and livelihoods of people who used to make a simple living producing crafts. This is on top of the exploitation of the Chinese.

Nicole's art is too beautiful, however, for her to give up.

There was a poor turnout and I realize these school fairs specialize in cheap junk. As Nicole says, if she could have sold her cards five for a dollar and I sold my book for 99 cents, we might have sold a couple.

There are markets for both her art work and my book, but that place was not one of them. Yet it was not my idea to go. My husband urged us to take a table. We tried it and that will be the last time.

Still, Nicole and I had a nice evening chatting. And it turns out she has been wanting a copy of my book. She offered to buy one, but I told her, "Nonsense. I'll give you one for Christmas."

The hostages are on my mind. The prayer for them is still up. I masterminded for their release.

Better to be a fool and have faith than turn my back and close my mind to the possibility of helping them through prayer.

The tea is cold, it's after one, I am so lucky not to be in chains, not to be used as a pawn for impossible demands, not to be in such a place of testing and fear and cold inhumanity of man to man.

God bless you, James Loney.
God bless you, Harmeet Singh Sooden.
God bless you, Tom Fox.
God bless you, Norman Kember.
God bless you, Susanne Osthoff .
God bless you, unknown man whom the press has reported just as "her driver."

May God come to you in your dreams.