text: There’s no denying that every time we face economic scenarios where many countries are disadvantages in the management of their wealth, productivity, income and which expresses a substantial divorce among the richest to the poorest. Precisely, as it says communication, Oxfam International has launched the book of poverty to power, by Duncan Green, a look at what has been learned in the last 10 years and a reflection on the future of development. In it is clear that the income of the 500 richest people in the planet are higher than the income of the 416 million poorest people. Another blunt fact is that 1 billion people remain every day with 4% of global wealth. Points out, that there are resources for all, but terribly badly distributed. Inequality determines that a boy or girl reaches the fifth birthday of life depending upon the environment in which is born. The global economy produces every year about 9,550 million dollars in goods and services per. Capita, 25 times more than the $365 per year that define extreme poverty in which 1,000 million people live.
  Or what is the same, 1 billion human beings subsist on a daily basis with 4% of global wealth. One of every six people in the world leads a life marked by poverty, hunger, diseases and concerns for what the future holds. The income of the 500 richest people in the world are greater than the income of the 416 million poorest people.In his book Duncan Green highlights, the incessant increase in the prices of food and fuel is marking a new era of scarcity, unless you act quickly, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will grow unchecked, exacerbating existing inequalities and condemning millions of people to poverty. Emphasis is made on paper, on the belief that the development of the poorest countries depends solely on the behavior of the richest countries, and seeks to prove that the development only occurs from the bottom upwards, i.e.
  “…I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” ~II Corinthians 6:11-13, MSG
  [Often, walking through the fields] I would see a man walking his four Kerry Blue Terriers. These were amazing dogs. Bounding energy, elastic grace, and electric speed, they coursed and leapt through open fields. It was invigorating just to watch them. Three of the four dogs did this; the fourth stayed behind and off to the side of its owner, and ran in tight circles. I could never understand why it did this; it had all the room in the world to leap and bound. One day I was bold enough to ask the owner.
  “Why does your dog do that? Why does it run in circles instead of running with the others?” He explained that before he had the dog, it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles. For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles. So instead of bounding through open fields that surrounded it, it ran in circles."
  This is a powerful metaphor of the human condition. For indeed we are free …. but the memory of the cage remains. And so we run in tight, little circles even while immersed in open fields of grace and freedom’. - Martin Laird in Into the Silent Land
  Leaving my son's room late one night - too late as always - I mentioned the Thanksgiving chain we had yet to start and my son said he didn't want to do one this year. When I asked him why, he told me he just wasn't very thankful and I replied, "Well, that's why we need to do it."
  This is my boy who always wants More and who, every time he gets One Thing, notices the lack of Another. But he's also the one who time and time again names that which I would rather keep hidden, whose voice so often puts into words the things we all feel, but dare not name.
  I'm the one who cuts long, thin strips of golden copier paper, who hunts down the stapler and markers, who remembers the way November sneaks up so quickly after the Mardi Gras madness of Halloween.
  Leaving my son's room that night I knew that if we weren't giving thanks, it's because I wasn't feeling very thankful either.
  There's a discipline to gratitude, a discipline to opening this doorway to grace, to leaving behind the tight, familiar circles of our own making. Gratitude often doesn't come easy, isn't natural, especially in this life where we so often want and need More.
  And in the practicing our lives are changed, stretched, opened wide. The memory of the cage fades as we're remade into something new, as we too learn the art and beauty of running, leaping, bounding through wide, open fields.
  The next night, downstairs in the dim bare-bulb light of our dining room, I rolled out a long stretch of transparent contact paper. Taping it to the table to combat the curl, I told the kids to leave me alone, I was working on something, a surprise and they needed to wait.
  Of course, this is exactly the kind of statement that sparks children's curiosity and they swarmed as I cut and taped strange shapes all across the table top. Drawing with a brown permanent marker I made the outline of a sturdy winter tree, branches bare, reaching.
  Piece by piece we lifted and carried that tree. Peeling the backing, we stuck it from the ground up, right onto the bare, white living room wall.
  "What's it for? What are you making? What are we going to DO with it?" they cried, circling me, leaping and bounding like puppies eager for a treat.
  "We're going to write the things we're thankful for on leaves and put them on the tree," I explained at last, cutting a few quick leaves from smaller pieces of contact paper.
  If there's one thing my son loves, it's permanent markers. They're the Holy Grail of craft supplies at our house. Standing on end in an old yogurt container on the kitchen counter, they're off-limits, used only by permission. Second only to permanent markers on the craft supply hierarchy of a five year old boy, is contact paper. To be allowed to use both at the same time, to make and stick as many leaves as he wanted, was surely something to be thankful for.
  Slowly, over the days and weeks, we're watching that tree grow full and green with gratitude, while the trees outside drop wave after wave of leaves.
  We're growing new leaves in fall which, I guess is a little bit what gratitude is like, especially when it doesn't come easy. The green buds and leaves of spring are no miracle, but these leaves, chosen in the face of winter, these leaves, surely, will give us shade in the days and weeks ahead.
  We're practicing gratitude together. Practicing opening these doorways to grace, practicing running and leaping, laughing and loving, in these open fields of grace.
  In the weeks before closing on the sale of our house we packed truck-loads full of everything deemed unnecessary and hauled them off to the basements of two close friends. We didn’t know where we would be living or for how long, so the climbing wall went and the wood working tools, along with bin after bin of off-sized boys’ clothing.
  Maybe it was optimism that led me to send along a bag stuffed to overflowing with every hat, mitten and scarf we own. Maybe it was denial. I was sure we’d be settled and our possessions re-gathered before snow started to fly.
  But this week, the temperatures turned. Flurries floated by, hurried bits of white, rushed along by the wind, eliciting gasps of excitment from children far and wide.
  The long-waning fall let go its dwindling grip on the world and I waited with growing dread for the morning my son would ask for gloves before heading out the door to school.
  I drove through the early darkness one evening, heading out of town to my friend’s house. Rooting through their basement I dug out the sought-after bag along with a pair of shoes, a binder and a sermon I’d been hunting.
  Yes, we’ll need to vacate a corner for a Christmas tree, here in this place where we never planned to be.
  Reading a children’s bible with my son one morning, a short sentence giving instructions to Abraham and Sarah shimmered before me the way a poem does, giving words to felt experience,
  I’m not blind to the hubris of comparing ourselves to Abraham and Sarah, but isn’t this in a sense, what scripture asks us to do; to enter into our own adventure, our own “wild dancing” with our untamed God, taking solace and courage in these ancients who are at once both our guides and companions?
  Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s chapter on the Practice of Getting Lost in An Altar in the World, her words stand as a strange and much needed affirmation, an invitation to embrace, yet again, the gifts of being lost and in-between,
  I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead . . . God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost. Take Abraham and Sarah, for instance, the first parents of the Hebrew people. The bible gives no reason for God’s choice of Abraham and Sarah except their willingness to get lost. By saying yes – by consenting to get lost – they selected a family gene that would become dominant in years to come.
  “At two, they’ve grown to half of their full height,” they doctor tells us as our twin boys wriggle and squiggle through their annual appointment. “It took them two years to grow this much and it will take them the next sixteen years to finish growing.”
  In two years they grew like flowers blossoming in a high-speed video, unfurling, stretching out and up toward the light.
  Lying in their cribs at night, they're wrecked, passed out cold in the strangest positions, half-covered, while stuffed animals and binkies flung into the darkness lay scattered across the floor. They sleep twelve hours a night and science tells us that their growth is fueled in part by this surrender to the long, dark night.
  The natural world is slipping into darkness now , the last leaves are shaken from the trees with a stretch and a quavering yawn as life continues, quieted, in the deep, dark, subterranean layers of the earth. Earlier and earlier every evening now, I walk the perimeter of our house switching on the lamps that push back the night. Strategically placed in every corner, they stand tall and thin like toothpicks propping our eyelids open. Outside the darkness grows, but the bright yellow eyes of our windows glow because we believe there is more to be done; we cannot rest, cannot embrace, willingly, the dark, still silence.
  Maybe we believe, as Parker Palmer suggests, that, “if we are not making noise,. . . nothing good is happening and something must be dying” (89). We have lost the sense of the value of darkness, lost an awareness that there may be good and important things going on in it of which we are unaware.
  The butterfly in its cocoon, the cicada asleep in the belly of the world, the child in the womb, all of these and more rely on darkness; in waiting and surrender they're changed into what they will be. Isn't it possible then that we too might grow in such a night?
  Perhaps we too are only half of what we have yet to become and so let us go, peacefully to our rest, while the great God who spun the night across the wide expanse of the sky, like silk, and who whirled the stars out wide in their orbits, works quietly within us to bring all things into completion.
  This week marks 3 years since I found out that I relapsed, and was rediagnosed with mutated Grey Zone Lymphoma. Grey Zone Lymphoma is a rare mutated combination of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and diffused large B-cell lymphoma (the most common type of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma) resulting in it being unclassifiable because it doesn't fall into either cancer category.
  I remember being at work and getting a phone call from the hospital, telling me I had a scheduled lung biopsy. I was so confused, I even told the nurse that I think she had the wrong number. Fast forward a few days, and I was sitting in my Radiology Oncologists office, being told I had new tumors, in new places.
  During our conversation in the tiny hospital room, my oncologist mentioned that perhaps I was misdiagnosed from the start, therefore, resulting in the relapse as I would have had the wrong chemotherapy cocktail. Part of me was upset that there was the possibility that I'd had a year of inaccurate treatment. I wondered why the doctors didn't take more biopsies of my tumors, why they didn't double and triple check. The other part of me, the part that scared me, was that I almost wasn't even surprised. Yes I was upset, pissed off, and confused but this seemed to be my new normal, so I guess I almost expected the other shoe to drop.
  How could I go through a year of hell, a year of poison being pumped into me and my body radiated, to then be told that it didn't work? I was numb, a little shocked, and I think I even laughed at one point because of how ridiculous it sounded. But there it was, the scans right in front of me: my cancer was back.
  Fast forward to now, a place I never thought I'd be. A place where I still struggle with strength, health, anxiety, and depression but more a place of warmth from all experiences I've had, the beautiful people I've met, and the places I've been. Cancer destroyed my life, but after the dust settled I was able to pick myself up and put away the past, allowing myself to explore and re-discover my life in the present.
  Cancer doesn't define me. I am here and I am creating the life I want for myself, and it is beautiful.
  A 20-something photographer, cancer survivor and lover of the mysterious. Follow along as I travel, eat, and live my way through this infernal life!
  Our approach to wedding videos is all about simplicity – we focus on the spirit and energy of the wedding day to deliver a 3-5 minute quick and fun Highlight Reel to you. We create a soundtrack using bits of audio from throughout the wedding day mixed into an original soundtrack. If you want more comprehensive coverage, you have the option of adding our Vow + Speech reel in addition to the Highlight Reel, which focuses more on the spoken memories at your wedding (such as your ceremony vows and all the speeches during the reception).
  Today I’m introducing a new look for Three Moons Media, and a new blog to go with it. I’ve completely revamped the site, and I hope you like it. What I set out to do was update a lot of info, improve the navigation, and present the published books better. The project sort of grew, into a whole new design, and into me finally committing to start the blog I’ve been thinking about for years.
  Three Moons Media has been around since 2002, and this is my third site design. The first one started with my logo, which was originally my personal icon for LiveJournal. I took the colors in it and ran with them. Looking back at that design now, I’d say I ran wild with them. It seemed organized and clean, but nicely colorful when I designed it. After a couple of years, though, I kept falling in love with sites that were clean, spare, even minimalist. Which mine sure wasn’t. It was time for a change.
  I tackled the site update in the summer of 2005. It took me almost all summer, because I rebuilt my database and ordering system too. In the process, I had to finally grok CSS to get the pages to look the way I wanted. I had been using all table-based layouts for my pages, for those of you who know what that means. For everybody else, I was building pages with 1998 methods and I needed to drag myself into the twenty-first century.
  On top of that, I wanted to make changes to the ordering pages for my books. Because I need to get a lot of information from an author when they sign up to publish a book, I can’t just use a standard shopping cart package. So I dug in and learned enough PHP to get all the data into a MySQL database, take orders and payments, and so on. It took me all summer. And I was pretty happy with the result. That design lasted five years, rather than three.
  But in between, stuff happened. The print-on-demand company I worked with, Booksurge, had been bought by Amazon in April 2005. It was bumpy for a few months, but some things were much improved once things smoothed out. Royalty payments started arriving on schedule, consistently, which made both me and my authors happy. Newly published books got listed on Amazon within days, rather than weeks. Booksurge added color printing and hard-cover options.
  Amazon also had another subsidiary, CreateSpace, which publishes music and videos as well as books. Last fall, Amazon merged Booksurge into the CreateSpace brand. This transition was very smooth, and not much changed in the way things worked for me. But it did mean another round of updates to my site.
  Besides cleaning up all the outdated Booksurge references, I took a good look at the services I offered. CreateSpace doesn’t offer hardback books, so that went. I decided to eliminate some ”packages“ that no one ever ordered. And I reassessed pricing for what remains. More on all that another time.
  All in all, it led to a full overhaul. I converted to WordPress to get a lot of options without having to build them myself. Moving the whole site over forced me to go over every word of every page. I cleaned up, consolidated, and eliminated a lot of cruft on one hand, and on the other hand added a blog and a whole new section to better show off the books.
  In the old design, the three or four newest books were highlighted in the sidebar of the front page, which linked to the ”Bookstore“ page. I’ve felt for a long time that page didn’t do justice to the full booklist. There are over 30 Three Moons books now, and with them all on one page, to see them you had to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll…I wonder how many people ever got all the way to the bottom.
  Now, books are divided in genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young readers—so you can see a few at a time, and get more info on the ones that catch your eye. Plus, there’s now that spiffy slider on the front page to show off all of them. [12/11/2010: The slider has been replaced by a gallery; it loads way faster. —Marilyn] I think there’s now a better balance between services to help an author get published and showcasing the books already released. After all, the whole point of publishing a book is to sell copies, to get it read. I hope this will help my authors do that.
  A year or two ago, I read a whole lot of blogs about blogging. Every business needs a blog, they say, and a blog needs its own name. I’m not starting this blog just because I’m supposed to. It’s mostly that I have a bunch of stuff I want to write about and this will be a good place to get myself to do it, finally. And the blog is not getting its own name and domain. But I did think quite a bit about what to name it. I came up with “Words, Books and Everything in Between.” The idea was that under that umbrella I could talk about language, grammar, writing, editing, book design and production, books I read, the business of self-publishing…Well, that’s still what I plan to talk about. It won’t be my title, but it will define my focus.
  For years I’ve joked about writing ”Mama Marilyn’s Picky Editor Pages.” I’m making that the name of a weekly feature here. I have a whole collection of text files full of grammar gaffes, mangled syntax, crazy spelling, misused words, and more things that make an English major cringe that I’ve been itching to write about. I think a blog of nothing but grammar rants would get a bit old (for you and me), so giving myself a weekly quota of just one will be a Good Thing.
  I’ll probably also talk about whatever project I’m working on, and I plan to feature one of the Three Moons Media books each week. That ought to keep me going until about November. A couple of my authors have new books in the works, so I expect there will be more by the time I cover the ones already published. One way or another, there should be plenty to write about. I hope you’ll be back to read more.
  And I hope you had a nice cup of coffee while you were reading today. I do tend to get longwinded. Hmm, maybe I should put a coffee cup icon on my long posts…
  The new design looks great and is easy to follow. It will be interesting to see what discussions will arise here on the blog. Having an English major as a wife, I continually get red marks on my writings.
  Not a single red mark on this one, sweetheart. 🙂 Thank you, and I’m looking forward to the discussions too.
  I'll be sharing all kinds of cool shit with you guys. Like thrift hauls, beauty favorites, podcast recommendations and more.
  The TMP708 is a fully-integrated, resistor- programmable temperature switch with a temperature threshold that is set by just one external resistor within the entire operating range. The TMP708 provides an open-drain, active-low output and has a 2.7-V to 5.5-V supply voltage range.
  The temperature threshold accuracy is typically ±0.5°C with a maximum of ±3 °C (60°C to 100°C). The quiescent current consumption is typically 40 µA. Hysteresis is pin-selectable to 10°C or 30°C.