In dedication to the profound loss our global neighbors of Chile suffered on February 27th. Please take a moment to pray for them today.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

- Aristotle

Did you ever feel stranded, left out at sea, with little to no hope in the word? We’ve all had our moments. But sometimes, an outside force comes in and saves the day:

THE luckiest dog alive has been rescued from an iceberg floating 32km from land in the Baltic Sea.

Sailors plucked the animal to safety after it got trapped on ice on Poland’s Vistula river and drifted for more than 122km, the Daily Mail reports.

Rescuer Adam Buczynski said: “He didn’t even squeal. There was just fear in his big eyes.”

It’s thought Baltic’s problems began when he got trapped on ice on the Vistula River near Torun on Friday.

A day later he was spotted in Grudziadz, 64km upstream, where fireman tried to reach the German shepherd-type mongrel.

But thick ice made it too risky to launch a rescue craft despite Baltic floating just a few yards from the river bank.

Another bid to save the stranded mutt was made at Kwidzyn, 22 miles further on towards Poland’s coast.

After sightings dried up it was assumed the dog had perished.

But incredibly Baltic had traveled a further 35km to the river mouth before heading out to the ocean where finally his luck turned when scientists on a research boat spotted something odd moving amid the broken ice.

Natalia Drgas, of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, said: “One of the sailors thought they had seen another seal but then he noticed it had legs, ears and a tail.”

However the men onboard the Baltica soon found saving the stranded dog was by no means plain sailing.

First they tried to catch the dog in a net on a pole but when that failed they had to drop a pontoon with crewmen.

Seaman Adam Buczynski said: “We tried to sail as close as possible but as we approached the boat pushed the ice and the dog was sliding off.

“The dog didn’t even yelp but you could see the fear in his eyes.”

With darkness falling and time running out Baltic was finally hauled on board in sub zero temperatures late on Monday.

Captain Jan Jachim said if his ship had passed that way a few moments later the dog would never have been spotted amid the gloom.

He said: “We were just at the right place at the right time.”

And he added that few boats chart those waters at that time of year.

“Baltic was drifting with the current further and further out to the open sea. He would have gone further if we hadn’t seen him.”

But Captain Jachim may not have seen the last of the Baltic, the salty seadog. If no-one claims him, the lucky hound will be adopted as the ship’s mascot.

Source: Herald Sun (watch incredible video here)

Even amidst the rubble, the pain, the hopelessness, hope still exists in Haiti. And no better exemplified than this story in Gimundo:

More than two weeks after the earthquake in Haiti that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and homes, search-and-rescue operations had seized. Rescuers had given up hope for those trapped in the earthquake rubble, instead focusing their efforts on helping the quake’s survivors, many of whom were injured and had little access to food or water.

But yesterday, while walking past the rubble of a home in Port-au-Prince, someone heard a weak voice calling out beneath the gravel. French rescue teams were alerted, and immediately set to work lifting the debris to find the person who had cried for help.

Soon, they had dug a hole to uncover

Darlene Etienne, a 17-year-old student at the nearby St. Gerard University, whose home had collapsed on top of her during the quake. Though rescuers held little hope of survivors staying alive in rubble for more than a few days, Etienne had lasted over two weeks, and was still conscious when the authorities pulled her out of the wreckage.

Authorities believe that Etienne was able to survive for so long because she may have had access to water from the home’s bathroom, and had a small amount of soda with her. Nonetheless, she wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

“She was in very bad shape,” rescuer Claude Fuilla told ABC News. “We had to rehydrate her for 15 minutes.”

Etienne was quickly flown to a hospital, and thanks to the rescuers’ assistance, it looks like she will be able to recover from her long ordeal.

“Now, her condition is stabilized,” said Fuilla. “She ate. She is speaking … She is not very lucid, but she is OK.”

Today I decided to pick positive quotes about a particular subject: healing. We’re in need of global healing, especially after the Haitian disaster. And personally, many of us harbor painful feelings for years, leading to partial state of being and a lack of wholeness.

May these quotes start the healing:

A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I’m sure that’s true, but they aren’t willing to make healing a high priority. They aren’t willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it.
Lindsay Wagner

A lot of victims, for example, have become addicted to alcohol and drugs. It seems to me that the church’s healing ministry is going to be enhanced through this in much broader strokes. That’s good, it’s all positive.
Roger Mahony

America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.
Warren G. Harding

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.
Alan K. Simpson

Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.
Matthew Fox

But I’m going to focus on salvation as well as physical healing.
Benny Hinn

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.
Stanislav Grof

Even the people who come our way look upon us in amazement, that we run only for the healing of Mother Earth.
Dennis Banks

Evil is the shadow of angel. Just as there are angels of light, support, guidance, healing and defense, so we have experiences of shadow angels. And we have names for them: racism, sexism, homophobia are all demons - but they’re not out there.
Matthew Fox

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.
Reba McEntire

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Healing in a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.
Hippocrates

Healing is a moral thing to do.
Jay Inslee

Healing rain is a real touch from God. It could be physical healing or emotional or whatever.
Michael W. Smith

Healing yourself is connected with healing others.
Yoko Ono

“Healing,” Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”
W. H. Auden

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying… Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
Ivan Illich

Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations.
Lucy Stone

I actually think sadness and darkness can be very beautiful and healing.
Duncan Sheik

I love sharing my story. It’s endlessly healing.
Ben Vereen

Source: BrainyQuote.com

It’s tough to know where to direct your efforts when it comes to Haitian relief. Everyone is concerned with online scams or questionable. organizations.

I found this guide online that really simplifies and clarifies what you can do now. ALL organizations have excellent reputations:
Thanks, Mashable:

Haiti Earthquake Relief: 9 Ways to Help Now

You have a lot of options on the web; here’s our list of trusted organizations. All of them will accept credit card donations through online forms.

The American Jewish World Service has set up the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund to respond to the crisis by supporting a network of organizations it works with.

AmeriCares has pledged $5 million to Haitian quake relief, and is soliciting donations to a general emergency disaster relief fund to help it accomplish that.

CARE is sending relief workers into the city of Port-au-Prince and needs funds to support its efforts. Suggested donations range from $50 to $1,000, but you can name your own amount if you prefer.

Catholic Relief Services has an office in Haiti, and luckily it’s still standing even though one of its neighbors collapsed. The organization is accepting donations of any amount.

Direct Relief International has committed up to $1 million in aid through two on-the-ground partners, and is sending containers of medical material aid.

Oxfam has 200 people on the ground to deal with the crisis, and began its efforts by trying to get clean water to victims of the quake. One of its staffers recorded a podcast describing the situation. You can donate on the American or UK site, depending on where you’re located.

Yele Haiti is sponsored by prominent Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean. You can donate through its website or via text message as described in the next segment.

UPDATE: Google Support Disaster Relief is a website Google has updated to respond to the crisis. Google has promised $1 million in support, but the site is also an easy place to donate money to either UNICEF or CARE. It also provides hospital addresses and links to sources for news on the situation.

---

Donate With a Text Message

---

Musician Wyclef Jean has used Twitter to rally web users to contribute to his grassroots Yele Haiti earthquake fund. He’s urged his followers to text “Yele” to the number 501501. If you send the text, the organization will receive $5. The amount will be added to your next cell phone bill. Consider retweeting Wyclef’s updates and get some of your Twitter followers to donate, too.

There’s another texting option spreading through Twitter. You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 via the Red Cross. Thanks to ABC News for pointing these out.

It’s going to be the big word of 2010. Remember it, boys and girls. Because sustainability has never mattered more.

Here’s the definition. Read:

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of well-being, which in turn depends on the well-being of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.

Sustainability has become a wide-ranging term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth, from a local to a global scale and over various time periods. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. Invisible chemical cycles redistribute water, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon through the world’s living and non-living systems, and have sustained life for millions of years.

As the earth’s human population has increased, natural ecosystems have declined and changes in the balance of natural cycles has had a negative impact on both humans and other living systems.

Convicted forger A. Schiller was serving his time in Sing Sing prison in the late 1800s when guards found him dead in his cell.

On his body they found seven regular straight pins whose heads measured the typical 47/1000ths of an inch or 1.17 millimeters in diameter.

Under 500 magnification, it was found that the tiny etchings seen on the heads of the pins were the words to The Lord’s Prayer, which is 65 words and 254 letters long. Of the seven pins, six were silver and one was gold - the gold pin’s prayer was flawless and a true masterpiece.

Schiller had spent the last 25 years of his life creating the pins, using a tool too small to be seen by the naked eye. It is estimated that it took 1,863 separate carving strokes to make it. Schiller went blind because of his artwork.

Source: The Nevada Lights

This is an older positive news story but bears repeating:

The giant lobster caught 100 miles off the Massachusetts coast spent last month in the lobster tank at Angelica’s Restaurant in Bethlehem. He recently was returned to the water, just off the southern tip of West Island, five miles from New Bedford, Mass.

Fred Cunha, the restaurant owner, bought the 37-inch Monstro with his 15-inch-long claws from a New Bedford fishing boat in mid-October. Cunha estimates Monstro is 50 years old.

Fifteen-pound lobsters are rare anywhere, but especially in the North Country. Half the customers who weighed in on the subject wanted to eat Monstro; the other half felt sorry for him.

After persistent lobbying from diners and his 7-year-old daughter, Angelica, Cunha decided to raffle off Monstro, with the winner deciding whether to send him to the ocean or the cooking pot.

So Monstro lounged in the restaurant’s tank with Mr. Crabby, Angelica’s pet 2-pound lobster, feasting on minced crab and scallops. Cunha sold chances at $1 apiece until he reached Monstro’s retail price of $150.

“She was really worried,” Cunha said of his daughter. “She really wanted him to go free.”

Last Friday, Angelica drew the winning ticket. The winner, Claire Lupton of Whitefield, doesn’t eat lobster. She said a lobster that big and that old shouldn’t end up on a dinner plate.

The Monstro raffle was so successful that Cunha extended it to another lobster, a 9-pounder who’d joined Monstro in the tank a couple of weeks ago. That lobster was set free, too.

Source: MSNBC

Lobsters - born to be free, too!

From one of the finest writers on Open Salon, Emma Peel:

I want to pay a brief homage to today, the day set aside to honour the many millions of war dead. I didn’t venture out to attend a ceremony on this cold, wet morning. Instead, I held my own small memorial for all the soldiers and civilians who’ve died, and continue to die, in too many wars.

The scale of the slaughter in the First and Second World Wars is unimaginable to most of us. The First World War was particularly horrific; the “war to end all wars” in which a whole generation of men was lost. Imagine if nearly every man you knew was killed or terribly maimed in a four-year period. That was the reality of Europe in 1914-1918. And in some ways, the ones who died were luckier than those who survived. They didn’t have to re-live the nightmares of trench and mustard gas warfare, they weren’t shellshocked, and their mental and physical health wasn’t destroyed.

Tragic events often create great art, and many of my favourite poets and authors hail from that era. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque, Herman Hesse, John McCrae (In Flanders Fields), and Vera Brittain are but a few of them.

Vera Brittain

Brittain has impressed me since I was a girl, and the BBC-TV mini-series, Testament of Youth, based on her memoir, remains one of the best indictments of war that I have ever seen. Brittain, a war nurse, was the only one of her “set” growing up to survive the First World War; she lost her fiance, and was nearly killed herself. I still have trouble comprehending that kind of personal loss and devastation, and an even harder time knowing that it continues as I write this.

Wilfred Owen

A poem by Wilfred Owen, whose parents received word of his death at the same time as the first Armistice bells were ringing on Nov. 11, 1918, sums up my thoughts as only a great poet can.

My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. — Owen

Futility

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, – still warm, – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Some of us make the most of our time, no matter how limited. Such was the case of Elena Desserich, a little girl with a serious problem. When Elena was only five years old, she was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.

“They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live,” Elena’s father, Keith Desserich, told WLWT News.

Elena and her family made the most of that time. She spent the long days in the hospital working on her paintings, which were full of hearts, fairies, and smiling families. One of her artworks was displayed in a local gallery in Cincinnati, right next to a Picasso painting. As the tumor grew larger and she lost the use of her voice, she began to communicate with her family by writing notes.

Elena died in 2007, just nine months after her diagnosis, lying in bed beside her parents.

Even though they’d known Elena’s death was inevitable, her parents Keith and Brooke were devastated by the loss. But they soon discovered that she had left a gift behind for them.

Not long after her death, Elena’s parents were sorting through her things when they began to find notes that she had written to them. “They would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” said Keith.

All through her final days, Elena had been writing love notes to her family, and hiding them in secret places throughout the house.

“We started to collect them and they would all say ‘I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.’ We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them.”

While Brooke and Keith treasure all of the notes from Elena, each of them has left a single envelope unopened. “We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven’t read yet,” said Keith.

Elena’s parents Keith and Brooke recently published a book about Elena’s short but inspiring life, called Notes Left Behind. All proceeds from the sale of the book go towards The Cure Starts Now, the non-profit they founded to help find a cure for cancer.

Source: Gimundo