BE CAREFUL WHO YOU CALL POOR!

One of the most touching testimonials about the impacts of the Harmony Education came from a retired primary school teacher Mgoma Faustine, from Bunda near Lake Victoria who told me:  

"After joining Tuko Sawa Society of Harmony Practitioners in 2020, I began to see value in what I was doing in my life and it gave me confidence to continue appreciating what I had. More importantly, I was emboldened to address negative comments I was receiving on my social media posts, where people were literally laughing at my postings as they interpreted them as primitive, calling me an ignorant poor peasant. The more I practiced what I learned from the the harmony education the more my ecological awareness increased, so too was my pride about the life I had created for my family. We grow enough organic grains and vegetable on my farm and my family was healthy. These days when I look at my goats and chicken I actually feel wealthy!"

Mgoma Faustine's cover photo on on Facebook shows him walking home with firewood balanced on his head.

During the many discussions we had, I (Regina) discovered that as a Teacher, (Mwalimu) Mgoma put greater value on the meaning that he gave and received from his work instead of simply the size of his salary received as a teacher. The harmony education empowered him to discover even more wisdom and later on he decided to convert one of his outside sheds into a classroom to offer free tuition lessons to children who had failed their primary school education. "I want to give them hope, self-esteem and to infect them with the love of Nature," he told me.

Mgoma Faustine (right) receiving plant seeds from another member of the society Philip Mateja (left). 

The visual world of Socia Media is infected with the materialistic virus that blinds many from seeing a whole person, instead they see only the displayed physical attributes. It is true that a photograph accurately captures reality but it most certainly does not capture the truth about who or what that person is as a human.

Glamourising material possessions as metrics of success or wellbeing is not helpful. Sadly we are stuck with a fragmented worldview that is harmful to the wellbeing of many who lead a self-actualised life, full of contentment, gratitude and positivity.

My stance on poverty is explored in another post: PERCEPTION, SPIRITUAL LITERACY AND THE "THIRD SOMETHING. (20/4/2024)

Finally, I would like to share excerpts from remarks by Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas on March 18th 1968. 

"Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. 

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. 

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

HUMANITY COULD DO WITH A HIGHER DOSE OF HUMILITY

In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan comments on what he sees as the greater significance of the photograph, writing:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. 

 

 This image showing our Planet as a pale blue speck, barely visible against the infinite darkness, was captured by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from 6 billion kilometres away.

Look again that dot! That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. 

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet.

Visiting the Moon? "Earthrise" is a photograph of Earth and part of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968

Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. 

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”