‘Tis [always] the season…

Reading the world’s newspapers on any given day is enough to make us throw up our hands and say, “There’s nothing I can do. What can one person do?” I know you say this lovely readers because several of you have expressed that hopelessness on this site. I have an answer for you she said smiling. This is my pet project discovered some ten years ago – Project Heifer International. It is an organization that practices that old tale about teaching a hungry man to fish rather than giving him bread for the day.

Heifer International is a worldwide organization that has had an enormous positive influence on the planet toward ending world hunger. Look around you, how obscene is it that in the world of 2007 there is a problem of world hunger? It is absurd and we need all to feel a bit ashamed. This organization works on a marvelous principle of spread the wealth, or what they call pass on the gift. You give a rabbit, a goat, or a cow to a family. When that animal produces (the organization makes sure it has a little romantic friend nearby) offspring, the family is obligated to give one of the animals away. Now think about that, how that can spread through a village. Go to the site and read. They tell their own tale much better than I can.

For years it has been my own routine to “sacrifice a goat” whenever something good happens. True the phrase has shocked more than a few people in the more urbane parts of the world… What I mean is that whenever the Universe gives me a gift, I go to the Heifer International website and buy a goat for a family. It is only $120/58 pounds for one goat, and amazingly the price hasn’t changed over the past ten years. There are more expensive animals and less expensive. It is the price of a day at the salon, or a new shirt, or a pair of gloves – and how many of those do we need? For that small price you get to feel smug, joyful, and generous. It DOES work to change the world. There is an old Korean proverb: To build a mountain, you start with a grain of sand.

I believe that every time we commit a good act it affects the Universe, just as every time we commit a bad act it affects the Universe. Now do the math, if we have more good acts….

Think it over and then go sacrifice a goat eh?

Ciao.