Welcome to this collaboration and exploration, and, at times, an investigation. The world tilted further on its axis when the coronavirus visited in its full garb in 2020. At least, that’s what we like to believe. The truth is that viruses have been on our planet since the times before bacterial life forms have. While you go through this website, I hope you’ll remember how you felt then, how you feel now and what is left in the life of Form 1. What questions do we have, what are we’re doing about them and what might be left in its wake… whatever that might mean. And now we’re trying to come to grips with the utter sadness and horror of war.

This website offers here assistance for your soul.  As much a I would like to erase this war and even Canada’s approach to it, I can’t.  But I can change how I feed my soul.  And together we can save lives.  Welcome to the door we didn’t know was there, the door to the world of Silence.

From The Canadian Encyclopaedia:  By 1914 a series of informal Ukrainian “blocs” of varying size crossed the three prairie provinces in a belt from southeastern Manitoba to just outside the Alberta capital. Within this area the immigrants recreated old-world kin and village networks, and maintained their traditional way of life, although the homesteading system precluded the replication of village structures themselves.

Ukrainians: Homesteading in the Parkland

The Zahara family, Ukrainian settlers of Rycroft, Alberta

Courtesy Glenbow Archives/NA-3237-3

“The mosquitoes,” grumbled a suffering homesteader, “suck more Ukrainian blood than the landlords ever did in the old country.” The speaker, one of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants who immigrated to the prairies before the First World War, was not alone in this indictment of the new land. Merciless in the summer months, the stinging pests tortured settlers already coping with loneliness, unpredictable weather, and the challenge of clearing and breaking the land. Whether Canadian mosquitoes were actually worse than conditions in Europe that Ukrainians sought to escape, however, is debatable.

In the late 19^th century Ukrainians lacked their own state. Instead, tsarist Russia ruled in the east, Austria-Hungary in the small western corner, where the provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna provided the bulk of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. Frustrated in their ambitions and expectations in the aftermath of the abolition of serfdom in 1848, the immigrants left behind crippling debt, shrinking land holdings, and even the loss of their small plots that forced entire families to labour once again on the landlord’s estate. The average peasant farm was 2.5 hectares, making Canada’s promise of a quarter section of “free land” seem like paradise. Years later, one Ukrainian pioneer woman would remember her excitement as a young girl to learn she was coming to a country so rich that she imagined its borders to be braided with kovbasa, or garlic sausage, a rare treat at her parents’ table.

please read on in Wiki

See also Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village.

https://donate.humanitariancoalition.ca/ui/EM221TPEN/p/soulblog

the POWER of SILENCE

from: https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/excerpts/view/17193

probably the best book ever on Silence; Robert Sardello on clearing space for silence and allowing grace.

When we have cleared a space for the presence of Silence to enter into whatever we are doing, we feel the presence of grace in our lives. When we have gotten to the point of feeling the desire of Silence and can call to heart that feeling when we are about to begin our day and our work, we feel graced. Grace is a second alteration of the soul that comes through the work of clearing. Grace is the permeation of our soul with divine love. It is a very palpable bodily feeling. It feels as if we are accompanied by a radiance, and in the midst of such radiance we radiate a glow. Sometimes others can even see or intuit the presence of this glow.

“The presence of the grace of Silence is diffuse, soft, and yet brilliant. When we are graced, it is impossible to hold onto its presence for ourselves, for the nature of being graced is to grace others. The power of grace unblocks whatever is blocked. For example, we find ourselves able to speak things we have not been able to speak before. It is not that we didn’t know these things or that we were hiding them, but without the presence of grace we have an essential inability to say what we feel or think or imagine that is of a spiritual nature. We tend to hold back, not letting that dimension of our inner experience into the world. We do not find words adequate to spiritual experience. With the presence of grace we do not become preachy, nor do we interpret what we do in terms of any kind of religious doctrine; rather, the hidden fullness of who we are and what we are doing becomes available. We now feel that we are overshadowed by the spirit-beings of love. This experience releases us from the kind of incessant self-examination we usually get caught up in.

“Grace does not free us from our weaknesses and our suffering, but it does free us from the feeling that these difficulties make life complex. Grace brings a newfound sense of simplicity. Everything that seems complex and incomprehensible is taken over by grace and what seems complicated is solved. Through the presence of grace we know what is wanted of us and we are able to respond. Problems decrease in importance. They are still around, but they do not present themselves as limitations or obstacles. The kind of hesitation we are accustomed to feeling, as in ‘I could do this, if it weren’t for that’ simply does not seem to be present. Our problems take their place within a larger context, where they are held in balance with their inherent possibilities and a deep centering sense of the spiritual nature of our actions.

“We cannot control grace or make it happen, but it is very obvious to us when it is present. It is bestowed, but it requires the receptivity that we develop through our connection with Silence. Grace divests us from what seems to be ours, so the presence of grace is often accompanied by our sense of being less in control and of possessing nothing. As we continue to clear away what we feel are our private possessions, grace increases. Keeping our connection with Silence becomes crucial, then, because we can easily feel that we are losing our identity as we undergo a transformation of who we know ourselves to be. We begin to find, though, that we are carrying far more than what has been allotted to us to carry and that we have identified with that extra baggage. In large measure, we are fated to suffer the limitations of our bodily being, our circumstances, and our history, but this naturally given fate is accompanied by grace, the capacity to shape creatively and utilize our conditions to make something new. When, however, we take in and live according to what the prepackaged world gives, we lose our sense of being graced. We are then carrying things that do not belong to us, even though we have become convinced that we do.