Royal Song of the Day: Saturday 7/30/11

Follow Me by John Denver is the Royal Song of the Day.  This is another one of the Duke & Duchess’ wedding songs.  It was performed at our wedding by some other musician friends of ours.  The Duke and Duchess of Peace chose this song while on a road trip.  There was a John Denver cassette (remember those?) playing on the car radio. They looked at each other, and knew they wanted the song to be part of their wedding ceremony.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6GAa8_5nRA]

Make it part of you to be a part of me
Follow me up and down all the way
Take my hand and I will follow you

Continue reading Royal Song of the Day: Saturday 7/30/11

Got royal wedding fever?: Alternative eye candy…

The Duke and Duchess of Peace have devoted their lives to working for nonviolence and a world without war. They believe that the nature of other royal systems is ultimately to glamorize the military and/or to distract people from politics and real life with visions of celebrity.

So, Duke Augustus and Duchess Susanna would ask people to turn their attention away from the wedding of Zara Phillip’s (Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter) and Mike Tindall, and turn their attention towards their own families, their own cultural excitement, and/or political problems in their own communities. Continue reading Got royal wedding fever?: Alternative eye candy…

Take out your own wedding photos…

Favor Cake for wedding, with 40 carton boxes a...
Image via Wikipedia

Susanna, Duchess of Peace writes:

Watching the Royal Family, and the extended royal family, in the media is a kind of celebrity worship, that captures our attention from more important issues, such as what is happening to our own family, or our own community.

So, unless you happen to be a blood relative of the Mountbatten-Windsor clan (or family to groom and rugby player Mike Tindall), I hope you will not give too much attention to the latest royal wedding happening in Scotland on July 30th. Continue reading Take out your own wedding photos…

Royal Song of the Day: Friday 7/29/2011

Raining and (lightly) pouring on Long Island, New York. So, The Duke and The Duchess of Peace sang a favorite nursery rhyme, “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring…” It’s the Royal Song of the Day for 7/29/2011. Rainy days are great days to sing old songs, write new songs, or get creative while cozy inside. The Duke and Duchess of Peace fill all their days — rain or shine — with peaceful, nonviolent, work and entertainment. What song do you sing?

To peruse some new and used books of nursery rhymes, on sale at Powell’s Books, please follow our search and shop link: here.

For more ideas about what to do for fun in bad weather, see this rainy day post at onthewilderside: here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN0cPFlOIdc]

More about this Royal Song of the Day… Continue reading Royal Song of the Day: Friday 7/29/2011

Am Intl: Top 10 Summer 2011 Books

This is an excerpt from Top 10 Summer Book List for Human Rights Advocates | Human Rights Now – Amnesty International USA Blog.

Here at Amnesty, our staffers have put together a list of books on our summer reading list for human rights. We invite you to read with us as we look to books, non-fiction and fiction alike, on issues in today’s world. Here are our top 10 summer must-reads!

 

1.) Anil’s Ghost by: Michael Ondaatje
Summary: With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.*

 

2.) Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World by: Samantha Power

The rest  of the AI post can be read at Top 10 Summer Book List for Human Rights Advocates | Human Rights Now – Amnesty International USA Blog.

Royal Song of the Day: Thursday 7/28/11

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIsO1O8bOPQ]

Duchess Susanna writes: With a lot of bad, sad news in the headlines, I wanted to find a hopeful song. The video above shows the Eugene Peace Choir, from Oregon, performing “Peace Is” by Fred Small.

If you want to sing the song, yourself, you can find the lyrics in Rise Up Singing, on page 163. A sample of the lyrics: Continue reading Royal Song of the Day: Thursday 7/28/11

Long Island New York: Street Scene from July 2011

Susanna, Duchess of Peace writes: Today, I went out to run errands, and took my camera with me. I was hoping to see some sign of the times — like when I was on our Royal Peace Tour and saw a peace bumper sticker. One scene I observed was this woman, on a busy street near the shopping malls in Nassau County. She was dressed in a long, denim skirt. She was walking up and down the median, holding up a cardboard sign to the cars waiting for the red light. The sign asked for money for her and the children she had to support.

This image seems like a sign of the times for me, considering the high unemployment rate and the state of the economy. To get to peace, we have to build an economy where everyone who wants to work can work in a job with dignity.