Poem for Monday and Poulsbo Scandinavians

The Prayer of the Mothers
By Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed and Rabba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum
Translated by Amichai Lau-Lavie

God of Life:
You who heals the broken hearted, binding up our wounds.
Please hear this prayer of mothers.
You did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear or rage or hatred in your world. You created us so that we allow each other
to sustain Your Name in this world:
Your name is Life, your name is Peace.
For these I weep, my eye sheds water:
For our children crying in the night,
For parents holding infants, despair and darkness in their hearts.
For a gate that is closing – who will rise to open it before the day is gone?
With my tears and with my constant prayers, With the tears of all women deeply pained at these harsh times
I raise my hands to you in supplication: Please God have mercy on us.
Hear our voice that we not despair That we will witness life with each other, That we have mercy one for another, That we share sorrow one with the other, That we hope, together, one for another.
Inscribe our lives in the book of Life
For Your sake, our God of Life Let us choose Life.
For You are Peace, Your world is Peace and all that is Yours is Peace,
May this be your will
And let us say Amen.

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I spent the entirety of Monday trying to fix Windows on my desktop PC and watching things get progressively worse -- from some corrupted dll files that stopped me from using a browser or loading images to cascading system failures that have me now trying to restore the computer to factory settings (so, Windows 10 instead of 11, no installed programs or saved files, etc.). My other projects were laundry and trying to find a place to get new eyeglasses that's on our VSP, so it was not a great day, though I guess not awful by the standards of a lot of people's days. 

I did have two pieces of animal-related good news. We got the report from Effie's vet with a copy of the x-rays and it looks like her kidney stones are completely gone, no surgery needed! And I had posted about the lost dog we saw in Confluence Park on Sunday and apparently someone from Facebook's Issaquah lost pets group went and caught the dog, then had her scanned for a microchip and called her previous owner. Hopefully she will be reunited with her current owners soon. Here is some of the Norse and Scandinavian heritage we saw on display in Poulsbo on Saturday: