Sunset over a lagoon in Batticaloa

"When it is all too much, when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of peace, find a human sunrise.

Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality.

Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of human life.

- Alice Walker, Novelist and poet, Speaking at the June 2006 Commencement of Naropa University, CO, USA