[Dialogue] [Bulk] With Thanksgiving

[Evelyn Philbrook]

Dear Margaret Helen Aiseayew,

Amen, Amen Margaret...

I am here in Tokyo preparing for the 7th Global Conference on Human 
Development with Shizuyo, Wayne, Eiki, Kayo, Kauro, Chimaki, and 
Obata...  Michael Watson will be here on the  10th.  Our conference 
starts on  17th and we will move headquarters to  Takayama on 13th.  
Larry arrives on 12th in Nagoya.  We are getting last minute visas 
settled since it is almost too late... but God will decide and we do our 
skype calls to those embassy's day and night. Anyway, we had not eaten 
lunch yesterday and stopped to eat a quick bite.  I glanced down and 
noticed that OBAMA HAS WON!  OBAMA WON! OBAMA WON!  I jumped up and down 
and Wayne said, are you sure, are you sure he won,.. I said YES, YES, 
YES.. and we both started to cry. So we celebrated with American Pizza 
and thanked God for MIRACLES.  When we got home at 10 pm and scarfed 
down our sashimi and hot soup that night at 11 pm we watched the speech 
on CNN...and  we cried again.

We are in a new paradigm. 

Larry and I talked on skype at midnight my time, he in Taiwan and I in 
Japan and he said Phil would have loved to see this day. So we called 
Marge and she was there at 9 am in the morning in Chicago. How wonderful 
to share with you all this great moment and the anticipation of much 
work ahead.

If you have any ideas for ICA's future, send your ideas to Larry 
Philbrook... who is collecting them on behalf of the General Assembly on 
22 & 23 November. Or if you are so moved... come join us!

Love and Light,

Evelyn Kurihara Philbrook

Margaret Helen Aiseayew wrote:
> I first met Barack Obama in Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories.
>  
> You heard me correctly.  This was on the trip to Israel with my dad 
> that I have already told you all about.  We had just gone through four 
> rings of security to meet a Palesinian Christian guide in the plaza 
> outside the Church of the Nativity.  The guide had just explained that 
> the walls were between ten and fourteen feet thick as they had been 
> rebuilt by the Christians with each crusade and by the Muslims with 
> each interval.
>  
> Suddenly five black, bullet-proofed vehicles came racing into the 
> square and screeched to a halt just a few feet away.  Our guide was in 
> a panic.  He kept saying that this must be a very important person and 
> was trying to get us to melt into the wall he had just said was 
> fourteen feet thick.  I naturally watched as people jumped out of the 
> first and last vehicles (Mossad and CIA) and only noticed by following 
> their glances the sharp shooters on the surrounding roofs.  More 
> people jumped out of the second and fourth vehicles (FBI and 
> Palestinian security).  Finally a woman was allowed out of the second 
> vehicle to go open the door of the middle one and out stepped Barack 
> Obama.  He was walking (relaxed, he has a rather delightful lope that 
> you could catch glimpses of during campaign events as he ran up 
> stairs) toward the church encircled by all these machine gun toting 
> guarding types.
>  
> I just walked into their circle and said, "Barack Obama, I would like 
> to shake your hand."
> He came over and visited with the group and as we ran into him around 
> Jerusalem the next couple of days he referred to us as his "Iowa 
> friends."  No one else in the group had known who he was.  They were 
> fascinated that I recognized a junior Senator from another state.  
> When they asked me who he was I simply said that he was going to be 
> the first black President of the United States.
>  
> He went into the church ahead of us.  The lintel is solid stone about 
> five feet wide and the door was not quite five feet high.  You had to 
> step in the middle of the stone to get across at the same time you 
> were bending down.  I watched him make that move ahead of me in the 
> midst of the security with such humility and grace I knew I had not 
> spoken falsely to the group.  Only later in Jerusalem trying to 
> explain all this to our Jewish guide who had not been able to travel 
> into Palestine with us did she mention that entrance is often referred 
> to as the eye of the needle (as in, it would be easier for a camel to 
> go through the eye of a needle than. . .).  It seemed appropriate. 
>  
> Although I have told the story of meeting him there many times, I have 
> hoarded until now the image of the eye of the needle.  I have prayed 
> over it intensely.  It allowed me all forms of permission knocking on 
> doors, making phone calls, advertising from my yard and being abused 
> for it.  I am probably laying myself open to accusations of magical 
> thinking, but there is curse and a gift in knowing what you know.  
> When he won the Iowa caucuses there was a certainty that settled on me 
> about both the difficulty (instigating repetitive doubt) and the 
> result.  Now it is our turn to follow through --rather like a national 
> rebirthing process,  I pray we won't lose courage.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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