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Healthy Inspiration from SparkPeople

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Motivational Quote - Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

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We are all scared of something. There is no denying that. Fear is a natural emotion. Maybe it is something small and seemingly silly, like an apprehension of spiders. But sometimes fear can be so large it can almost paralyze you. How do you react to it? If you see something wrong going on around you, fear can sometimes stop you from acting to stop it. What will you do? Courage and bravery dictate that you stand up for what you know is right, even if doing so causes you anxiety. Be firm with what you believe. Sometimes you have to help those that cannot help themselves.

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TERESA6262

5/1/2016 9:21:02 AM

TERESA6262's SparkPage 		Thanks for posting the back story!

DOCKO56

4/18/2013 11:17:35 AM

DOCKO56's SparkPage 		The rest of the article! I found this very interesting!!!!



The timid presume it is lack of fear that allows the brave to act when the timid do not. But to take action when one is not afraid is easy. To refrain when afraid is also easy. To take action regardless of fear is brave.
(To order copies of the complete article, contact gnosis@lumen.org)

DOCKO56

4/18/2013 11:16:03 AM

DOCKO56's SparkPage 		The mysterious Ambrose Redmoon's healing words
March 29, 2002|By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic.


Did he, on an evening when the stars seemed to linger a little closer to the earth, when the wind murmured its strange, lost language, ever dream of this?
Did he know that somehow -- six years after he died -- his words would be spoken 2,000 miles away by a Chicago police officer to honor a fallen comrade?
Just when you think that the world is fresh out of magic, that all of its secrets have been revealed, along comes the odd and uplifting saga of Ambrose Redmoon.
He wrote one of the most memorable and oft-quoted definitions of courage in the contemporary world -- "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one's fear" -- but he was, until now, an utter mystery to the people who used the line, a cipher to those inspired by it.
Our story begins last Saturday when Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard eulogized Donald J. Marquez, an officer shot and killed March 18 while trying to serve a warrant. Identifying Redmoon as a "noted author," Hillard recited the quotation, adding, "Officer Marquez displayed his courage for what he deemed important: Helping others."
But who is Ambrose Redmoon?
The quotation seemed so profound, so fitting in this time of renewed appreciation for public safety personnel, that naturally one wondered if Redmoon had written other memorable work. Was there a novel, perhaps? An essay collection?
Yet a check of the Internet yielded a curious fact: While the "courage" definition attributed to Redmoon is repeated frequently on Web sites ranging from corporate home pages to quotation compendia to personal weblogs, there was not a crumb of biographical information about the author.
A check of Lexis-Nexis and other Internet databases that archive articles from major newspapers and periodicals brought the same result:
Nothing.
The quotation was repeated plenty of times with Redmoon's name attached, but when it came to Redmoon himself -- nothing.
The mystery deepened: Who is Ambrose Redmoon?
Dennis Bingham, a public relations specialist for the Chicago Police Department who wrote the speech Hillard delivered, said he came across the quotation several years ago. "I thought, `Now, when can I use this? Where's a good place?' I do a lot of work for the police department when officers are killed in the line of duty. I look for things about courage and self-sacrifice, above and beyond, that sort of thing."





The mysterious Redmoon
And Redmoon's identity?
"I believe," Bingham ruminated, "that he's a novelist."
Yet a check of booksellers' Web sites, which include novels in and out of print, turned up plenty of references to Stephen Ambrose and Ambrose Bierce -- but none to Ambrose Redmoon.
A consultation with several university librarians also went nowhere. They discovered the same passel of references to Stephen Ambrose and Ambrose Bierce and even Chicago's Redmoon Theater -- but no Ambrose Redmoon.
Yet tucked away in a dusty, forgotten corner of the Internet, like a scrap of paper that flutters to the floor when you bump against an ancient rolltop desk in the attic, was a clue. There, on a Web page for Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions -- a magazine of New Age spirituality and mysticism that went out of business three years ago -- was a table of contents listing for a 1991 issue. Among the authors: Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon.
Jay Kinney, co-publisher of Gnosis with his wife, Dixie Tracy-Kinney, said he vaguely recalled receiving the article -- "No Peaceful Warriors!" -- from a man calling himself Redmoon.
"We only had contact through the mail," Kinney said from his San Francisco office. "And it was 11 years ago, so I don't remember a whole lot about it."
At the bottom of the article -- a five-page exhortation against people who think they can protest injustice without physical sacrifice -- was an author's note saying Redmoon had written "poetry, plays and a military unit tactics manual" and "served as occult editor on the original staff of Rolling Stone." The article included the famous "courage" quotation.
So there it was: The origin of the line that has become so ubiquitous that it appeals to CEOs, engineers and police chiefs alike. Impossible to know who first quoted it on the Internet but once there, it has spread exponentially for the last decade, a sort of whispering campaign of wisdom.
But the original question still loomed: Who is Ambrose Redmoon?
It was time to call in the heavy artillery, i.e., David Turim, crackerjack researcher in the Tribune's Editorial Information Center.
You will be spared a tedious recitation of the many missteps and false leads and blind alleys that accompanied the quest-- not out of modesty, but out of space constraints.
Just accept the fact that there eventually dawned the golden moment when Redmoon's daughter, Alexandra Carnacchi, was located -- and Redmoon's long, strange odyssey stood revealed.
Man of many faces
According to Carnacchi, Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon was born James Neil Hollingworth in Painesville, Ohio, and he died at 63 of cancer in Santa Rosa, Calif., after an amazingly varied and multifaceted life. He hung out in New York's Greenwich Village with the beat poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s, counting iconic comedian Lenny Bruce among his friends. Moving to San Francisco after a brief stint in Chicago, he was manager of the legendary rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service, which emerged in San Francisco at the same time as the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane.




Redmoon spent the last three decades of his life in a wheelchair, after a car accident outside San Francisco in 1966 -- as he was on his way to a Quicksilver concert -- left him a paraplegic. He lived in a small garage apartment in Santa Rosa, a town about 70 miles north of San Francisco, where he kept such a low profile that his landlord, David Yoast, said earlier this week that he didn't realize that his tenant was a writer.


But writing was his life, Redmoon's daughter said. "I have to say, I cried. It's just mind-boggling," she said, describing her reaction to the news that her father's "courage" quote is widely disseminated on the Internet, that he is practically a household name -- yet still a mystery man -- to millions.
"We've got volumes and volumes of his writing," said Carnacchi, who goes by the name of Weyaka. The name, she said, was given to her by her father in a naming ceremony when she was 16.
Her father was also wont to take on other names, she said. "My father couldn't stand his name. He decided to take his father's middle name [Ambrose]." And the Redmoon surname? "He traced his heritage back to Native Americans -- there was Native American blood on his father's side."
Weyaka, a schoolteacher and mother of two who lives in the Santa Rosa area, said her father was "quite radical. He was seriously radical on every level. He was a scary person when he had a passion. He was very, very, very intense. He was a verbal assassin.
"He was a really serious warrior. He felt that he was a warrior for the earth, for women's rights, for Native American culture. Any battle worth fighting, he was there."
Weyaka was born on Chicago's South Side, she said, where her father and mother lived for several months in 1962 on their way from New York to San Francisco.
From beatnik to hippie
Redmoon performed briefly with Second City, she said. He and his wife, Dakota (formerly Louise) Durham, who lives near Weyaka, divorced when Weyaka was 4. Durham declined comment on Redmoon.
"My father was a beatnik and from the beatnik scene he went on to the hippie scene. He couldn't go back to the straight world because he was so outrageous," Weyaka said. "He never really fit in anywhere. He said things that really blew people away. Everywhere he would try and publish his writings, they found him too wild."
Weyaka is certain that Redmoon didn't know his definition of courage had become famous and in wide circulation. "It was very frustrating to him that people were not listening. You have no idea. He tried for so long and worked so hard to be heard."
She has tried repeatedly to get more of Redmoon's work published, to have it known beyond a relatively small circle of mystics and fanciers of neo-paganism.
How would her father feel about the news that a police officer had been laid to rest to the accompaniment of his words?
"He would be very, very proud," she said quietly. "Relationships between beatniks and the police weren't that good. But the police changed. And he changed, too. It's so ironically perfect."





She was with her father in the hospital when he died. "He died fighting intensely. It was really, really hard for him to die. He fought for the very last second."
If you are ever tempted to dismiss a phrase as "only words," remember this: A line written more than a decade ago by a forgotten man living in a garage apartment has been quoted thousands, if not millions, of time, has circled the world via the Internet, has given hope to those who hear it, including the many who grieve for a Chicago police officer slain in the line of duty.
Remember Ambrose Redmoon.
The most quoted Redmoon
From "No Peaceful Warriors!" (1991) by Ambrose Redmoon:
As a real, live, initiated, trained, experienced, traditional, hereditary warrior with thirty-seven body scars and a trophy or two on my belt, I find such expressions as "peaceful warrior" offensive, trivializing, and insulting. "Peaceful warrior" is far more than a contradiction in terms. The function of a warrior is to eliminate an exterior enemy presence. Cowardice is a serious vice. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one's fear. The timid p...

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