Sweet Festival Flower Moon Peace

The Flower Moon is doing her job. Gardens are just quivering with delight. Trees are loaded. Peepers are peeping. It’s Spring, dadgummit!

It’s cool today, but the sun is shining.

A half a block away from my house two large metal sculptures are for sale. One is an almost full sized elephant head. The other is a saucy dragon. oh yeah.

It’s my party. which the whole town threw just for me, or that’s how I’m looking at it.

In villages all across the Susquehanna Valley, indeed our country, maybe even our world, people are celebrating Spring. They’re strolling in small towns, eating festival foods, greeting their neighbors, hanging out with their friends and having a good old time.

My husband’s playing in the park from 11:30-12:30. Go bang a drum with him.

(I’ll be at the food court, meeting my buds!

And coughing, yes, and coughing. But I just visited my favorite pharmacist, so I can at least mask the symptoms! Because I certainly don’t want to stop the flowers!

Bright wonderful Festival Peace be with you. Happy Birthday to my 3 birthday buddies and blessings to Ro and Arlyne who at long last are getting married! Celebrate! Create Community. and just flat out enjoy!

Reading Hope Into Peace

It’s gone on for years: wonderful women (and a few men) have opened their hearts and arms to class after class of kids who need a bit more.

They teach them structure and discipline and play. They help them get ready to start kindergarten on a level playing field. They teach them to play well and to settle disagreements peacefully. They teach them to fight fair. They teach them not to pick on one another. They teach them that their lives matter.

And isn’t that the most wonderful thing?

Kids whose start may be rocky are rocked against kind and talented women’s hearts.

Steve and I got to read and and teach them a song. I got to write a little children’s ditty. and that was so fun. And steve and I got to work together. and that was fun. And they were so grateful.

They were grateful? Once a year, we come in and act like stars. Every day they are stars. And they light the heavens of a whole generation of our children.

Everyday they love Peace into those children. And Possibility. And Hope. And a Future.

Oh, we give thanks!

Flower Moon Peace Walks

I recently, finally, thankfully started walking again, after a winter of inertia. I swear, I could have sat all night, I could have sat all night, and never left the chair… Oh, right, I did. all winter! And the book? Went in a circle.

I was gearing up to boot my butt out the door when my friend asked me if i wanted to walk. I sniveled, I bargained, but at least 5 days a week, there i am at 7 am out in the neighborhood.

What’s great (exercise aside) is that SJ is a student of the Earth. So I feel as if I’ve got a tourguide to my town. I’m likely to see houses, skies rivers, she sees the Earth in so many ways.

It’s such an interesting and alternative view as we walk along and look and talk. There we were last week standing under a group of trees outside Deb the photographer’s house that were filled with Cedar Wax Wings. A whole charm of them.

And then looking at a little bog filled with something or other that someone was going to be so glad to hear about because she’d been wanting it in her garden and nature wasn’t going to begrudge her a few plants.

And then hearing about the knot weed, the good, the bad and the ugly.

There’s a lot of bounty out there in the Flower Moon. Including the pollen —which make the lovely maple trees. There are a lot of ways to make Peace with this Earth. I hope I keep the walking up. There’s so much to see and learn and do! Peace! You’re so fascinating!

Earth Day Peace!

Happy Earth Day!

I am so grateful for all the people who have started the movements, often from sweet and simple activities that monitor, care for and lobby for our beautiful planet.

I am so grateful for the beauty that keeps me moving out into the world, the incredible connections of the web of all life, and the simple pleasures of living on this planet.

I am so grateful for the visionaries who keep me dreaming of possibilities, the strategists who figure how we might work smarter and all those people who begin again, every morning, in love.

And that’s the challenge, isn’t it? To begin again in love, the slow, arduous, complicated trek toward Peace. Our Earth demands nothing less.

We Need Peace With Earth

Earth Day is tomorrow. It’s having it’s 45th birthday.

On the one hand, people are aware and involved.

On the other, we are naive, oblivious and self involved.

It’s all very hard work. Many of us do some of the things we’re supposed to. We work to reduce, recycle, reuse. We compost. We drive better cars. And all of us have secret and not so secret places where we’re not really so good.

One of the places we often fall down is in the political involvement, because corporations do all sorts of dirty things that all the bricks in the toilet and turning off the water while brushing your teeth can’t begin to touch.

I think we also pay too little attention to the sacredness of this planet. I think that because we litter, we don’t pay enough attention, we accept that things are/will be polluted. Why is it a crime to desecrate a church and not the land? it has come to this, picking up trash, working to clean up streams, protesting pollution and unsafe practices is a life of prayer. Are we ready for that?

I know the original chant said it a little differently, but my group always sang it this way:

Where I stand is holy
Holy is the ground
Forest, mountain, river,
Listen to the sound
Love is all around me.

In this time of the Flower Moon, when Mother Earth so generously shares her beauty and promises her bounty, let us take off our shoes and stand in grateful reverence. And then let us begin the work of Peace with the Earth.

Imagine Flower Moon Peace

Oh, John Lennon. We miss you.

We miss your tender optimism. We miss your vision and hope.

Here we are, all these years later in dystopia rising.

Everyone’s learning to fight and shoot.

Not a lot of time to imagine when you’re avoiding a quick right hook or thinking you’re fighting off savage marauders. No time for joy. No time for hope. No time for Moons that promise and bring the flowers…

Imagine giving Peace a Chance. Imagine.

Flower Moon Sabbath Peace

Spring Mornings. They’re really quite beautiful. Blue, blue skies that you can still see because the leaves haven’t come out to block the sky. Chilly temps that you know will warm. This is the weather that the Flower Moon brings along with the march of spring flowers.

Spring afternoons when you finally are excited about doing chores that by the end of the summer will annoy and bore you.

Sunday mornings, quiet before the dash to church and meetings. Well, except for the birdsong outside!

Sunday afternoons when a walk requires nothing more than grabbing a sweater before you walk out the door. When a pool of sunlight is just meant for dragging a chair into as you read the Sunday Papers.

It’s a sweet time of year. It’s still a little early to start gardens but just in time to ream about them. A day off means time to enjoy the wonder and beauty and be grateful for Nature’s abundance.

Sweet Sabbath Peace to you, my friends. Enjoy the day.

Flower Moon Love and Peace

The Flower Moon. Today’s the day it begins to build. In a couple hours, not one bit of the moon will be visible. Even now, as I write, there’s just 0.1 percent of the Pink Moon left. (I know, it’s daytime so it’s not visible at all!)

But, then there it will hover, a vast empty slate, full of possibilities.

It’s called the Flower Moon because the world gets so busy blooming. But it’s also called the Mother Moon, the Milk Moon and the Corn Planting Moon. Mammals all over our region are giving birth and nurturing their young.

We’ve got stuff to think about! Finding the Peace and the Balance. And today? we also have Love to think about. One young philosopher is making huge discoveries about Love… here we are. Love is and it keeps going. I’m not sure whether he was thinking that we keep loving those that were gone, or that their Love lingers on our hearts when they’re gone… tiny little fuel cells of Love.

So, in the Flower Moon, let us Love and let us Peace!

Pink Moon Daddy Peace

Some days, rather than writing about the world, I need to write about what’ and who are all the world to me.

My father would have been 100 today. That’s a righteous number of years of which he lived 93.

He was a good man. He was a gentle man, a gentleman. A bit stern, a chemist, so very thorough. He was a Christian in all the ways that mattered. He was thoughtful, stood for what was right, served on committees, school boards, municipal boards, pool boards. He helped start the day care center and the women’s shelter.

I’m proud of him. Proud to be his daughter and follow in his lineage. Proud of his grandkids for him and in his way… Grateful for him.

Oh, we had so much fun in the last years of his life.

So Happy Birthday Daddy. I’ll try and find some lemon meringue this weekend and lift a forkful to you in celebration. I’ll call my brother and tell him I love him. And write his grandkids and tell them I’m proud and that he would have been so proud.

Peace. I was a lucky woman with a good father. I miss him, but mostly I’m just so happy I had him and that he had the raising of me. I’m a better woman for it.

Lucky me. Lucky Peace. Thanks Pink Moon, for a great Daddy. And wow, a whole century of him!

Pink Moon Peace Realities

It is what it is. My friend Lenore says that all the time. And I keep coming back to it.

Paid my taxes yesterday. Every year, the Pink Moon arrives and you can bet that Tax Day won’t be far behind. It was a stretch. And you know what? I’m doing it wrong. Year after year. It doesn’t change — because I don’t change.

I like to think I’m just that way with money. but I’m pretty sure I’m lying to myself. I think if I did some accounting, I’d be aware of places I’m not balanced in most of my life.

I know I pay a price for it financially. What do you want to bet I pay a price for it in other ways… and other people pay a price as well…

And then that lovely question… and what am I going to do about it?

Realities just help us to see both the distance and the terrain of the journey to Peace. Peace means a lot of things. Our honesty is part of the struggle. Sigh. There’s always work to do. Luckily it’s a beautiful day for work. What day isn’t?

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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