The Fiercest Peace

I saw a picture of plants with their roots yesterday. The tag on the pic said that plants can converse by clicking their roots. Isn’t that an amazing concept? But as I was looking at the picture and pondering, I started thinking about how hard those soft, tender shoots had to work to break their way through frosty soil. They are driven to come out and open to the sun.

If only you and I were sensitive enough that we could hear Peace’s commanding cry. Or that we could sense a neighbor’s response and begin to listen for promising news. Peace is possible. Don’t we want to be the evangelists for Peace, rising up like the flowers out of hostile ground? Don’t we want to come out in our full beauty in a chorus of Peace? I believe it’s possible. It does mean we need to plant ourselves fairly carefully in the company of others who also believe. and then slowly we must push with all we’re worth, knowing we are both being encouraged and encouraging others. There we are frail flowers for Peace, beautiful in our own right, but astonishing in our combined glory. Imagine the fierce beauty of the Peace of Early Spring. And then push. The World depends upon your willingness to emerge in the name of Peace and Beauty. (Oh, and look, it’s a new month, so we’re now celebrating Nancy Cleaver’s Woven Peace!)

The Peace of Winter’s End

While everyone’s jumping around hollering because the sun’s shifting, I am reluctant to let go of Winter’s beauty and its blessed slow pace. I am a jumping around kinda person, so I like being offered Winter’s opportunity for reflection. I like slowing down. I like focusing on my dreams and not just on action.

But will-he, nill-he, things are changing in the natural world’s cycle and carrying us right along with them. So we must consider what pieces of our Peace Dreams we’re going to start developing. You know me, I don’t garden, but I know gardens. They’ve been pouring over seed catalogs and ordering in their favs, designing the layouts of which vegetables and flowers will nestle side by side.

There’s our challenge — to make sure we have what we need to bring our Peace Dream to fruition… to help it bear fruit. Let’s show up and be present to the new season’s beauty, count our blessings and use them to spread over our Peace Gardens and perhaps we can continue to honor the Winter with some consistent periods of quiet, dark and reflection to sustain us for the time of jumping around. Peace, it looks so different at different times in the year, doesn’t it?

Tiny Cracks of Peace

Perhaps it’s what’s needed, small inroads into the ediface of hate. Crack after crack until it can’t stand any longer. You notice I capitalize Peace but leave hate to stew in its smallness.

Little acts of love, sweet smiles… they give us the courage for the grand gesture and for the time when we will have to reach out to help one another across the very tricky ground. At that point we will be able to say Yes! to Peace, in a louder and louder chorus until the Great Thaw begins… Let’s end the ice age of hate. You and me and a whole bunch of our friends and neighbors and strangers we are longing to meet. Connections. Laughter. Peace. Each act a prayer.

Peace of Small Steps

The support for non-Peace is enormous. Part of the pushback, I believe is the myth that Peace is magical and therefore unobtainable. Who believes in Magic? Well, other than the Lovin’ Spoonful.

But both Peace and Magic and arts at which you become accomplished only by practicing diligently. It’s another 10,000 hour quest to become wildly accomplished at either or best. Oh, we say, no sense jumping in, because I don’t have the equivalent of five work years to give one of them. But that misses the fact that you don’t need to be a genius at Peace to begin to make a difference. Two people meeting across a boundary find a reason to smile and non-Peace is stopped right there, and Peace begins. Then you have to keep feeding the smiles. You have to start paying very close attention that you don’t step on any cultural toes and if you do, you get off quickly and apologize. Look at you, you’re Peace-making. Whoda thunk? Good work. Push back the non-Peacemakers with joy and magic! One small step (and smile!) at a time.

The UnPeace of Being Right

I don’t know about you, but I like being right. I like having my opinion born out by the majority. It makes me feel, oh, let’s admit it, smug. But in all honesty, I must admit, smug is not a a flattering choice from the emotional wardrobe. And smug does not draw people to me, to us.

When I was a kid, I was particularly pleased to learn the world supercilious. It rolls around so well in your mouth and has a swell lip-curl of disgust to finish it off. And while there are plenty o’ folk who gather upon recognizing that familiar snarl of superiority, it is not a group that’s going anywhere. It’s a group standing on the mountain of our self-righteousness. You can barely even see into the Valley of Peace from that mount… in fact, we’re all probably facing the wrong direction!

Peace is a journey, perhaps even a dance of hesitation. When we’re standing still, it requires the simple act of being present. Lip movements range from hesitant, hopeful smiles to broad grins. There is no drawing apart, there is only a tentative coming together. How about this? How about that? OK, let’s stand here and enjoy the moment, let’s keep moving forward. And being right and being self-righteous need to give way to righteousness living. Let us not draw apart, let us keep dancing forward. The drums are beating; the bells are sounding; life is longing for Peace.

Peace of Wonder vs Fear

The last couple snows around here have been composed largely of those flakes the size of the palm of your hand. They’re the ones that are large enough that you can actually decode their beauty when they land on you.

And yet, I find myself, as they fall, rather than standing and staring, head back in wonder, squinting instead at the thermometer, worrying about what will happen when the mercury inches up a bit. Because late winter storms often turn to icy rain.

When did this happen? When did I turn into a woman fretting about what might be rather than one joyfully noticing what is? Perhaps my premature timidity is more of body at the moment than of spirit, but where the body goes, so must the spirit follow. I quail at the notion of skating, and yet as a child, we routinely picked up an 85-yo to take along to the pond with us and he would skate majestically too and fro. We hesitate to leave the house (is it that the appropriate footwear isn’t attractive?), and yet entire northern nations hop on their bikes in this winter and toddle off to work. They’re actually rejoicing in the notion that spring is coming when the flakes get large and wet.

Hmph. I think I’m going to have to mull on this a bit — and take some action. Because soon it won’t be just snow that circumscribes my dreams. Fear is a soul eater. Living in the present, pulling out the good, focusing on and magnifying it, offers the senses a banquet.

Love Flows to Staten Island

Dear Friends, I know, twice in one day!

The local UU congregation in the Susquehanna Valley, where I’m minister, got involved in Superstorm Sandy relief not only because it is right to be generous in the face of need but also because many of us in this River Valley had only last year experienced the trauma and destruction of floods. We were so lucky that when we reached out, we found a congregation on Staten Island who was acting as a distribution center for the relief and recovery efforts. We’ve grown a great partnership and we’re very proud and grateful to have been able to have been of some help. We’ve now created a new way that with a little bit of generosity and a wee bit of effort gathering your friends and family to help that we can make a big difference in a both a joyful afternoon for some and a big gift that will benefit many. Here’s what’s on our UUCSV website and here are the instructions for chipping in to be a small but integral part of a sweet and refreshing gift of love.

Since Superstorm Sandy the UUCSV and our friends in the Susquehanna Valley have been sending cash cards to the people of Staten Island which are being disseminated through the UU Church of Staten Island. The Rev. Susan Karlson has been our contact point. What has been great is that we’ve been able to send not only every dollar that was given, but also leverage those dollars and send more than was collected by donating the fundraising profit we get from selling gift cards. It’s been a great boon and the money you’re donating is going right into the hands of people trying to rebuild their lives. We chose this action because people in this Valley know what it means to inundated by floodwaters. People’s generosity has been amazing. We are grateful and proud. Over $9,000 has gone from our hearts to theirs.

We’ve been planning a work day. (May 25, 2013) As Susan and Ann talked about the difficulties of finding work for non trained people at this point, we decided that what would be wonderful would be to take them a garden party. Musicians have donated their time, we’ll be soliciting food from stores and restaurants. But we also thought it would be wonderful to gather a large sum of money as a gift. We need to pay for the bus. But other than that, we could turn your gifts into cards for individuals, or they could find a project that needed a lump sum infusion. The idea of gathering $10 from 1,500 people all over our River Valley and Beyond was born. Do you have $10 to share with the People of Staten Island? Will you ask your friends if they do? You can help make a huge difference in the lives of fellow flood victims. We can give, because we’re generous and because we’ve been there. Love flows: from the rivers to the ocean, and from our hearts to yours. Please give that Love some momentum and donate to our Sandy Relief project today. Here’s what to do. (although stuffing a $10 in my pocket — or better yet a bunch of them works just as well!)

In gratitude for your generosity and thoughtfulness… Ann

Peace of Cooperation

Cooperation. It’s an important word. We think so much about achieving goals, that we rarely stop to think that the best things we may get from a joint project derive from working together. The shared sense of accomplishment is important. As exhilarating as it is to pull something off on your own, there’s nothing quite like looking at one another at the end of a haul and saying… we did this. Having someone to kick around possibilities can leverage both the scope and the outcomes of the project. And being able to reflect jointly on the failures and figure out how to recapture lost effort and lost ground is a good indicator that you not only might be able to figure out where you went afield, you also have an increased possibility of finding ways to turn those failures to your advantage. And what’s better? there are long-term health advantages to belonging to a group.

It’s nice to have people invested in a project you care about. While most of us want enough personal risk-taking and satisfaction in a job, it’s good to know that what you think is important is important to someone else. We’re all looking for meaning… and shared meaning deepens the experience.

And then there’s the encouragement piece of cooperation. Sometimes it’s passive — someone else’s success will buoy yours. Sometimes our load is eased by more active encouragement whether it’s a hearty “Well Done!” or a well-timed, “You can do this,” or even an enthusiastic “Look what we’ve accomplished!”

Cooperating means leveraging everyone’s skills (viva les differences!), celebrating the successes (see earlier “Look what we’ve accomplished!” or the comfort of numbers (“we’re all in this together!”). I haven’t checked the studies, but my guess is that a high cooperation rate is a fairly good indicator of success. It’s certainly a pretty good indicator of a good time being had by all — and an assurance that someone will be around to break open that bottle of bubbly something!

On the Peace road, where there are so many obstacles, cooperation makes the journey more comfortable and more enjoyable, and adds a lot to our probabilities of progress. Let’s hear it for the Muppets who start us out early on a great road! And let’s consider how we might cooperate on our journeys toward Peace.

Balancing Peace

Peace is no different than anything else: people go about it in different ways. What’s hard is that there is in the nature of Peace the imperative to work together. When someone’s approach is so different as to be alien to yours, it makes working together challenging, to say the least.

I work best alone or in consultation with other people who work alone but who are interested in pursuing a particular goal. I can play well on teams, where we each rely on our own expertise, but do not do particularly well in institutional settings. My independence can be an irritant and I can find that work style fairly irritating. I went to a meeting the other day and was reminded that it’s not that I can’t play well with others, I just don’t particularly enjoy organized play! Only team sport I ever competed on was swimming. You put your head down and swam your heart out. That works for me.

When I was a kid, I was good at the massive eyeroll about the slow steady nature of institutional work. Now that I’m clear I don’t have to participate, I can appreciate. Because after all, I really want to do only the work I’m good at. That means there’s a whole bunch of other work to be done. I finally got smart enough to look around and see whose work was complementary! At work for instance, I rely on my Director of Religious Growth and learning to supply denominational enthusiasm. When I started to work there, I knew I needed to find a residential UUist. While profoundly UU in spirit, I’m interested in local or regional community and Peace building. I want impact. I can do that work because Sara reminds me where the institution supports that work. She wants process. Luckily we adore and respect one another and are happy to see through one another’s eyes now and again.

Sara’s pretty easy to love and she’s a grown-up and knows her strengths, which makes it very easy to work with her. We laugh enough and make enough progress that it seems she feels the same. We also trust one another to have the best interests of the community on our hearts. And we rely on each other to do the work we can’t do… and we both cast around to find someone to do the work neither of us are gifted at. And that is Peace. It isn’t my working like Sara, completely out of my element, or her working like me, completely out of her element, it takes both of us doing what we’re excellent at and accomplishing our shared goals. We’re building community the only way you can, together, and we’re building it on our differences rather than despite them.

This works for us because we each know ourselves pretty well, we have enough explicit, shared work, goals and values and we are willing to figure out out how to stand together… but as our buddy Mr. Gibran says… not too close together!

Peace on the boil!

Well, it’s nice to be back. Life has been so hectic recently that I haven’t had the time to sit down and write. Good things happening, so I”l tell you more, in another post.

The sugaring image has been tugging at me recently. Lots of effort and lots of ingredients and lots of time required, but oh what sweetness at the end. Peace is a lot like that, while it may be as simple as a smile, there are always logistics to be worked out. But, as with anything worth having, you have to take the time and make the effort to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You work hard, and then you wait. You have to keep the fire banked and burning steadily so you don’t burn the sugar or fail to chase the moisture. If you’re smart, you’ll glory in the process as well. We might as well let go of the notion of simply getting things done, getting past this or that to the sugar at the end. The process makes the sugar sweet, but you can allow the process to be sweet as well. Make some memories to store up for the year ahead. Reflect on your life and the beauty of nature. Have a good time and enjoy your solitude and your company. Live in the time you have.

Not the one tending the fires? You have to invest to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor. We each add our own piece to the process. Our Passion can help keep the Peace fire steadily burning. Maple sugar is a little delight. Peace is a grand one. Maple sugar isn’t good for everyone. Peace is good for everyone. Enjoy your Maple sugar judiciously. Spread Peace on everything. Peace awaits our hands to do the work and our hearts to take the time.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

The Priestess Is In