Peace at the Edges

and in the middle… It’s where we look for it… or it’s where we look that we must place it. or where we live that we must make it… Peace can be made everywhere.

It’s really up to us.

But it’s urgent, I believe that. Needed by people and by planet.

Peace.

My heart is with our daughter and granddaughter as they let go of a man they loved. Ed Lund, we are grateful for your life and our presence in it. Today, your East Coast Family will sit by a fire and remember both that we loved you and that we love one another.

Peace Out of Time

It was just a sweet little caress in the grand scheme of things. But there it was, a beautiful little violet in grass that has not yet browned up for the winter.

All around it, the cooler weather is causing the trees to begin to burnish. There’s not been a freeze yet, but we’re all anticipating. All my gardener friends are busy putting their gardens to bed.

But in the meantime, one bold, and yes, foolhardy, violet is dancing in the grass.

“Look at ME!” she cries. And we do. Silly, we think, don’t you know you’ll be gone, soon.

And yet we look. and admire.

There is perhaps something to foolhardy declarations of Beauty and Possibility. After all Peace is not going to be won by our doing the same old thing. That as we have been told so many times, simply leads to insanity.

So Peace. Peace of the beautiful what is. and Peace of the wild, outrageous Violet. Peace. We’ll take whatever leads us in that direction!

New World New Peace

It’s one of those stupid things I’ll never understand. How is it that people decide that the most important thing in their religion is determining when the world will end.

In Christianity, it demands blowing right past the central tenets of the Jesus message to concentrate instead on the end times. I can be as perplexed as I want. I don’t think enlightenment on this topic is coming.

But a reboot? I’ll take that. We’re a tech savvy world, right. What if World 827.3 included the violence fix? The ignorance fix? The hatred fix?

What if we acted as if making this world better were possible?

I just finished reading two books on racism and white privilege with my church. What if we were to do something that began, even began, to make a difference.

If we began today, it would mean we embraced a new world — a world made new — by hope, by love, by justice, by Peace — by us. What do you think? Peace, anyone?

Shaping Peace

As I read stories about people dropping stones onto cars below, I wonder what’s happening in the macro sense. I feel like my grandmother, bewildered by a nasty, changing world, maybe it’s not different. Maybe I’m just seeing things more clearly. But it feels different.

And yet I remember my father taking boy scouts hiking. A rock was kicked off a path, and fell onto the top of a car driving below. I don’t believe it was aimed for the car. I know they were lucky it landed on the roof and I know they rushed down to make amends and to offer (I don’t remember what happened, i was very young) to pay for the damages.

Accidents happen, especially when people are horsing around. But no one around here doesn’t know the dangers of such things because we’ve known what happened to Sharon Budd when a rock landed on her head. Four boys dropped a big rock onto the Budd’s car. It struck Sharon in her head. Over a year later, she struggles with pain and memory and operation after operation. She will always struggle; her life has been altered. The boys (young men?) are going to jail.

What tempts them?

Is it naive to think we’re not connected enough? That we’re not seen enough? I know, there are always kids who weren’t, but are there too many? Families are not gathered, few belong to churches. Few are scouting, few are connected.

And if we’re not connected, the world is happening to us, we’re not happening to the world. We’re not creating Peace.

Guns. Rocks. No Peace. What do we do? It’s on us… I wish I had a clue about where to begin.

Peace, Not Guns

How have we become so fearful?

How can it be that more pre-schoolers are killed by guns in a year than police in line of duty. One is an inherently dangerous job. One should be dangerous only because we fall reaching for our goals.

This is America. This is our legacy.

We’re doing things that make this so and we don’t seem so very interested in stopping it.

And I confess, I don’t know what to do but keep talking about it. What to do but keep asking for hearts to change. You cannot convince me that an assault weapon is good for anything other than killing a lot of people.

You don’t eat deer or any other animal peppered by a lot of shot. They’re ghastly instruments of war that you can buy so so easily. I live in PA, in a rural county where many people eat because they hunt. No one’s asking that to go away. But these people pride themselves on a clean kill and good marks(wo)menship. My sister in law won the fish and game honoree of the year this year. She’s proud. and good for her! I’m proud of her.

But assault weapons? Weapons of terrorism?

And who gets killed? Children. Women. People of Color. Seeing any correlations here?

We don’t need guns. We need gun laws. We need rational gun owners of rational guns. We need Peace. We need to make Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.

The Peace of this Moment

We need to pay attention. Oh, we will, we assure ourselves when something happens…

And then life gets back to normal and we slowly become oblivious to the individual little moments that make life astonishing.

But life is fickle, fleeting. I was about to write momentous and then thought about what that meant… moment-ous… each moment.

And if we don’t pay very close attention we miss the moments that make life magic. We don’t make time to capture life with all those we love. We don’t notice the wonder of Mother Earth. or whatever.

We have to treasure what we have… because this moment is all that we know we have. Next year’s musings have been taking shape in my mind as Everyday Peace, watchword noticing…

It feels all the more pointed now when Ed Lund is gone from Selena and Grace’s life. He was an incredible gift. Always so present. He’ll be sorely missed. Ed, we loved you.

Peace be with those who loved him. Peace be with us all.

Parties for Peace

We had a wonderful party last night for Steve’s birthday. 75-80 people showed up and everyone had a good time.

Including the Birthday Boy.

I’m so lucky to have found Love in my 50s and to have him be more and more healthy. Every day is a day for giving thanks.

It was a blast.

But the best, best, best? By the end of the evening we’d collected over $1000 for Lover Flows the LOVE project (Let Our Valley Eat). More kids will eat… and that’s a blessing.

I will never again have a party without a donate box for charity. Now it’s true that I have no kids, so this is easy to say, but no one I know needs gifts. And lots of people need what we can give. So, hurrah.

Peace, my sweetheart. Peace, my friends. Peace, my Valley. May we become The Valley with No Hungry Children.d

Electronic Detente

I know I strive for Peace. But sometimes with electronics, you celebrate detente.

I have a wonderful new computer. I am so lucky. But as often happens with electronic equipment, that which should be so easy is complicated. Even when you purchase for not complicated.

And better than anything, I have a wonderful friend who does great untangling. for a living. and knows the way my mind works and the ways it doesn’t.

so, I can hand it over and he doesn’t even think less of me.

It’s a wonderful thing. And within a week, it’ll all be computer Peace at my house. And that will be swell…

If only I can figure out how to do the next three things I need to do!

But, they’ll get done… and whoever thought Peace was going to be a quick fix? Not with people… and not with my learning curve.

But hurrah for detanglers and their mad computer licks. And hurrah for my job which offered me the opportunity to have this beautiful machine. I am a grateful woman.

Community Dancing Peace

It’s really sort of a Thursday miracle. About 40 of us gather to listen to jazz in a friendly little downtown restaurant.

People like each other, and are really happy for a night out. Food’s good. BYOB, so folk are drinking what they want.

I know I brag, but my husband is really an extraordinary drummer. And his group is quite wonderful. There’s always a beat you can catch, because making people dance is Steve’s happiest thing.

It’s part of the group’s happiest thing as well!. Dancers throng the floor and just delight in the pleasure. Many of them are 70+. One of them is 90+. Some are not well, and still they dance away. And have so much fun.

Sweet Thursday Dancing Peace spills easily into Friday as we all enjoy the memory. Get out there and dance, my friends.

A Voice, A Foreign Life, Peace

My world could not be more different from the world of the Inuit on the Hudson Bay of almost a century ago.

So going to 100 year old what passed for a documentary then and expecting to do much more than observe from a distance is usually unrealistic.

But Tanya Tagaq and her musicians totally changed that. Tagaq is Inuit. She has studied the music and has lived in the climate. She has both in her ears and her body and her soul. And last night, she opened them to us.

It was inspiring and transformative. It moved past the film maker’s insistence that the Inuit are charming and hapless. It made everything that happened in the film beautiful and infused it with wonder.

She sees her voice as a whole body instrument. She sees all of life as one. She was the wind. She was the dying seal. She was Nanook and his family.

And we were invited to see the Peace of that very hard and beautiful life.

What a blessing.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

The Priestess Is In