Having committed to a year of “prosing” about Peace… and having found a new structure, it’s interesting to see what images arise to fill that structure. I like the notion of our Peace dreams slowly building from concept to completion, using each month’s strong points to help us construct our dreams, our work and our world of Peace. So, starting with little crystalline Peace “seeds” that are short lived but visible witnesses to our beginnings captured my imagination.
Oh, my friends, Happy 2013. Or perhaps more correctly, let’s make this a happy 2013. It is up to us. We get to decide to be happy and we get to decide if we’re going to work for Peace. This year in my musings, I’m going to explore how what each of the months have to contribute to the process of Peace-making. It is time. It is the great work of our lives…
For each of us, it’s a different work and a different life, but the paths all head toward Peace. Yours and mine will meet and diverge… but with a great deal of will, there will be enough company along the journey to help us know how very lucky we are. Open your hearts and minds and dream deeply of Peace. Lots of happiness along the way!
Day after day we hear horrible stories of what goes on in high schools and how students cope with bullying. The cyber world, which I celebrate as it keeps me in touch with almost-lost high school friends and newly-minted grandchildren, is not always put to work for the good.
I read, aghast, about the way twitter and FB are used to isolate and terrify kids. I wonder whether Twitterverse isn’t the island that William Golding talked about in Lord of the Flies. When I read that book in college in the 70s I rolled my eyes, secure in my knowledge of humanity’s basic goodness. There’s nothing quite like privilege, is there? After all, I’d been growing up during the 60s in the years of the most heinous race riots and somehow still believed that clapping for Tinkerbelle was what it took.
Years later, I still cling to my Pollyanna worldview. I believe, when encouraged, we move toward the best in us. (it was only slightly discouraging when referencing pollyanna to have one group of information about Eleanor Porter’s 1915 novel and the other bit about “disambiguation” which is a synonym for my preternatural cheery optimism.) Once more with feeling “Let’s all look on the bright side of life…”
But looking away doesn’t help anything, especially our bullied and frightened kids. So it was a lovely thing to read about a 17 yo kid in Osseo MN taking to Twitter to shut down the mean girls and boys in his school who were using social media to terrorize and traumatize. Kudos for Kevin Curwick (and his parents who raised a great kid!). A cute, popular kid, leading the kindness brigade. Or as he says, OsseoNiceThings — goodness gracious are we going to rehabilitate the word nice, make it more than icky-sweet? He just set about noticing kids and posting what was great about them. Day after day, tweet after tweet. A young man doing his kindness reps. And Hurrah! for the kids at other schools are doing the same thing to combat bullying. If we’re going to trend and hashtag, let’s do it for the good. Hop on that bus, my dears.
And while we’re cheering, let’s hear it for the kids who are participating in Lady Gaga’s Kindness Campaign and for Office Depot and their president Patrick Schwartzenegger’s support and Cyndi Lauper’s “Give a Damn” campaign. It’s good to see people with klout taking a lead on this issue.
Makes me wonder what you’re doing for the good about bullying. Wander over to our FB page, like us, and tell me what you’re up to.
In the meantime give it up for Kevin. Thanks to him, at least in Osseo, MN, we’re no longer listening to the sound of one hand clapping, we’re listening to a rousing round of applause from every student in his school. (Although someone might want to know if was using his cell in school, but that’s the principal’s problem! I’m just happy someone’s doing what’s right. ) So, while I’ll keep working for change, I’m going to keep clapping for Tinkerbelle. Sometimes the light just shines brighter. I do believe the more you focus on what is right, the more we move toward that. But we should stop once in a while to see who’s not in the parade with us and invite them to come along. Go Kevin!
Summer time, and the living is fabulous!
Lammas! That late summer wonder is here. Bringing with it such garden bounty. Corn! Tomatoes! Eggplant! Cukes! yum!!!
I love the slant of the sun this time of year. And yesterday for the first time the breeze blew cool and I went to bed with the windows open and a fan blowing. The sleeping was heavenly. The heat will rise again, but you could feel Fall leafing through the catalog choosing where she might be off to in a few short weeks.
By now, I know the length of the town pool, so my summer swimming has finally settled into its rhythm. My injured ankle improves in the daily back and forth. Perhaps it’s because I know the month is slipping away so I treasure each dip in the pool. Somehow as the laps build up, the years slip away and I am ageless in the water. Even my fear and sadness cannot stand against its healing properties.
Yesterday I swam next to a woman, all business with her training, shoulders rippling with muscles. Such is my joy in the swimming that I didn’t bother to feel badly that she was so fit and I was, well, not. We giggled about time slipping away, exchanging dates of births but not names while hanging panting on the end of the pool.
Fall will come and then it will be my favorite. But for a little while, as that old saying goes on days like this: God’s in Her Heaven and all’s right with the world.
Even if it’s only for short moments, I hope you can experience August’s generosity. It’s a wonderful gift when she so often rests heavily on our days.
P.S. Don’t forget Perseid’s showers!
It’s easy, when your heart isn’t on the line, to wax loftily poetic.
And then it is:
My sister has just been diagnosed with a late stage lung cancer. Possibilities are not exhausted, but they’re not limitless either. The journey to possibility is horrifying and ugly. Deb’s accepting and frightened. I’m so frightened too. And I can’t make it better or share the pain. I can only bear witness.
My sister! My sister!
I always say the miracle is that it works at all. It isn’t unusual for things to go awry. Life is messy. And not forever promised.
“I always” doesn’t mean jack when it’s your sister. It doesn’t mean much either when well-meaning friends tell me I’ll have to man up for Deb because she’ll need me. Well, of course. My forte. Evanses are strong, competent and brave. But excuse me? My heart? Breaking here. So much loss. And now… uncertainty… that edges toward some unwelcome certainties.
I make the only promises I can. I will be present. I will be her advocate. I will revel in her company, however heartbreaking and messy. I will keep my hands and heart open. And I will love her fiercely.
And you? I will love you too, working hard not to let this pain blind me to you and your struggles and your triumphs.
But I tell you the truth. I will need a kind word and a steadying hand on my back.
Creation is so much larger than we are usually willing to contemplate. It can take standing at the edge of Grand Canyon, or some equally immense site to help you understand how vast and how ancient this world is.
A favorite Sandra Boyton card showed a bear standing at the edge of a precipice saying something like: As I stand at the edge of the world, looking into the night sky, I am amazed at how small am I. (I’m sure it’s small and petty of me that what I loved about the card is that you opened it up and it said, “it’s amazing how small you can be.” I would never send the card. But I bought it and it sends me into gales of laughter every time I come across it!)
Sorry, back on track. It’s difficult to live in the vastness. And so we retreat. We can only observe the grandiosity and then have to back off to what we can comprehend. If you read Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” or watch her TED talk, she talks about the wonder of her left brain’s shutting down and the right side, which connects with the universal expanding and expanding and expanding. She loved it, but understood that it was not real world.
Awe is in that universal place. And awe is in awful because we are not able to stay in that universal place. It is at once and the same time wonderful and terrible. Or maybe terrifying. How can there be that much?
And so we retreat back to the mundane. But if we do not continually visit that place of inspiration, we miss at least half of all that makes life wonderful. And I don’t believe that in the face of that wonder, we can feel anything other than connected (by our insignificance). I can’t imagine that you can stand at the South Rim of the Canyon and think “I should own this. and you should not.” Instead you think “this is holy ground.”
So perhaps when we need to make peace, we should go to these sacred places, on our own or with those people with whom we have disagreements and allow the vastness to bring our petty squabbles into perspective. And then we should deal kindly with one another.
There may be nothing more delicious than the quick exchange of shared amusement between strangers. Together, but alone, you notice the same thing, a burst of life that fills you with joy — a joy contagious enough to share, and then having shared to encourage outright laughter.
People are always looking to be amused… and in kindness… it’s only a mitzvah if we share our amazement at the world’s follies with one another.
Be on the lookout for delight. It’s there if you look for it. And fairly often, someone else will be looking too! Enjoy… and laugh!
As a minister, you’d think I would have a regular schedule of retreat and pilgrimage, wouldn’t you? But instead, like the rest of us, I spend my time hurrying from place to place, meeting to meeting, event to event. I don’t remember the last time I sat on a rock in a stream. Particularly on the rock in my steam. or when I waded along the ocean for hours in the morning, running in and out of the waves, simply because I could.
I have the unbelievable luxury in my job of time off in the summer. Time to write and think, of course, because that’s my delight. But also, time to rest and renew and revisit the places that remind me of creation’s beauty and strength.
And maybe if I spend a month practicing the art of appreciation, it will be habit I cannot let go come the beginning of of my work year.
In the meantime it’s pretty beautiful on my porch this morning…
Where do you go, that’s not so very far, to fill up your soul?
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It’s been so hot here and when i went out to the garden to get some herbs, I brushed against the tomato plant… mmmmmmmmm. right back to my youth.
I have read that we remember things better when they lodge in more than one place in our brain. Songs stick, because there are words, rhyme, meter and tune which all help. And scent of the ocean and and and…
If, when we meet people, we would remember that each of us has joys and memories buried deep within, and tried to evoke that, we would find many more things in common. Peace like memory is built on many levels.
p.s. Reading the poem again today was frustrating… I work so fast sometimes that I don’t fully develop an idea or an image… the challenge in pushing out a daily poem… which will change as I edit it for the book…
It’s not that anything particular has happened recently. But I’ve been thinking about the fact that challenges of all sorts do not necessarily keep company with the seasons rhythms. You can lose a job or receive a difficult diagnosis in the midst of the season of bounty as easily as any other season. I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about this before, but perhaps it’s that the seasons and rhythms of our lives trump the year’s turnings…
When this happens, the disconnect between what’s going on outside and what’s going on inside can be great. Whether the challenge is ours or that of a beloved, our job is to remain open and present. Not everyone can do that. It does catch me off guard when people gradually withdraw from a relationship because a partner/friend/colleague has encountered one of life’s great roadblock. Not everyone who’s offered the challenge can stay present in it either.
But, because they’re challenges, they keep offering other opportunities to be the best we can be and to do the best we can. Because in the end, that’s all we can do.