Forsythia Sabbath Peace, llvl

I love the promise of forsythia (can violets be far behind?). All that sunny, beautiful yellow. It simply hollers Spring.

Happy Easter (Western and Eastern Easter are on the same day this year!). Glad Pesach. Happy Spring (we’re actually a month after the Equinox, but the weather’s staying chilly, hence the late April forsythia in Central PA.). Much of the world will be celebrating sacred holidays today all of which have Hope in common. May that Hope spill out on the rest of the world.

The turning of the seasons brings back such memories and such opportunities to make more memories. Remember. Re-member. Piece Back together the times that came before.

So much to look forward to, so much to enjoy right here. I’m going to go sit beside this river and eat breakfast with my sweetie — it will be a fine start to a wonderful day!

What ever you celebrate may you be filled with Hope. And may you have a wonderful Peace-filled Sabbath, reveling in the Beauty and the Possibility. And what the heck. I’m up and on time on East Coast time!

The Peace of Candlemas Light, LLVL

It’s fitting that the new Moon starts building on Candlemas, a season dedicating our Light to its Purpose. Let there be more LIght and may I be one who bears it, one who is it.

It is at Candlemas, historically, or Imbolc, that people took their vows of service.

Here’s an opportunity, my dears, everyday a new chance to say what do I want to BE, what do I want to DO, not when I grow up, but next. Not like do I want to go to the movies, but like do i want to change the world, even my small corner of it. I hope so.

People here in my little town are doing a polar bear plunge (what are they crazy?) for charity… that’ll change their lives. But it’s a dedication. and hopefully no one will slip on the ice going into the river. People may not be thinking about the symbolism, but it’s hard to ignore…

I’m skipping the icy bath, but will spend some time thinking about my light and what it’s dedicated toward…

That focus was deepened last night as I sat in a tavern laughing with friends, stepped in on a little harmony, and just reveled in a little town enjoying itself. It gives me hope that we can make a huge difference by building on that camaraderie, building Peace on Love and Laughter.

This little light of yours… what are you going to do with it? Let it shine? Let it shine for Peace? oh, i hope so. Altogether now…

Being Present to Hope and Peace LLVL

Snow brings me joy. Even hunkered down against the cold. I’m happy for the brightness and the mysterious piles of white. Days like this when it’s cold and the sun shines, the entire world sparkles… It’s too cold for even the cars to make the snow gunky.

While I know it’s dangerously cold, and you have to be well-clad against its dangers, when you’re on the inside, it’s a soft and comforting blanket, keeping me safely indoors. (easy to wax eloquent when you don’t have kids clamoring to be out!)

Sitting last night by candle light, writing Charlie’s memorial, flanked by Marlin’s picture of Deb and Mary’s portrait of Charlie, there was a lovely feeling of gratitude as I remembered the love. That certainly brought in Hope in the midst of the melancholy. Love really lasts. And we can call on it when we need it. We’ve got to make room but it’s willing to rush in.

Gratitude for the Past. Love in the Present. Hope in the Future. That’s what Peace is built on when you’re living la vida local. Right here. Right now.

Stories for Peace

The Dark is the time of Sacred Stories. We are asked to recall and recite the stories that make sense in our lives, the stories that make sense of our lives. Every time we tell them, a layer is added. The meaning deepens in the telling and so do our connections to the stories.

We have choices about the stories we tell. We have choices about how we tell the stories, what is it we want them to teach us. We even have choices about the way our stories evolve, because we can make choices about how we live our lives.

When I started this year, I decided to let a new storyline emerge. I wanted to explore Peace in my life. Writing about Peace every day, no matter how obliquely has turned me into a Peace-Considerer and is moving me toward Peace-maker. Choosing to capitalize Peace and other nouns that lead toward it, while choosing to take power away from unpeaceful nouns by keeping them lowercase has had impact, on me, if not on others. The capital (particularly from someone who is capital challenged) is a small, lingering caress. I pay attention to the Peaceful details of the stories I tell.

And oh they matter, those stories. I’m trying to collect them about a friend of mine, who died a week ago. He was a wacky, wonderful guy with a sly sense of humor and a penchant for collecting things and people and stories. and awful jokes. There are so many Charlie-stories worth telling. Telling them well, next week when we have the memorial will help those stories settle into our collective hearts and become part of our history.

Telling Charlie stories will ease our sorrow and shape our shared future and perhaps our individual ones as well. That’s what stories do, the bring the past into the present and offer a path into the future. And if you make your stories stories of Peace, you will build a future of Peace. The more people in your stories, the more people on your Peace road. So observe so you can collect those stories, practice so you can tell them and listen to what you say so you know what to tweak and what to do next. Which ones exhort you to show up? Which make you reflect? Which count the blessings of sweet memories made from your feats of derring-do and your moments of collective lolling about.

Tell the stories that make you happy, make you laugh. Tell the stories that remind you that your heart bruises. Remind yourself of big work completed and little times enjoyed. Tell the stories that help you remember what you stumble over. Remember what you’re proud of. Tell the stories of how Love grows, and Hope and Joy. Tell them simply or embellish the heck out of them. But most of all? Enjoy each and every one of them. Peace, my friends… Happy Story-telling!

Expect Advent Peace

What if we just did that? What if we just expected it to be Peaceful and then acted as if it had happened? How would the world change?

This isn’t like wishing for a pony for Christmas, this is expecting that you will care for all ponies because ponies are needful.

This is an expectation of yourself that you will be Peace. In Advent, in the sacred season of coming into being… This is an unwillingness to expect any less, not only of yourself but of others and then loving yourself and your neighbors when we fail and encouraging us all to try again.

Expect Peace. The world needs you to ask the very best from it, to not settle from less. Part of expectation is going back again and again and again, and asking for more. Advent: Hope. Love. Joy. Peace. The hard work of Advent is expecting all of that. C’mon, I have great expectations of us.

Appreciate, Hope, Advent, Peace

Appreciate. Esteem. Honor. To know the worth of and to value. To understand the implications of. To take seriously.

Hard work, all of these. Tricks of the trade too infrequently brought into play. We rarely even use the words, let alone exercise the skills….

For example, to appreciate Nelson Mandela is not simply to see who he was as he died, but to understand who he was to become that man. There’s such trash on the internets at the moment, decrying his early actions. Really, do you not understand how a man has to be someone spectacular to grow through everything that happened to him to become the man he was?

After two plus decades of hard labor he chose to leave bitterness and hatred behind. To appreciate Mandela is to esteem him, but it is also to understand those implications. He made space to transform himself and to be transformed. In that space he transformed his people, his country his world.

I appreciate his courage Peacemaking. I appreciate his journey. Not fully, I’m sure. Nothing has ever been that hard in my life. I pray that nothing ever will. And I pray that lack of hardship doesn’t limit my ability to pour myself into Peace. I pray it doesn’t hinder you. Let us Hope.

Advent, Sabbath, Hope, Peace

This is the first Sunday of Advent. I love this Season of Expectation. While I’ve traveled fairly far from my roots, the process of discerning what in fact I am expecting is a delightful, contemplative process, best undertaken in a lot of candlelight. It’s been interesting in that journey to discover Advent’s roots outside Christianity… Life is rich that way!

What in fact I am expecting in my life, in the world? Considering this will be fascinating this year as I’m in a very different place in my life than i was 6 months ago. In the midst of this great loss there is also a great deal of freedom of choice and a fair amount of indecision…

And along comes Advent. The first Sunday you light the candle of Hope. I wonder, what are the dreams you harbor for your life, for your family and for the world? What do I? This week’s prayer might be something like this:

May I be a person who believes that the world is a good place, that things can be made better and that I might be an instrument of Hope in the world. Blessed Be.

Light a candle, sit down where you can see it and think about that while relaxing into your Sabbath Peace. Notice what happens when you do that!

Do-It-Yourself Peace

I’ve had a lot of cause to be thankful to FB over the last couple months. I wasn’t really seeing anyone, so, my friends around the corner were reaching out on FB the same way my friends in Sweden were. And it was great. I am so thankful. Because I still haven’t been able to turn my hand (okay, my heart) to my thank you notes or to casual phone calls or tea encounters.

But in the same time period, and perhaps always, but I’m just a bit more sensitive at the moment, there has been a whole lot of whining going on.

Now, i am a champeen whiner. The tireder I get; the more vigilant I have to be. wah… Life is too hard. My (fill-in-the-blank) doesn’t understand me, was mean to me, doesn’t know i’m alive. We all need to do some whining it lets off pressure, but then, I believe, we need to stop whining and get back into it. Because i don’t feel better when I sing that song, I feel justified. And that? Gets us nowhere!

Right now the political whining is at a frenzy. It’s their fault, she(he)’s a horrible person so I can complain and do nothing to help the rest of society. As a favorite shrink used to say, “where is it written?”

Here’s the deal folks. People are hungry. In our country we collect money in plastic canisters in stores to pay for life-saving operations for children. People are living without heat, without shelter. None of these things, none, is acceptable.

We don’t get to Peace; we don’t get to Justice; we don’t get to full-bellied children by doing nothing. We don’t get to any of those places by going backward. We only get to those places by moving forward. By forging coalitions. Much of what we have to give up in forging those coalitions are entitlement and whining. We have to want what’s best for someone else as well as ourselves.

In the next two days, I’m going to go fix the page at Love Flows, in case you’re local and you want to donate money to help the UUCSV feed people in the Susquehanna Valley, I’ll give you the link.

But you may not live right here. We’d be happy to have your money, but so would your hometown. How can you get involved?
Build something constructive rather than tearing something down that someone else has done.
Add to life, don’t take away from it.
Get informed — not about how stupid others are — but about what’s needed.
Work locally to make a difference.
Join with others to make life better.
And stop whining. Because it doesn’t make you look smart. It just makes you look mean.

Then let’s just get busy building Peace. And Hope. And Justice. Because we’re just the folks to do it.

Wisps of Peace

Driving across the bridge yesterday, I was ambushed by the beauty. Sweet wisps of fog dancing on the river’s surface as the sun rose.

One of the challenges of mourning is making space for beauty. To some extent you live in a fog. One foot in front of the other, doing what needs to be done. Staring into space, occasionally curling into a ball.

I have gotten by with a great deal of help from my friends. One of the odd things about grief is that you’re very muzzy-headed, so to have to make loads of decisions is hard. But the ending of a life brings nothing but decisions. and stuff. it brings lots of stuff. and I am so easily overwhelmed by stuff and details in the best of times. so you can imagine how it is now.

There have been angels. People who swoop into my life and in an hour or two, make it different. People who offer. People who write or call. people who prop you up. People who surround you because your boundaries are about as fuzzy as your brain. I’ve recently taken to describing this brain as acid etched. Whole pieces are missing.

I’ve partnered with grief enough to know that your brain eventually rebuilds, the holes reconnect — but in the meantime. sheesh. It’s the silly things, you know. A book in the series of a favorite author came out and I fell on it joyfully. Distraction. But I found myself really annoyed that she was referring to a period in this character’s life as if I should know it. Why would I know this? I was almost finished with the book when I realized, oh, I should know this because the last book was about this. But I’d completely forgotten. When I finally fished the book out of my shelves, I remembered, but it was gone.

If grief had not been a frequent companion in my past, I might have panicked. As it was, I thought, “Ann, pay attention, because you’re not working with a full brain. Keep your expectations low… and be safe.”

So to have beauty pierce the fog of mourning is delightful. And what was lovely was that it wasn’t only my fog that beauty was piercing. It was also piercing the fog of the morning, no “u.” And while all the heavy fog had fled, there remained small columns of vapors drifting together across the water. It was exquisite. Last week I drove through the Poconos and the colors were changing. Every once in a while a tree would scream color and beauty and dare me to ignore the bounty. I was about to talk how Autumn is particularly beautiful, but perhaps what I need to say is that each season has a particular beauty that opens us, and helps us remember that this will end.

Wisps of Peace. All I can appreciate; all I can withstand at the moment. But still, Beauty is. Hope is. Peace is. Even in the fog of mourning.

Faith in Peace

You’ve got to keep building. Even when it looks bleak, build. Because you build in Faith and make space for Peace.

Today, Lewisburg is having its Arts Festival. 10,000 people will come through on a perfect Spring day. Surely some of them are going to want to make a contribution to Love Flows and help some recovery workers get showers, aren’t they? Well, in Faith, I’m going to give them that opportunity.

All we are saying… you know how that song goes. All these years later, we’re still saying/singing it!

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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