Tag Archives: joy

Laughing, Adventuresome Peace

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Watching a niece the other day, I had to admit to myself that I’ve become very sedentary about adventuring. My mind is adventuresome, but i don’t take the rest of me off exploring very often. I have Important Work, you know. I have A Great Deal to Do. Peace Must Be Made, you know.

Sigh. Be it here resolved. That I Ann Keeler Evans, Priestess and Poet, (you have grandiose names for yourself, right? Come on!!!) is declaring herself Ann Keeler Evans, Adventuresome Poet and Priestess. Sweet Drummer and I are going to find an adventure this week and then make a practice of including more Joy in our lives. Chores to be accomplished will have an element of adventure thrown in. Time to find (refind) the Magic of Everyday and the Magic of the Deliberate Adventure. I’m going to practice at this a bit. Start collecting that laughter lying around. Because really? Peace isn’t going to be worth lots if we’re not laughing all the way.

PeaceMay6

Community Peace

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Sometimes it works. When it does, take a moment and celebrate. Fasten that in your memory. Won’t always be this smooth, won’t always be this great. But when it is, it’s a reminder of why we do the work. It’s a call to be present so you don’t miss the moments. It’s all about the Joy. And on your way to Joy … and bien sûr Peace? Dance to the music!

This concert was one of the sweetest moments I can recall, because so much was right. hurrah!

PeaceApril8

The Peace of Many Celebrations

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Welcome to the weekend! Religious festivals overlap in a joyous burst of New Life. In the Spring it’s not just the Christians and the Pagans together at the table, as that sweet song says, there are lots of us digging out family recipes and putting the extra leaves in the tables.

Too many folk think this is a reason to snip and snarl (when we’re not decorating eggs or hunting out our Seder plate),but this is a reason to be joyous. What ties us together is that we are all celebrating. Mother Earth is calling us all back to life. Menus may collide or need some adjustment, but may your feasts be traveling one and may you get to know your neighbors and their religious practices. May Peace break forth with the flowers and may we be the reason why. Enjoy and sweet blessings of the holidays to you. let’s see… gefilte fish, peanut butter eggs, bitter salad greens… priestess or glutton, you decide!

PeaceMarch29

The Peace of a January Fool

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Are we willing to count the world well lost for Peace? Are we willing to embrace the absurd notion that society can be based in love and tolerance? People say it’s a foolish and simplistic notion that we can live in Peace. OK. It’s not that I’m unwilling to address the complex issues, but I am unwilling to allow the complexity to overwhelm the possibilities of Peace. Because Peace is what we are called to, or so I believe.

Far more is possible than we know. Let’s risk it. Joy is more present than we allow. Let’s live it. Let us be fools for Peace, risking being thought absurd to bring about change on earth, for the earth and all its peoples. As a notion, it’s perhaps a little grandiose… but it’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday, and the beginning of a President and Vice President’s next four years. Whether you voted for them or not, I would hope you would join me in wishing them well, and in wishing that they dedicate themselves to their country’s well-being and a Peaceful, prosperous world. May that be so for all the world’s leaders.

My friend Blair Monie used this in his sermon yesterday morning. Here we are: more fools for Peace: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way. Because I heard the voice saying: do something for others.” –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Peace of Spectacular Failure

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Failure is how we learn things. It’s how we grow. If we’re not willing to experiment, we never stretch our minds and our resources. Failure keeps us humble and it keeps us laughing. And goodness knows we need to be laughing. Whatever else I know about Peace, it’s not all earnestness. There’s a great deal of shared laughter.

We need to stretch our abilities. We need to dream big. This means we might fail in a rather spectacular way. Ok. So, laugh, reconsider, try again. Practice failing at things that don’t matter so that you’re used to missing the mark. But don’t practice by pulling the target so close that you can’t help but hit it. Push it back. Imagine differently, more generously.

If you take your work and your life seriously, you’re going to keep experimenting. It may seem counter-intuitive that taking your life seriously also means being willing to laugh uproariously at your failures… and then to learn from them.

So, my dears, Dream. Try. Win a little(or a lot). Fail a little(or a lot). Laugh. Reconsider. Try again. That way lies Peace. (and a lot of laughter, shared and otherwise!)

Sunset Peace

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My mother Betty was a landscape artist. Thanks to her, we spent a lot of time captivated by what was going on outside. I now know that she taught me first to look and then to see. One of the things we saw was sunsets. In her quest to teach us about beauty, she had two helpers with sunsets.

First, on the days that Mom had the car (remember those days when families had one car!) we went down to pick Daddy up from the carpet mill where he was a dye chemist at 4:30. We drove directly West. For some parts of the year the sun and clouds would be inescapable.

Second, our dining room faced west. Mom taught me a lot about stopping whatever you were doing to look at the sunset. This served me well when I lived in the Oakland hills and would watch the sun travel its path between South San Francisco to Mt. Tam and back, offering a different sunset delight every day. The Gods of the Bay Area must love sunset, because it was often the clearest part of the day.

Deb wound up with both Mom’s sunset paintings. We all visit them when we visit her. The painting above is Mom’s view out our diningroom window. So it won’t surprise you that I find a joyful Peace in sunset… or that I stop and gulp to gawk at the beauty.

Shared Laughter

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!

The Swing

I’m going to have to think a bit more about the whole Swinging for Peace. In the meantime here’s Stevenson’s sweet old poem. As true now as in 1913.

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside–

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown–
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

Robert Louis Stevenson