Tag Archives: magic

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

Pink Moon Peace

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The Pink Moon is named after a small Pink wildflower… wild phlox perhaps. It rises majestically on a beautiful pink and white world. A world where everything is new and hopeful and soft and fluffy. pretty grand, actually.

Everything seems possible in the midst of so much beauty. Even Peace. Perhaps because this weather brings so much joy, it just seems you can’t get away from the beauty, and you find yourself exclaiming in delight to whoever happens to be next to you. So, if Peace is potentially more possible now than in Winter’s cold which makes us burrow or Summer’s heat which makes us slothful. Let’s have at it. Onward. Peacemaking. Spring. (wait, let me take a claritin! ahhhhhhhhhh. that’s the ticket.)

PeaceApril26

Peace of Small Steps

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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.

PeaceFebruary26

Peace and Magic Making

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I’ve been living, as the poem below says, in Mercedes Lackey’s Valedmar, filled with Mages and Companions. It’s been lovely. I was tired and depleted, and it’s been a grand vacation. When you can’t lie on a beach, go to the library!

I don’t read sci-fi in general, rather I read a very small segment of the genre, women’s fantasy, often sword and sorcery fantasy. (and THAT’s about the most I’ve ever admitted in public!) I read it for three reasons, first because it completely interrupts the real world. It helps me stop thinking. When you live in this brain, stopping thinking is an occasional blessed relief — maybe even a rite of holy obligation! Second, I like the that the heros and heroines are always striving for a better world. In my world, I find inertia and stagnation often drags me down, tempts me to ignore my calling to do the same, seduces me to work around my values and beliefs. Heroines on paper? Nevah! Third? I’m beginning to think that authors’ use of magic is really about their longing for to create Peace, which is, I believe, the biggest magic we have available to us in this world.

In this series, I was really struck by the the author’s description of the aftermath of the working of great magic, the disruption it causes in the world. She was envisioning storms arising from a working of great evil, in increasingly larger ripples. But isn’t that how things are? One little action, and sooner or later, ripples begin to spread. With evil-doing, the ripples are two-fold: greater acts of violence and increased indifference them. But isn’t it the same with acts of Peace. One person acts and another is encouraged. One person acts, exposing the ugly root and another sees and acts for the good.  We have choices about the ripples we want to put into the world. Indifference or action? Violence or Peace? Willful Blindness or Vision and open hearts?

It’s January, almost February. Here we are, gathering the shards together to begin building our own Dream for Peace, however great or small. Those dreams as we implement them will cause ripples. When people see us act for good, they are empowered to do the same.