Letting Extreme Storms Move Us to Peace

I’m reading Active Hope by Joanna Macey and Chris Johnstone. It’s a wonderful book designed to draw us back from despair and lead us into engagement. I heartily recommend it. It’s worth thinking about. Mother Earth needs us to think about these things if she is to provide us a world we can live in.

We are quickly tipping into unsustainable levels of destruction. It’s our Earth. Our decisions. What are we going to do?

Fretting and sending recovery money are not the answer.

Let us decide on Peace and act accordingly.

The Earth Says I Am Here. Do We Respond, “Peace?”

We live on this beautiful planet Earth. Too often we pay no attention to that fact.

And the Earth is paying a price. Because the Earth is paying a price. The bigger price the Earth pays, the less she can support us.

It’s that simple. We must say Peace to the Earth. And act on it. The Earth is our Mother. We must love her as such.

Because if we’re not concerned with this relationship, we limit our ability to build Peace. It’s an issue of Justice: the most deeply impacted are the most marginalized and poor. It’s an issue of bounty: She must be healthy to feed us well. It’s an issue of quality of Life: we need clean air and water and soil. It’s an issue of Beauty: Nature moves us with her outrageous Beauty. It’s an issue of Peace. Our issue of Peace.

Touch and Honor Your Grounding in Peace

The world is incredible. Too often we don’t pay enough attention to the Beauty that is gifted to us. And not paying attention we neither honor it or care for it.

It leaves us off-center and it leaves the world vulnerable. No one’s paying attention.

We must stand for the Earth. She is our Mother. And mistreating her is the stupidest kind of self-abuse. Because as she changes, so do our lives. Climate change is real and very dangerous.

And not only that. When we’re not firmly grounded, we think too much, talk too much from a place not our center. Let us touch the Earth, give thanks for all we have and only then move into planning and action.

Ponds of Peace

My brother is a deliberate man. He, unlike his speed demon sister(s), studies things, thinks about them, and gradually goes about working his way through whatever he’s doing.

So he is with ponds. He decided he wanted to build a pond up on the mountain. So for a year he read about it. And he built one. And then he built a second one. Cindy and he got crazy with this one. They’ve filled it up with native fish and other nibbling things. They put the right plants (including the oh, my goodness, mountain cranberries) in and around the pond. It looks sort of murky, but when you cup your hands and bring the water up it’s crystal clear. It’s a living pond. It’s gorgeous.

And it’s oh, so swimable, if you don’t mind those nibbly moments in your close encounters of the fishy kind.

The water is silky and smooth and it was perfect for swimming… or, well, floating. Tom and I both got a little weepy thinking about how much the parents and debbie’s family would have love the pond. And all of them and then eventually most of us, will wind up in the blueberry patch that overlooks the pond, good ash making the soil just a bit more fertile.

The night before, a mama deer and her fawn had bedded down where we’ll end up. Cindy’s a hunter, but she has a big safe space around the house and a woods that mama lives in where no one hunts and few even walk. Mother Earth at her most grand.

Nature, getting back to itself. There is so much Peace in this land. So much Peace in that pond… just a really sweet balance in life on earth… I gave thanks and reveled in Peace, Love and all the bounty of their garden. Late summer. It’s an amazing thing. And, oh, my goodness, somehow summer has drifted into September… Peace.

Peace Symbols — Resting in Peace

Many of us where symbols of our tradition on our persons. When we die they adorn our graves. In the past our graves have been kept separately… Religion from religion and sometime sect from sect.

In the town my brother in law grew up, The Catholics and the Protestants are on one side of the road. The Methodists and the Lutherans have driving paths between them…

Too often our symbols pronounce you’re not like me — which in some ways means you’re not of my heart, my flesh. But you are. Huh… so, Ann are you beginning to develop a theology about cemeteries? Are you beginning to think that we should lay down together, jumbled together in eternity as we are in life?

I know that that’s an anathema to some traditions. And I’m simply feeling my way forward — and really I care more how we jumble up in life. How i sit with you and know you as my friend? That is the work of life, isn’t it? and then together to be friends to the rest of the world and to Mother Earth?

May our symbols remind our hearts of the work we are called to do or even if we will the way we were called to live. May we live in Peace. and when it is all over, may we die into the Peace of our Mother Earth…

Oh, and the fairy crosses? found in Georgia and Virginia. Not surprisingly, they have legends surrounding them.

Peaceful Winter Food

When I was taking acupressure courses, one of them was on foods. Our teacher was very clear that we were to eat foods that were grown within a 50 mile radius and appropriate to the season.

If it’s winter, it must be root vegetables. And if you’re lucky, tasty bitter greens grown in a cold frame

To eat from our region is to honor the Mother Earth. It is to honor our bodies. It is to honor Peace.

It is to take from what is available to us which means to leave what must be available to others. So many times what the West needs is grown where those from the Southlands might have.

Let us eat in Peace.

Supporting Peace in Advent and Every Single Day

If Peace is what I long for and speak for and work for, then I must have support for that work.

I must find internal support — for me that’s my spiritual practice. As an extrovert and an activist, I don’t always find enough time for my practice. Oh it was sweet yesterday to walk the labyrinth on the Solstice. Remember Ann, remember. find time for that.

And then there is the community. I am so joyful at the community support and interaction that I enjoy — and that I’ve finally figured out how to live in that. I’ve always been such a loner… not an easy characteristic for an extrovert!

But supporting: both being supported and being supportive. Both of these are crucial to our quest for Peace — and Peace on Earth and with the Earth is crucial to our well-being.

Supporting Peace. During Advent and the rest of the year.

Alternative Advent – December 22: 20¢ for every meal you ate in a restaurant this week.

Breezy, Leafy Peace

So many of the leaves are down, but plenty are still clinging to the trees. Enough that we’ll be raking for days to come.

Driving yesterday, the sun picked out color on the burnished hills. Here and there there were still a few golden spots although the color was darkening toward copper.

It’s November. Time for beautiful, empty, black branches upthrust against a cold, grey, rainy sky.

Although we don’t seem to have much rain, just beautiful, beautiful blue, blue skies and unseasonably warm temperatures. It’s the time of the Moon when you have to get up pretty late at night (or pretty early in the morning) to catch the moon resting in the embrace of those empty branches. But if you do… it’s worth it, and the skies have been clear and starry.

I’ll take the Beauty and say thank you. I’ll take the Beauty and say Peace on Earth.

The Moon! More Beauty! More Peace!

I have such a strong sense of home as I drive along that river, something deep within me responds. It’s gorgeous every day of the year and every time of the day.

But there’s something magical about the night. Add a full moon and that wide, flat river is content and so Peaceful — and so am I. I’m always amused/amazed that for someone as wedded to the indoors as I am, I have a visceral reaction to my river, my valley… and even, my moon!

On this last drive the reflection of the trees built another kingdom in the water — the moon was that bright. Add to the joy of home that childhood belief that there’s another world under the surface of the water that looks just like this one. I always wonder who lives there and what they do and how that’s different from the ways we live here. I know, I’m supposed to be a grown up, but it never stops me wondering. Maybe it’s more Peaceful. Maybe we should pay closer attention.

And, maybe, I should just enjoy it. And consider what I might learn about Peace in the moonlight along the Susquehanna. Enjoy the Moon tonight. It’s the last SuperMoon of 2015. Bask!

And Dance by the Light of the Moon

Ah the sky. It offers such delight. Eyebrows at twilight. Clouds at dawn. Stars. Oh, my. Stars. And then our beautiful Moon.

Writing about the Moon has helped me get out there to see it. To look up. Just to stand still and be in the night…

We live in this beautiful world. We need to observe it and appreciate it.

That’s the only thing that’s going to help us protect it.

Last night the strongest Hurricane ever made landfall. Extreme storms are part of global climate change. What are we going to do?

Peace is up to us. Do we want it? Maybe that’s what that cocked eyebrow was telling me.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

Tag Archives: Mother Earth