Lemon Peace

Yummmm. Sounds like pie, doesn’t it. Lemon Chiffon? Lemon Meringue? I’m beginning to wonder if August isn’t going to be the month of foods in celebration of the harvest. I could probably do a week on tomatoes! Nature and the seasons keep delivering bounty, what can I do but wonder and write odes!

My friend Susan Willm taught me to make the best lemonade (using the lowly Joy of Cooking Cookbook), although her lemonade was made from, drum roll, Meyers Lemons. Oh, yeah. That raises the bar more than a notch!

I don’t drink lemonade often, but when I do, I’m transported to childhood and delight. It’s one of the few sugary drink treats that Mom ever had in the house. (she must have liked it a lot!) And let’s not forget limeade — swoon.

But lemons… those tart beauties are the beginnings of many favorite things in my life and the transformers of other favorite things. Pour a glass for a friend! Pour a glass for yourself! Drink deeply! Savor the sweet taste of Peace. Consider how sharing increases the delight. Ah, August! Summer!

Sweet August Peace

I know, I know, dog days and all that… but I love the sheer laziness of August accompanied by peaches and watermelon and cantaloup and tomatoes and, and… I love the act of being present to what I eat and of carving out a bit of peace and quiet in a noisy, busy world.

And I admit that I speak as a non agricultural person. I’m not toiling in the noon-day sun for low wages. I am not a gardener (so not a gardener), so I am enjoying the fruits of someone else’s labor… if I really say grace for the food I eat, I must consider the well-being of everyone from local farmers to migrant farm-workers as I celebrate.

But there is also time, indeed there must be time for meditating on the deliciousness of a ripe peach whose juice drips down your face. There’s probably a poem in there… And there’s certainly a peach for me to eat! So I’ll go do that very thing. And I’ll think slow and Peaceful thoughts. You do the very same thing, too, ‘K? I’ve got a bowlful, if you want a peach, I’m happy to share.

And enjoy Nancy Cleaver’s incredibly beautiful mandala: Organic Peace, a water color she painted in 2009. She says this about the design: “This holds an ambiguous natural form for you to interpret. Is it a chrysanthemum, a shell, a seedpod, a cone? Whatever you see, it may perhaps be your totem for peace, calling you.”

Peace calls us and sometimes it just blesses us where we are. For me, August is one of those months.

An End to This Peace Pilgrimage

It was a beautiful trip and I am the luckiest woman in the world to have done this with my sister Deb.

I admit, I found it appropriate to end that amazing trip with a small earthquake. Having spent a lot of time on the West Coast, I have a weird sort of fondness for the small ones. The huge ones are scary, but to know that the earth truly moves, I mean, literally moves and to feel that? is some kind of wonderful. (Remember — it’s not the first time you’ve thought me odd.)

Of everything, I was caught by the sacredness of the experience and the realization that, for me, this was a pilgrimage. It was a very important trip to take with my sister. And it was a very important trip in and of itself. Sweet companionship, awesome, in the ancient, awed sense of that word, scenery and wildlife… and time where I wrote nothing, read very little, especially of value, forgot the news and people’s troubles, and was. They say it takes 3 days to go media free. nonsense. one good hot-tub and you’re ready.

Go cruise the Alaskan Inner Passage. I think you’ll be delighted! And Deb, thanks for the time together, it couldn’t have been sweeter… or more Peace-filled.

Peace Away, Peace at Home

I’m not an outdoor kinda girl, except in theory… and of course, unless it’s a beach or a lake or a pond in the summer. I’m probably the only concrete Pagan Priestess you’ve ever met! But I know how important it is to our well-being to be in nature. This cruise was great this way, it was sorta like living in a travelogue! Look, Nature! Over there, Beauty! (My friend and I loved the list of things that made your brain work longer, brushing teeth, lowering your cholesterol, drinking green tea and watching nature shows. pretty doable, eh?)

But we all need a break from our lives to be able to see our lives. And we all need to make a pilgrimage now and again to a place that reminds us of our insignificance in the face of such grandeur and abundance. We need to practice awe.

This trip offered me that opportunity. Where do you go to be amazed back to silence and Peace? Where are your prayers for a better world startled out of you? Alaska did this for me.

A Peace of Convenience

When I want to decouple from my busy and intense life, I tend to read fluff. Nothing shuts your brain off at the end of the day like a romance, mystery or fantasy novel. Some people like TV; it doesn’t work for me. So, in all of the regency romances (man, I’m REALLY baring my soul here!), there’s conversation about marriages of convenience.

So how is a trip to Alaska like a marriage of convenience you might ask? And what does that have to do with Peace exactly? Well, as I said, it’s not so much a marriage of convenience as it is a village of convenience. 50 people getting to know one another in 10 hour stretches. You find out a surprising amount about people… maybe not so much what they do back in the real world, but how they treat one another, how much they laugh… those things.

Well, Alaska is like Love, it seems, and conquers all. There we all were, hanging out the window oohing and ahhing at every little moose and caribou. We were joined together in wonder… and that made for a very pleasant, Peaceful village. Alaska triumphed and we all lived together Peacefully and happily, with generous offers to trade seats for great photos. It was a short-lived village, but it prospered.

Wonder. Beauty. Nature. It changes us. It helps us make Peace. Why, we wonder, don’t we let that happen more often? Why won’t we do it in the villages where we live and love everyday?

Eternal Sabbath Peace

On a very hot summer day in plain view of the majestic mountain we released a small bit of our parents’ “till.” They were always sorry the mountain was wrapped in clouds when they had traveled there 20 years ago. Today the mountain was in full glory under a cloudless sky. Here their spirits will linger and rejoice in the beauty and the Peace and quiet. Gilead is many places, but the balm is constant.

Lingering on a beautiful day and rejoicing in the bounty is a pretty good idea. Resting in Peace is not something to be confined to the afterlife. We might do well to occasionally put our burdens down and rest in the Peace of Possibility. Wishing you a blessed Sabbath.

Peace? Mostly a Pest

Mosquitoes are part of Nature. I have to keep saying that. I keep trying to find healthy keep aways for them and sometimes resort to the horrible stuff. In Alaska? Horrible stuff. “All day, all night, sucking blood…” (If you’re old enough, you’ll have trouble getting that earworm outta your mind!) My One with Nature philosophy gets completely disrupted by that high pitched whining in your ear. Although these are the basso profundo o mosquitoes! It’s a wonder these puppies fly. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

One of the ways you knew you had begun to see your fellow travelers as your village — as folk waited for the bus to go to the train, those who had had enough foresight (and had believed the rumors) to bring their bug spray along, ritually handed off their deep woods off on the veranda as they left. People were practically weeping. “How can I repay you?” they asked. “Share the wealth!” was always the answer.

But they were the only downside to this incredible park. Somehow the magic of sitting on a deck at 10 pm in the midst of incredible beauty wasn’t tainted by the darned bugs (at least if you shared liberally in the magic potion). The golden light in the season of the midnight sun is an astonishing gift. (Just make sure you make sure the bugs have left the room before you go to bed. They are not fun overnight guests!)

Majestic Peace – Past and Present

My parents made it to Denali, but they never saw the mountain… that and the Galapagos Island were two of Dad’s great regrets. The privilege of Denali, and oh, we saw it and saw it and saw it was magnified somehow by knowing we completed a journey for them.

It’s a gorgeous Mountain. And the terrain is fascinating. Once again, Nature offers us a different glimpse of her power and Beauty. There is great Peace in this land that cannot be disturbed by the humans. A geologist friend says: Mother Earth bats last. In this place, you understand, whatever we do, she will triumph. There are many sweet beings whose existence we threaten, but the powerful Earth will prevail. It’s a sobering thought.

Too Much Water, No Peace

In 1964, the unthinkable happened in Alaska. The largest earthquake… could it really have have been 9.2… happened on Good Friday, March 27, at 5:36 and lasted for 3 minutes. It’s significant that it happened on Good Friday, because everyone was home. Only 143 people died.

I had just moved to San Francisco and was walking down the street when the Loma Prieta Earthquake happened in 1989. It was a frightening and amazing experience. But it was only 6.9 and lasted just 15 seconds. For every tenth of a point, the power of the quake goes up by a factor of 10. I get confused by the math… but I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been. Plates made enormous movements. You wonder what happened to the fish and sea mammals. OK. I looked it up. Sad. But it makes sense. They’re all part of that ecosystem…

And then to have that wall of water sweep up the inlet. Thirty feet high and 90 miles per hour. Could anything be more frightening? That it went that direction saved many lives, because it meant that the tsunami did not hit Anchorage. But it raced up that narrow inlet and inundated Alaska’s farmland, turning it to salt bogs. What a loss.

As our bus driver told these stories, the bus quieted and simply looked out the window… If there was Peace to be found that day, it was in our shared reaction to the devastation.

Departing in Peace

As we ended the cruising portion of the Alaska trip, I was a bit startled by the affection I felt for some of the people there. There was no sense that I might see them again, although some I’d be delighted to. There was simply a sense of having shared something spectacular. Something momentous. And everyone was aware, both of the beauty and of the privilege. And of the Peace. There’s something very calming and as I’ve said, elemental about steaming through that landscape. It’s not often that you get to be in Nature so vast that it overpowers the presence of cruise ships. Earth, Air, Water, in that place seemed empty of its inhabitants and its few observers.

The cruise ship had been large enough that you never had to interact with people, unless you chose to. You were not likely to meet folks again, unless you worked at it. But everyone gasped in wonder at Nature’s Beauty and shared that with whoever was standing by, whether you spoke their language or not.

The UUs sing: Go now in Peace, Go now in Peace, May the Spirit of Love surround you, everywhere, everywhere, you may go…That Peace, that Beauty and that Spirit of Love was something we had beheld together. What a marvelous experience. And for me, it was sweeter because I was with my sisty, Deb. Life really IS this wonderful. I give thanks for all I have seen and done.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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