Peace of Small Steps

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.

The UnPeace of Being Right

I don’t know about you, but I like being right. I like having my opinion born out by the majority. It makes me feel, oh, let’s admit it, smug. But in all honesty, I must admit, smug is not a a flattering choice from the emotional wardrobe. And smug does not draw people to me, to us.

When I was a kid, I was particularly pleased to learn the world supercilious. It rolls around so well in your mouth and has a swell lip-curl of disgust to finish it off. And while there are plenty o’ folk who gather upon recognizing that familiar snarl of superiority, it is not a group that’s going anywhere. It’s a group standing on the mountain of our self-righteousness. You can barely even see into the Valley of Peace from that mount… in fact, we’re all probably facing the wrong direction!

Peace is a journey, perhaps even a dance of hesitation. When we’re standing still, it requires the simple act of being present. Lip movements range from hesitant, hopeful smiles to broad grins. There is no drawing apart, there is only a tentative coming together. How about this? How about that? OK, let’s stand here and enjoy the moment, let’s keep moving forward. And being right and being self-righteous need to give way to righteousness living. Let us not draw apart, let us keep dancing forward. The drums are beating; the bells are sounding; life is longing for Peace.

Peace of Wonder vs Fear

The last couple snows around here have been composed largely of those flakes the size of the palm of your hand. They’re the ones that are large enough that you can actually decode their beauty when they land on you.

And yet, I find myself, as they fall, rather than standing and staring, head back in wonder, squinting instead at the thermometer, worrying about what will happen when the mercury inches up a bit. Because late winter storms often turn to icy rain.

When did this happen? When did I turn into a woman fretting about what might be rather than one joyfully noticing what is? Perhaps my premature timidity is more of body at the moment than of spirit, but where the body goes, so must the spirit follow. I quail at the notion of skating, and yet as a child, we routinely picked up an 85-yo to take along to the pond with us and he would skate majestically too and fro. We hesitate to leave the house (is it that the appropriate footwear isn’t attractive?), and yet entire northern nations hop on their bikes in this winter and toddle off to work. They’re actually rejoicing in the notion that spring is coming when the flakes get large and wet.

Hmph. I think I’m going to have to mull on this a bit — and take some action. Because soon it won’t be just snow that circumscribes my dreams. Fear is a soul eater. Living in the present, pulling out the good, focusing on and magnifying it, offers the senses a banquet.

Peace of Cooperation

Cooperation. It’s an important word. We think so much about achieving goals, that we rarely stop to think that the best things we may get from a joint project derive from working together. The shared sense of accomplishment is important. As exhilarating as it is to pull something off on your own, there’s nothing quite like looking at one another at the end of a haul and saying… we did this. Having someone to kick around possibilities can leverage both the scope and the outcomes of the project. And being able to reflect jointly on the failures and figure out how to recapture lost effort and lost ground is a good indicator that you not only might be able to figure out where you went afield, you also have an increased possibility of finding ways to turn those failures to your advantage. And what’s better? there are long-term health advantages to belonging to a group.

It’s nice to have people invested in a project you care about. While most of us want enough personal risk-taking and satisfaction in a job, it’s good to know that what you think is important is important to someone else. We’re all looking for meaning… and shared meaning deepens the experience.

And then there’s the encouragement piece of cooperation. Sometimes it’s passive — someone else’s success will buoy yours. Sometimes our load is eased by more active encouragement whether it’s a hearty “Well Done!” or a well-timed, “You can do this,” or even an enthusiastic “Look what we’ve accomplished!”

Cooperating means leveraging everyone’s skills (viva les differences!), celebrating the successes (see earlier “Look what we’ve accomplished!” or the comfort of numbers (“we’re all in this together!”). I haven’t checked the studies, but my guess is that a high cooperation rate is a fairly good indicator of success. It’s certainly a pretty good indicator of a good time being had by all — and an assurance that someone will be around to break open that bottle of bubbly something!

On the Peace road, where there are so many obstacles, cooperation makes the journey more comfortable and more enjoyable, and adds a lot to our probabilities of progress. Let’s hear it for the Muppets who start us out early on a great road! And let’s consider how we might cooperate on our journeys toward Peace.

Balancing Peace

Peace is no different than anything else: people go about it in different ways. What’s hard is that there is in the nature of Peace the imperative to work together. When someone’s approach is so different as to be alien to yours, it makes working together challenging, to say the least.

I work best alone or in consultation with other people who work alone but who are interested in pursuing a particular goal. I can play well on teams, where we each rely on our own expertise, but do not do particularly well in institutional settings. My independence can be an irritant and I can find that work style fairly irritating. I went to a meeting the other day and was reminded that it’s not that I can’t play well with others, I just don’t particularly enjoy organized play! Only team sport I ever competed on was swimming. You put your head down and swam your heart out. That works for me.

When I was a kid, I was good at the massive eyeroll about the slow steady nature of institutional work. Now that I’m clear I don’t have to participate, I can appreciate. Because after all, I really want to do only the work I’m good at. That means there’s a whole bunch of other work to be done. I finally got smart enough to look around and see whose work was complementary! At work for instance, I rely on my Director of Religious Growth and learning to supply denominational enthusiasm. When I started to work there, I knew I needed to find a residential UUist. While profoundly UU in spirit, I’m interested in local or regional community and Peace building. I want impact. I can do that work because Sara reminds me where the institution supports that work. She wants process. Luckily we adore and respect one another and are happy to see through one another’s eyes now and again.

Sara’s pretty easy to love and she’s a grown-up and knows her strengths, which makes it very easy to work with her. We laugh enough and make enough progress that it seems she feels the same. We also trust one another to have the best interests of the community on our hearts. And we rely on each other to do the work we can’t do… and we both cast around to find someone to do the work neither of us are gifted at. And that is Peace. It isn’t my working like Sara, completely out of my element, or her working like me, completely out of her element, it takes both of us doing what we’re excellent at and accomplishing our shared goals. We’re building community the only way you can, together, and we’re building it on our differences rather than despite them.

This works for us because we each know ourselves pretty well, we have enough explicit, shared work, goals and values and we are willing to figure out out how to stand together… but as our buddy Mr. Gibran says… not too close together!

Peace on the boil!

Well, it’s nice to be back. Life has been so hectic recently that I haven’t had the time to sit down and write. Good things happening, so I”l tell you more, in another post.

The sugaring image has been tugging at me recently. Lots of effort and lots of ingredients and lots of time required, but oh what sweetness at the end. Peace is a lot like that, while it may be as simple as a smile, there are always logistics to be worked out. But, as with anything worth having, you have to take the time and make the effort to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You work hard, and then you wait. You have to keep the fire banked and burning steadily so you don’t burn the sugar or fail to chase the moisture. If you’re smart, you’ll glory in the process as well. We might as well let go of the notion of simply getting things done, getting past this or that to the sugar at the end. The process makes the sugar sweet, but you can allow the process to be sweet as well. Make some memories to store up for the year ahead. Reflect on your life and the beauty of nature. Have a good time and enjoy your solitude and your company. Live in the time you have.

Not the one tending the fires? You have to invest to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor. We each add our own piece to the process. Our Passion can help keep the Peace fire steadily burning. Maple sugar is a little delight. Peace is a grand one. Maple sugar isn’t good for everyone. Peace is good for everyone. Enjoy your Maple sugar judiciously. Spread Peace on everything. Peace awaits our hands to do the work and our hearts to take the time.

Sweet and Peaceful Sabbath

While for many the Sabbath is celebrated as the first day, a day of looking forward, I still cherish the notion of its ending the week. When you’ve worked hard, then comes rest and relaxation. In our world, it seems we have to play as hard as we work, but there is much to be said from what can grow from the idle contemplation of a fire… particularly when the fire’s boiling down the sap into syrup. mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Sweet Life. Sweet Peace.

Peace of More Possibilities

I saw this great quote yesterday and used it in my musing for today: Manning Marable, a professor of African American Studies, said: “Grace is the ability to redefine the boundaries of possibility.” You know me, if I’d have said that, I’d have had exclamation points abounding. His was a simple emphatic statement.

We forget that when we wake up to a new day that more is possible today than we dreamed was possible yesterday. Now we could say that we failed to imagine yesterday’s possibilities and thus sold it short. And that might be true. But what he reminds us is that there’s no reason to be constrained by outmoded notions of what we can do.

To think less, to act on less is to give up. It’s the thinking that keeps the world small and divided. It’s thinking, quite frankly, that keeps making the world smaller. We need to take as mentors, people who dared. Big people, certainly. But look around you. There are people daring everywhere you look. Hitch your star to theirs! Spend time with those who imagine. You’ll become someone who imagines as well. And see that? Possibility expanded, the world just got larger.

Valentine Peace

I recently read an article that said you can’t love the whole world, that that’s just too big a concept for our hearts to comprehend. I rarely argue with science, because science, like gravity usually wins. But if Peace depends on Love, because really, I don’t think tolerance is strong enough for Peace, then how do we get around our own very real constraints.

Certainly getting around our constraints to loving is the hard work of Peace. I think perhaps all I can do is love the people I encounter. And if you love the people you encounter and we love each other then love begins to spread across the world. It’s not easy, that’s for sure. Because loving the people I encounter requires going to my highest self. It means loving people despite, perhaps even because of their messy humanness. It means loving myself when I’m less than lovely. It means loving you when you step on one of my corns. It also means loving people who do really unpleasant things. It means, oh, darn it, releasing not judgment but judgmentalism. If I’m going to love, I have to find a way to accept people who stand for things that I abhor, even as I work to change those things, despite my awareness of them. It means being kind, when I am so gifted at snarky.

It doesn’t mean nice, which is such a namby-pamby kinda word. It means passionate about the world and its possibilities. Love is a demanding dance partner. But, oh! how our feet will fly!

Author’s note: as I was adding tags to this post, I noticed that love was not one of my tags. Slow, slow, slow to love the world. Still, we try. Enjoy this day of loving and being loved.

Peace Dream Slivers

Reading the newspaper is a huge part of my prayer life. At my best, when I read, I try to focus on the places in the world in need of peace and send them prayers of peace. There are some that I can then act on, and some I must simply keep praying on.

I work to stay centered on lifting up (or as we say in FB parlance) sharing only those things about which our prayers can move us forward. I am easily moved to outrage by stupid stuff, so I try to save my outrage for the stuff that matters. Violence against Women, for instance. You’ll see me be fairly outraged about the ongoing use of women and our bodies and our safety as a tool in war and our complete disregard of that reality. Yep. Outrage. But I try not to rile (too much) when a member of the larger clergy community (using that term oh-so-loosely) is a jerk. There are as many jerk ministers as there are jerk anythings; we’re just more dangerous because we have pulpits.

Well, now that I have that off my chest, perhaps I can get to where I was going when I wrote the title. Peace Slivers. Little pieces of Peace. Sometimes they’re a broken off bit of a larger dream, but sometimes they are tiny little dreams that can actually be carried out. Maybe by you, because it’s a tiny little change you could make in your life that would make you more peaceful, or even your corner of the world. Like smiling at strangers on the street. That can make everyone’s day sweeter. But maybe by someone else. And when I say someone else, I’m not thinking about those, “oh, hey, here’s this thing that I don’t want to do, but if I ruled the world, I would make everyone do it: kinda thing. No, I’m thinking about looking at a tiny little something and being struck by how much that thing is tailor made for someone you know. It may in fact be so tailor made that they already do it.

Nothing spreads peace faster than noticing someone for doing something wonderful and complimenting them on it. And sometimes you can help someone notice the impact they have… or the impact they could have. “Oh, you do this so wonderfully, have you ever considered adding this little thing to what you’re already doing?” or “Wow, have you ever thought about this being your work, you’re so good at it and it gives you such joy.”

But whatever we do with the scraps, it’s worth saving them up into a container. Then on a rainy day when we need a little Peace success, we can pull one out and work on it. Or perhaps we can go through our Peace scraps with a friend and see how this little idea of ours fits with that little idea of theirs and pretty soon we can start a Peace joint venture. We’re not here to save the world on our own. We’re just here to do our work. Our work is Peace. Peace is a communal effort… and communal efforts can be, should be fun. Peace slivers — they’re good for what ail you!

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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