Winter Peace

It is cold outside, I have to acknowledge that. But I’ve decided not to fret about it this year. It’s not going to be too cold. It’s not going to be too hot. It’s going to be life. I live in the Northeast. We have winter. It rains. It sleets. It snows. It’s cold and windy. It is what it is. Because you know what? Life gets cut short. And then there’s no time to spend together.

And if we spend our time together wishing our way our time together, we’re not having time together. I spent a lot of time last year working on improving my relationship to the dark and searching for the mystery. I think I’ll spend a lot of time this winter looking for (and finding!) the beauty.

I’m going to buy marvelous potions and lotions and slather myself in them.

I’m going to wrap up against the cold and take long walks. I’ve got the gear. Why not try it out?

I’m going to hope for snow and be glad to shovel.

I’m going to light candles in my house and keep the tea and oranges coming. I’ll keep my house clean and cozy.

And I’m going to give up wanting the clock to move in anything other than its stately progression. I’m going to work to be present and self-reflective. Because this is the time I have with you. This is the time I have with me.

So Winter is going to be all about Peace for me. It’s going to be about wonder and the sacred, sacred Dark. It’s going to be more work on living my life as a prayer of thanksgiving. I hope it will be for you as well. Because it certainly is beautiful. And this is our time.

Autumn Peace Swimming

I love swimming. You can’t have read these for long and not have gotten clear about that. And swimming out of doors, whether in a creek, the ocean or a pool. The best. But swimming anywhere? I’ll take it.

The pool where I swim in the winter is in a room on the end of the building, windows all around. No matter what’s going on outside, the water remains a cozy 84˚. The air is even more balmy (unless you get too close to the doors on a winter’s day.). Sometimes I get to the pool in the afternoons and it’s empty except for the guard and I do my work out chatting with Tara and enjoying nature. It’s wonderful. Oh, look, there’s an eagle. Funny that wind last night didn’t take all the leaves off that tree…

But it’s also wonderful in the early mornings, when the pool’s open before class. The ladies come drifting in for their stretching and aerobics classes. It’s such a delight to hear them chatter. Catching up on their days, talking of bargains, of plants and old friends. Giggling. Comfortable in their bodies and in their lives. Grumbling a bit about the inconveniences, but present. Showing up to life and the moment. Counting their blessings and sharing them with the person next to them and the one across the circle.

May I be such a one. Swimming still. Reveling in the full-bodied embrace of water on flesh. Enjoying my friends and the morning gathering. Life is still rich and they’re generous with stories and lessons and laughter. Ah… Keeps me going back because this is the exercise that feels most like joy to me. And that makes the exercise sacred for me. Joy in my body. Joy in my heart. Peace in my mind and soul. It doesn’t get better than this for me.

Present for Peace

Everyone’s life is busy. And when you add our illusion of control to our to do list, we begin to think our tasks are monumentally important. And it’s clear, says one over her head in tasks, that sometimes tasks require an immense amount of attention.

However, in the midst of that busyness, we are often asked by friends or even strangers to show up. Every instinct screams that we don’t have time… sometimes that’s right, but we need to be sure.

Because often the very most important thing we can do is to do less than our stellar best on a task and make time for a relaxed, human encounter. My parents drilled this into me. They were at a friend’s house once. The friend was dying. They’d gone for a visit. “Stay,” he said. “Tasks,” they said. He died that week. “Never do that,” they said to us. “Never.”

We need to prioritize Friendship. We need to prioritize Love. We need to prioritize Life’s Sacred Passages and show up for them. Houses may be messy, grass un-mown, but cups of tea and glasses of beer or wine will be had, shoulders will be cried on. Funerals will be attended, conversations will be frank, people will get the ride they need to the doctors appointment or the medicine from the drug store. Doing good work and good works is the most important work. Stepping up can be hard work, yet, in doing that, simple presence will be offered and life will be transformed.

Extending our hands beyond our normal circles of caring begins to build great possibilities, and starts us down the road toward a Peace that is bigger than we are. All because we rearrange our time and our priorities. It’s sometimes messy and frustrating and inconvenient, but Peace and Caring? as the ad says… Priceless.

Handwashing Peace

With all the cavalier decisions being made by politicians recently, all the violence in public and private, I’ve been feeling we’ve really missed the point. Life is sacred. and we’re treating it as if it were nothing. We’ve forgotten the awe. We’ve forgotten our responsibility to that awe.

Life is brief and beautiful. And when we touch it, we should do so with reverence. Creation is an astonishing gift, however you believe it came about and whatever/whoever you believe was the genesis of that beauty. It too needs our care and respect.

And if our world-weary hands are soiled with greed and anger and disdain, we must wash them… and begin again. I’ve always believed the notion of baptism had it backward. Babies, new things are precious and sweet… it is we who must get busy with the soap and water before taking life into our embrace.

We’d all like to point at the other and relieve ourselves of responsibility by proclaiming it is they who besmirch Life and Creation. But, if we’re honest, we all have responsibilities we’ve been shirking. All have satisfactions we’ve been harboring about our righteousness. But if people are without what they need; if Creation is being despoiled… we cannot point fingers. We must roll up our sleeves, pour living water from the ewer into the basin, wash our hands (and cleanse our hearts) and set to work with a will. Because, whether you believe this quote is by the Hopi Elders or June Jordan, we are the ones we have been waiting for. Others are waiting for us as well. So, lets get busy.

Labor Peace

I’ve been using labor so differently these last few days. Thinking about the labor that leads to death, which is surely as hard as any labor that leads to birth. I’ve also been thanking my lucky stars that I get one more swim in the town pool before summer’s officially ended in the school calendar. Labor Day has always been one of the saddest days of the year for me when I live on the East Coast simply because the pool closes. I’d been able to forget that while living in Oakland… Outdoor pools are open all year. Put a cap on and swim in the heated pool all year long. but whooo, in 20˚ it’s a long dash from winter clothes in an unheated locker room to a heated pool… and even longer back. but the joy was always there!

But, of course, Labor Day is not about my pool habits and the end of a season. And it’s not about the labor of birth or death, although they are good labor indeed. It’s not about the laborious reclamation of life after loss, although this may be the hardest labor I ever do.

Labor Day is about good work, safe work, good and fair wages that secure a life, adequate leisure time in which to explore that which makes us fully human. Somewhere in the midst of the picnics and the swimming, somewhere even in my grieving I must remember this. And even as part of my grieving. My sister lived as well as she did because Wayne was a member of the teacher’s union. They had a pension. They had health care. Sometimes in this country we act as if those were radical and ridiculous ideas. No, not so much.

So Labor Day, for those who labor and are weary, for those who labor and would eat, for those who labor and would be paid, for those who would Labor. It’s time, it seems for us to get to work for Labor. In my thealogy, the right to good work is a sacred one, and it is not just a cobblestone, but a whole stretch of the road on the path to Peace.

The Peace of Three Sisters

I was late yesterday getting to my musing. It had been a challenging day. Off to the cancer doc with my sister in the morning and the news is not good. We’re working and waiting to understand what hope will look like as the situation develops. Strange how a limbo changes from hell to a large and hopeful plane… At the same time I was needing to focus to write a funeral for a member’s beloved father. Focus wasn’t coming easily and all the hours at the doc made me aware of a low level panic in the back of my mind.

I’m actually not much of a procrastinator and perfectionist. I’m more of a mediocre and done and then exhale and polish kinda girl. So finishing the night before is difficult for me and feels disrespectful to the family, but then you do what you can. And Deb has been very sick. And she is very sick. Although a short-term treatment may have helped her feel better and may allow her to have more options… whatever your choices, options are what you want. Choosing is powerful.

Her short-term treatment was a vast relief for those of us who love her who have seen her plummet down hill in the past week. By last evening she was walking without the walker and had color in her face. And I had a bit of space and relief to write.

But having finished the funeral, there was the musing. I could skip a day I suppose. In these instances, people would understand. But I find the writing fulfilling and completing. But what to write about? I’d had corn for dinner… did I write about corn? I’d started to, but then I thought wait, what were the Three Sisters? These three plants were the staples in a Mezzo-American Agricultural. It spread over much of North America with a few changes.

In addition to making a full protein and giving us lots of essential vitamins and minerals, they care for one another. OK, that’s a bit of anthropomorphism… But they give one another what they need. It was an important message for me as I consider how to care tenderly for my sister, whom i love, giving her what she needs not what I and a thousand of her well-meaning friends believe she needs. So there are three sisters teaching me what they know… do what you do best. Thanks, Sacred Girls. It helps to have mentors and role-models.

Soft-serve Peace

Every summer our kids come to visit. We are so lucky. Me particularly. Not having had kids myself and now getting to add the soft blessing of Grannianni to my list of nicknames is priceless. I’m awkward at the grandmother thing, there are things you learn as a mom, that makes this transition easy. So, I struggle a bit…

But one thing my mom taught me, that I can put to good use with the littles, is the sense of occasion and the building of traditions. And the soft-serve ice-cream place is one of those places. It is magical on a warm summer evening. To sit out under the trees, while the kids are playing and to watch the fireflies light up the soybean field next door, is just lovely. To sit there with a friend or with my Sweet Pea… equally grand.

We don’t do it often, and that makes it even sweeter. But we layer the memories on the same way the soft ice cream piles up in a cup. And then no matter where we eat soft ice cream, it’s piled with the memories of the place where we hold hands to watch the fireflies or our children and our grandchildren. Sacred ground, indeed!

And here in the country, the ice cream reflects the season… strawberry, peach, pumpkin, each in its own seasonally appointed time… and right after pumpkin, it closes down for the season, not to open again until after Easter. Being the country, Easter is proclaimed on their sign. Everyone in the neighborhood now puzzles to figure out how the resurrection, bunnies, eggs and ice cream are related. But they are somehow, and that’s the way it is.

That’s a lot of delight for a small cone to impart! But even a small cone is big enough to carry the memories.

Peace Rapture

When we say rapture, most of us either think about sex (hooray) or the endtimes ( a bit different in word usage.) But when it comes to life, we think of it as rare and distant. I’m not sure about this, but I wonder if that isn’t because we’re not intimate with our own lives. These days we’re at a camera’s distance from everything that happens. Rapture is profoundly intimate… and overwhelming.

It bursts our hearts open and makes us available to joy, more joy, maybe even profound joy. It makes us consider how we might want to keep our hearts open a bit more. There will be ups and downs… but disappointment should not stand in the way of full on enjoyment.

I was caught of guard this year by rapture… All of a sudden, I was doing exactly what I was meant to do and I had the perfect partners and the project was exactly the right scope. Boom. Rapture. I’m hoping it taught me something about finding the right partners to work with and embracing projects which can be accomplished. It’s about using all the skills we have been given and then have developed.

It’s probably also about life being what we know we have… and to treat it as less than holy and worthy of holy rapture is to demean it. We are the Peacemakers. That’s our job. Let’s go!

Peace of Sacred Things

We’ve all been listening to the stories coming out about teen-age rape. One of the things that strikes me is the aura of protectionism (well, unless you’re the young raped girl, then, not so much.). But it seems we concentrate our efforts on what needs to be protected rather than what is sacred. We’re still trying the girls for inappropriate clothing or behavior becoming no one. We’re still worried about poor boys and their ruined chances.

But here’s the thing. People’s personage is sacred. It should never be assaulted by another. I believe it’s a fundamentally different approach to teach our children (and goodness knows, ourselves) to honor what is sacred rather than simply to protect what is precious. If it’s precious, someone wants to get at it. If it’s sacred, you despoil yourselves by mishandling it. Girls are not fragile things needing protection. Or rather they need protection as do all children because adults do not revere their sacred being. They teach their children the same lessons. Remember the phrase pecking order? It refers not only to who eats out of the bowl first but also who’s fair game.

I want the teaching about rape to be about an understanding of another person’s Godhead if you will. Let’s teach kids the meaning of Namaste: The Divine in me greets the Divine in you… So, even at 17 when driven by a (nearly constantly) erect penis, the Divine must be greeted. Let’s teach nasty girls that the Divine must be respected in themselves, who might not be so quick to gossip, and in others who don’t deserve to be gossiped about. Divine doesn’t work for you? how about that which is the Essence of Life? Who we are is sacred. It’s time we took seriously our responsibility to talk about and teach that. Because we’re teaching our children horrible lessons and then recoiling in disgusted surprise. Stop protecting, start revering. And share your reverence with the world.

Our children need that. Our Sacred Earth needs that. Those who are marginalized need it. And your health will improve, so you need it. Namaste, my friend, the sacred in me greets the sacred in you. Peace be with you.

Sacred Village

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