Tag Archives: Water

Get on the Peace Train to Somewhere Fabulous!

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I like traveling. I like meeting new people. I like trying new foods. I like the sea (lake, river, pool, hot tub) anywhere I find it (them).

So in my 20s traveling through Europe on trains was extraordinary and so exciting. Venice wasn’t my first big adventure, but it was a fabulous one.

I liked traveling alone. I liked doing it with friends. I often had destinations, so I didn’t have to get off the train and not know where to go, although plenty of folk do well with that. But I saw things and I met people and I ate local cuisine and I swam in the waters. Life is filled with loveliness and interesting people. Interesting people from foreign lands have new perspectives on Peace. It’s always good to encounter those…

Yes, every place has its own share of challenges, but we have to encourage the lovely things. We have to talk with people not like us and find new ways to work together for the good. We have to put ourselves in the way of the hateful in every way we feel able. Let us be the ones who make a difference. Let us be those who make Peace.

And oh, visit sunny Venice before it sinks into the sea. It’s gorgeous, filled with history, water and beauty. And wild, wonderful people and great food. It has plenty of problems to contend with, but it also has its own Peace.

EverydayPeaceTuesday29Jul19

Rock, Ocean, Lighthouse, Peace

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Sounds like a childhood game, doesn’t it?

Gorgeous granite, warning lighthouse, unfathomable ocean, Peace.

All of these words could have many modifiers. Peace doesn’t really seem to need one does it?

We’re a long way from the sea where I live, but it is good to travel to see it — hmmm… or maybe visit it. “Hello, Ocean, It’s me again, Ann. You are so beautiful! I’ve missed you. May I float in you?” As you know, if you’ve been following me at all, I’m more about being in bodies of water than on them, but whether you’re traveling or bobbing, the health of our oceans are crucially important to us.

We can participate in their health in small ways and big. If we begin to insist that the streams around us are clean (or cleaned up) then the water flowing from them into the oceans will be clean.

It’s only natural then to begin to expect — oh expectations can be wonderful things, if we have demands to accompany them — that the Oceans be cleaned of debris.

We can participate in non-littering campaigns. We can participate in clean-up campaigns. We can participate in campaigns to stop stupid packaging and plastic bags. Me, I could stop with the plastic bags already. Wouldn’t that be swell?

The granite? I think we just have to be in awe of its strength and beauty. To lean against it and feel the way it retains the Sun’s heat or the Earth’s chill. (note to Ann, it’s hard, try not to fall down on it and skin your knee.) And we need to remind our fellow humans that rocks are beautiful and eternal — writing on them is sacrilege. They are timeless, we are temporal. It’s a hard fact. If we want to make a mark in life, we must do it in life not on rock.

And the lighthouse and the people who climbed the steps and tended the fires and lived out on the rugged islands in the midst of the sea… And now those who find the technology that keeps our lights burning whether or not there are lighthouse keepers.

There are so many ways we can make Peace with the land, the seas and the elements. Let us bless them. Let us take them.

EverydayPeaceTuesday26Jun28

Spelunking for Peace

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One of the rarely remembered pieces of my youth was going out with the caving club my first semester in college. (What was I thinking?) Wiggling through enclosed spaces isn’t exactly what you’d expect me to do. Or it isn’t exactly what I’d expect me to do… And then I got in trouble with the dorm president because she didn’t get the call that i’d be coming back late. So I got yelled at for no reason. Put me right off spelunking, if the actual spelunking hadn’t already!

None of which has anything to do with today’s stalactites and stalagmites. Those incredible pieces of beauty grown from dripping water. Drop by drop making a difference.

That’s the way we we can make a difference with Peace. Drop by drop.

It’s what we must do… It’s what the world needs. And Peace is every bit as beautiful as the Luray Caverns! Or will be if we persist!

EverydayPeaceTuesday22May31

 

 

Our Force for Peace Must Stand Firm

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The elements are powerful and work at returning life to its most, well, elemental.

We’re the ones who can bring care and understanding and Peace to life. It is perhaps not the most natural of states. It is however muchly to be desired.

We are the ones who can bring Peace to life. It is a labor. But it is a labor of Love. And love is the ingredient we have to offer Life!

Let us be about the business of Love and Peace, all the while admiring the power of the wind and the rain to change the shape of life. And let us remember the people of Oaklahoma whose lives have been changed by the strong hurricanes.

Wind and Water. Love and Peace. Let us honor them all.

EverydayPeaceTuesday19May10

The Peace of Water that Wears

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When you think of water in reservoirs or lakes, you so often think of water that is. And the ocean seems to endlessly offer and take away. It’s only when there are storms that we really notice it’s power for destruction.

But in little streams making their way down mountains, they slowly change the world. They’re persistent and tireless. They don’t care that it will take them millennia to carve their way through rock, they just trickle steadily over it and past whatever’s in their way.

Sooner or later, you look and everything is different.

I believe that’s how we need to be with Peace. We just need to drip life-giving force on situations so that life changes. Because let’s not forget, Water (and Peace) are life-giving. They are both life-changing. So let us protect the water and let us be about the work of Peace.

EverydayPeaceTuesday16Apr19

Working Water Peace

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When I think about water, it’s usually about having a tall, cool drink of it — or getting into it to float or swim (hot for the first, cool for the second!)

I rarely think about it’s importance to our commerce and manufacturing. Much of our country was built on water energy. Across the world, in lands where it’s abundant much still is.

I love looking at water, but living beside it, i don’t often remember how precious it is and how cavalierly we treat it. It is not an endless resource. It cannot clean itself as quickly as we despoil it.

We cannot live without this wonder. It gives us life. You’d think we’d be willing to do the same — but we are a greedy bunch it seems.

First best action? Give up bottled water. Get involved in your municipal water works to insure that your town is both cosseting its water supply and giving its constituency good water to drink.

Learn something about it. Share a glass with a friend — not just because you’re thirsty, but because it is precious.

Water. Wars have been fought over it. Shouldn’t Peace be made with it?

EverydayPeaceTuesday13Mar29

A River Runs through Peace

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Part of the Pink Moon season is snow melt and April showers. Those two things swell my lovely Susquehana and make my favorite drive all the more interesting.

And for some reason, who knows why, I far prefer the ride up the river, although traveling down river is technically just as lovely… since it’s all the same river!

Aren’t humans funny. (Although as I told someone not long ago, one day as I was driving up-river at dusk, the entire river and the valley were filled with sunset rose and it may just have been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen). I like this, better than that, when both are pure beauty?

Ah, but the river runs and the fish, birds, and animals enjoy it. A friend says she waits to see a brontosauras grazing… and actually, it’s not ridiculous… they used to hang out right there. All those tasty river grasses!

For me, Peace is there. Most of the time, that river is calm, calm, calm. It’s true occasionally it can rage. But so can we all…

I think I need to visit it a bit more often this Spring. See what I can learn from it.

Every day I go there I’m likely to find Peace floating by! I am so grateful!

PinkMoonLunacyApr13

Floating Harbingers of Pink Moon Peace

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It must be the change in light that nudges the birds into wakefulness… or maybe it’s the absence of a certain kind of food that alerts them. Pssst. get going. Time to be on the move.

Whatever it is, it causes great swathes of them to rise up and return to their summer homes far up North. I believe that I’ve heard, but could find no corroboration this morning, that these gulls are headed to the Great Lakes. The swans and the snow geese have their own destinations.

But yesterday, they’d reached a cornfield along their journey where they could roost and rest and a stretch of the river where they could calmly, time and again, rise and fall and simply float down the stream.

I promised myself, watching, that this summer when the water and the air warms, that I would do the human version of this. I would gather my friends together and we would put our innertubes in the water and float merrily down the stream. The gulls remind me of the importance of quiet communion on the water. Fun and Friendship.

Thanks, river gulls for this glimpse of Peace. The Pink Moon brings so many wonders… Do you think the gulls whisper of the sweet memories made on Sundays on the Susquehana? Delight ahead!  Let us all remember!

PinkMoonPeaceMar23

Whom Does the Moon Call to Peace?

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Whew. Thank Goodness I corrected the title before people had a chance to think I didn’t know what a direct object was. I spent a lot of time trying to teach teenagers the difference in English so they could learn it in French!

One of the sweet realizations of this year’s moon project is that everyone loves the Moon. The stories are piling in… I saw the Moon… I remember when I saw the Moon… I danced by the light of the Moon… We love the Moon at home. We love the Moon over water, forest, desert, and plain… We’ve told stories in the Moonlight that were magical and stories that revealed hopes and dreams and broken hearts… From what I hear, in just these three short days, the Moon seems to call a lot of us to attention…

Send those stories. (I’m wallowing in them. I know idea what I’ll do with them besides take pleasure in them…) Remember them… The Moon shines her silver balm down on us… let’s let that gentle Peace spread — because we need to find some Balance and some Peace, for Love is needed in all the cracks and crevices of the world…LunacyWolfMoonJan3