Helping Peace

Writing about the Three Sisters made me remember other helping plants. You wonder, when thinking about the bold Marigolds, who discovered that they worked well together, or did the plants just make their way to one another in some garden?

It’s pretty much the same for Peace, isn’t it? We want to do Very Important Work with Peace, but much of the work that’s really needed is leveraging Peace, making it better where we’re able. Some people’s gifts are big and splashy (just like the red hot tomato!). The rest of us are best suited to be sturdy soldiers in the garden of Peace.

And that, my friends, is not nuthin’!

“All we are saying, is give Peace a chance.” The chorus may have started with a sit in, but it needs to continue with concrete, consistent (hard) work for Peace.

Melting Peace

The glaciers sculpted not only Glacier Bay but the terrain around it. Its abundant beauty is a gift from those frozen artisans. The Tlinglet people made their homes in this Bay because the tools for a good life were abundant. Certainly their way of life is threatened by glaciers that are melting more and more quickly due to global climate change. But all our lives are endangered by the loss of Polar Ice and glaciers.

What will we do? How will we respond? Perhaps we need to see the beauty to be stirred to action. It’s interesting that tourism, which is always responsible for some environmental degradation, is taking it upon themselves to educate. Each tour boat has a Tlinglet Native and a governmental Naturalist on board describing the history, the present and the possible futures for this astonishing area. Let us learn. Let us work toward Peace. Let’s halt the glacier’s rapid disintegration…

Peace Team Sabbath

If today’s word is teamwork, today’s job might well be taking the day off to look at your work and decide that it is good. And while you’re puffing yourself up about your own work, look at what a great job your neighbor has done as well. Offer him or her a glass of tea or lemonade or beer and reflect on this week’s accomplishments… and then, take a nap, take a swim, take a walk…

Blessed Sabbath, my friends, and oh, did you see the moon last night. No? well, look again tonight.

Teamwork… one of the most important things about it is choosing your team wisely and then relying on their work… Peaceful Sabbath, everyone.

Peace Harmony

Well, Happy Solstice, my friends! One of the things that’s been hard to adjust to since we’ve returned is that we have dark here (and clouds, barely saw a cloud in Alaska). They have light there, a lot of it, especially as we were bearing down on the Solstice. But on the other hand, I was so reassured to see that the well beloved fireflies have returned — just in time for the California kids to arrive next week. oh, there will be ice cream and fireflies at the Purple Cow!

I haven’t even begun to process Alaska, things to catch up on after time away. But I as aware when I was there, in that vast land of mountains, sky and water, that when left to itself, the land has its own kind of harmony, even if it’s sometimes harsh. And in the face of so much land and so few people, the people will-he-nil-he live in harmony with the land and the seasons as well. There are lessons to be taken from that, for sure… And Mother Earth is inclined to teach those lessons.

And I guess that says as much about Harmony as anything, doesn’t it? Living with what is here, what we’re given? and then finding the place to add our voice to the chorus! What could be sweeter? What would be better work? What could be more Peaceful?

Remember back when Coke wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? Well, harmony is imperfect, but it’s fun to look for and fun to participate in.

Courageous Peace

Courage is such a under-appreciated trait. There are so many people living courageously every day. Getting out of bed and accomplishing the day’s chores sometimes requires greater courage than folks who decide to summit a mountain.

Courage for soldiers is probably as great living in the aftermath as in the moment when training and adrenalin are surging through their bodies.

And the courage to work unflaggingly for Peace. we need that. Let us encourage one another. What we always need is the courage to be present to the moment and respond to the needs to the best of our abilities. Here’s wishing us all the courage to live our lives for Peace.

(I’ll be off for two weeks, but keep checking the website, posts are scheduled to appear! Probably not everyday, but often enough that you’ll know I thought about you as I prepared to leave on my two-week vacation with my sister! Peace, my friends.)

Peace Dictionary

June’s going to be a funny month, I have a lot going on. My sister and I are going to Alaska for almost 2 weeks on a cruise (with a short side-trip to Denali). So, I knew I would have to write ahead so that you guys get your dailies and I stay constant with my goal of daily writing (and what good is a year’s worth of musings with a two week hole in it?).

What to do, what to do? Well, awhile back I wrote a sermon on the need for a UU (that’s Unitarian Universalist) language of reverence. I don’t think it’s just a UU need, I think we’re all ‘way too connected with the ugly and not enough focused on the possible… That day I reeled of 30+ words that I thought should be in any Peace Dictionary or in the vocabulary of anyone who takes Peace-ibilities seriously (or even humorously!)

So why not use June to focus on those words I thought? It won’t be an exhaustive list, you may have others to suggest to me. But, they certainly might help us get through the Peacemaze still making Peace!

Here’s what Nancy Cleaver had to say about this month’s beautiful Peace mandala: Seeing the complexity of everyone participating in the constant renewing of the vow towards peace led to this piece. I thought it would be a paisley pattern to repeat on fabric, originally. However, the image had other plans for me, and the ancient Mayan shell pattern insisted on bordering the maze. All roads lead to peace, if we will follow the way.

I definitely will have the poems done. I hope to have at least some blogs done which will post automatically. If you’re used to finding this on FB, you may need to come on over to Sacred Village… and while you’re reading words, I’ll be storing up images of Alaska and a trip with my sweet sister to write about next month… but I’m not going anywhere until the 7th, so don’t run away!

but respect? It’s where we have to begin…

Beginning-again Peace

When you have huge pinnacles in your work/life/love, there’s an odd sort of moment when you realize that the what you thought of as a destination is really just a way station. The path leads on from there, and after your rest, you need to refill the backpack and get back on the road — which is all right, because you chose your work/life/love for the journey, it’s just a bit disorienting.

Time to take stock, examine your heart, get out the compass and the GPS, and “ease on down the road.” This time, however, you’ve got sweet memories, and not just great hopes, to keep you going as you set off down the Peaceroad.

If you haven’t recently plotted and planned for something at which you could succeed wildly, after a lot of good work accomplished and new relations built, let me recommend you try it. Aid if it’s a project you’ve done for the world? You might just find you like it enough to keep working for Peace.

Saying Yes to Peace

What would it mean if we were to say yes to Peace? If we really wanted to do that, it would mean that we would have to exercise our options to say NO! to war. We have to go to work on many fronts each where we work best and form a Peace wall of people working together.

There’s too much sadness in this world. Too much violence. Why aren’t we searching as diligently for an end to war as we are for a cure for HIV or cancer. Why aren’t we funding great studies? Let’s ponder together.

Even Tiny Bits of Realized Peace

Sometimes you just have to stop and take stock and say, “Wow. we did that.”

Today is one of those days. 40 some people are on a bus from where I live to Staten Island (I’m already here, bouncing impatiently up and down.) We haven’t put hammer to sheetrock, or bleach to mold, but we will. But what we have done is run a successful campaign and organized ourselves and our talents and our gifts and gotten them on the bus headed toward good, but hard work and good celebration.

The road to Peace is long and tiring. So it’s important to celebrate the milestones, however tiny. I’ve said before that we’ve only got a teaspoon of water to an empty well, but if we all filled our teaspoons and took them to empty wells, not only would we be caring for one another, we would be filling wells. And when many of us come carrying teaspoons, people with buckets will be inspired to do what they can. And then engineers who can tap into the groundwater will think… “wait, I can solve that problem.”

So my dears, teaspoons up, click, fill, pick your empty well, and start walking. And every once in a while along the way, remember to say, “Wow! we did that!” (and I’m proud of all of us, myself included!)

Graduate Peace?

Our graduates are coming out into a tough world. There aren’t lots of jobs available. And there are many things wrong with the world. We’ve certainly given them unrealistic expectations that their lives would be better than ours — a notion the boomers proved to be true in their early work lives perhaps but are perhaps struggling with today.

It’s a great time for leadership. And I’m not sure it’s going to be ours. Because we haven’t led. I realized two things in writing this. 1) well, that was depressing, despite my faith in them and 2) the next poem had better be to their elders, we’d better Peace-up, and start looking for our own solutions.

But graduates? Count those blessings, Review your shortcomings. Do that self-reflection dance. Stay present. Stay connected to your friends with great ideas and the will and ingenuity to implement them.

And isn’t that the work of right now? What’s going in that garden to feed our family? What Peace seedlings are we planting and tending to feed a Peace-hungry world? There’s work to be done. And for too many kids there are choices to be made between doing nothing and doing good. We cannot let these shining stars become discouraged; and they’re of an age where they might want to realize that it will be dangerous for them.

So, an important part of their challenge is to stay involved and inspired in their lives despite a very challenging world. There’s very real danger in their becoming disaffected… we owe our children not to let that happen — and they owe it to themselves.

Cusps and Verges are very interesting places filled with wonder and possibility and fraught with danger…

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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