This poem took shape on a FB message talking about how to help a friend deal with a problem. I grew up in a small town. Oddly, I’m back here now, at my sister’s house enmeshed in the love of a small town as I hear from everywhere (The Democratic Committee sent my brother and me their condolences on Deb’s Death, telling us how wonderful she was.) It’s hard to slip through the cracks when people keep stepping up.

People do. and small towns can be vicious and tough. Nothing’s perfect. But they’re vicious when folk, oh, let’s just say we, here, eh?, aren’t conscious about the forming of community, when we’re lazy about it.

But when we work at it, whether we’re connecting hands and creating webs across continents or oceans or we’re making sure our neighbor’s house gets cleaned when someone falls and can’t manage, the web catches us when we can’t stand upright on our own.

This village-making is one of the building blocks of Peace, i believe. It’s tricky, because part of the nature of villages is that they’re closed. And we’re calling for open villages. Connecting our hands across boundaries to offer the support that’s needed. Not turning away from those who are different, challenging, unlike us.

Let us be webweavers, my friends. Conscious webweavers. Because we can weave ourselves together with vitriol. But that? doesn’t really cut it. It cuts out folks, isolates them. That can’t be what we choose… and yet it is a choice, a choice for laziness and disinterest. But we must choose connection.

I always think this. But I’m feeling it so strongly now. Now in the places where connections have been made and in the places where they just don’t exist. I must be careful where i rest my broken heart. Yet support emerges, webs make themselves beautifully visible in the most unlikely places. And from this place of brokenness, new webs will be woven.

The world is so broken. If we weave the little webs, we can attach the big ones to that. The most amazing thing about those spiders is that they weave entire worlds in a very short time and go back and reweave when the human ones break them. So let’s all do like the spiders do: weave, weave, weave!  Let’s keep making this world sweeter. We do the work. We realize dreams we never knew we had. Peace. Peace Dreams.