California Poppy

California Poppy

 

Awakening early,

one petal unfurling lazily over another

like sleepy dangly arms on a Saturday morning

Stretching out to the sun, laden with morning dew

Opening wider and wider to the light

the petals rich with unabashed orange

See through and waving like tissue paper in the wind

Silent, Joyful, Dancing

The red cups at the base of each sheet holding

tenacious, trusting, floppy skirted

sheets of orange in place.

Vulnerable yet resilient

Lace of the Earth

Closing up tight to sleep with the sunset,

spent with the fullness of the day.

 

 

Gray Whale Love

            The spout of a gray whale is shaped like a perfect heart. It’s almost startling how shapely and valentine looking it is. In Monterey, we never see it. It’s always too windy, and the swell of the ocean is too high. The spouts just blow off to one side or another. This morning, I was walking Cholla out on the beach, and there it was. A baby gray whale was in close to shore, bursting soft vapory hearts from its blowhole to me. Each one was so perfectly formed, so happy and gentle, quiet and free out there in the calm bay. I smiled with each heart until she waved at me with her fluke and left to go deep, deep.

            Through the years, I’ve read about the spouts in books, and generally felt that the description and drawings of them were a kind of exaggeration. And then Russ and I did a side trip in Baja out to San Ignacio Lagoon. We were there a bit early for the whale kissing that guide books and travel brochures advertise. The area is protected, so we couldn’t just take out our kayaks and go off on our own. We had to go out in one of the tenders with a small group of people. It was off-season, so there were just a few of us.

            The bay is so calm and still, like the biggest warm bathtub going. It’s no wonder that mama gray whales want to have their babies there. What could be a safer spot? Right away, we saw the hearts hanging in the air around us, and I was thrilled just for that; I didn’t need to get my picture taken of me hugging a gray whale. I got to see the hearts! The folktale was real!

            People got to chatting in the boat, and I did what I usually do; sort of hang my head over to the side, letting myself go far away from others, looking so deeply into the water as I used to do when I was a kid out fishing with my dad. I’d look and look, and I’d like to say that I’d invent stories or resolve the mysteries of life, or talk to the fish, but all I can say is that I’d just look. And that’s what I was doing; observing the changing terrain of the shallows, observing the passing of the little pebbles, the mottled colors of the bottom. I was reveling in the textures and beauty of being there, joined with the stillness of water, the flow of the bottoms. Then my mind crept in so slowly to make sense of it all; what I was looking at was the passing of a whale close and directly under us. The pebbles weren’t pebbles; they were the crustaceans living on the animal. I could see the long smile of her, the eye right under my hand dangling in the water. In a moment, the others spotted it, too…ballena!

 That moment, or vision has stayed with me with perfect clarity through these years. I loved that moment of not knowing what I saw, but feeling its familiarity; being transfixed and lured in willingly with all my senses. With all senses wide open, the gifts of nature and love are exactly in the air and beneath our very hands, moving with color and magic. 

            .

             

           

Broken Heart

Broken Heart

It doesn’t make sense.

It’s Spring!

Poppies are bursting bright with orange,

lupines are stretching to the sky

But pieces of my heart are fluttering

down, down, down

to another season

and the shards are strewn around me like broken glass

with limited vision

I scramble to collect and reassemble the pieces

one by one they spike and bleed me

still, I stretch for them

Meanwhile

the poppies flutter their delicate but resilient skirts

To the sun.

Middle Age

In The Middle

            I’m middle aged. It’s got to be true; if I do the math, which means basically doubling the number of my age, and assuming I don’t get hit by a truck or something, I think I have to accept that label. It’s a label I remember hearing about as a teenager with the same kind of mystification and fear as middle aged people regard the teenage years: sudden reckless behavior, compulsive and impulsive actions, sexual promiscuity, experimentation, abandonment of the loved ones. As a teenager, I thought I should die before I reached such craziness, or just sleep it off until the cuter granny stage set in. But here it is, and I don’t need to be put into confinement because of it.

            What’s happened is that I find I can relate to anyone, and I threaten no one. When initially I was so angry that I needed reading glasses (!), I’ve found that just by those alone, I’ve become a sort of member of some kind of lovable little club where people smile warmly at me and hand me their glasses, along with a comment about stretching arms out real far or how many pairs of glasses they have. Children love to go running around looking for my glasses, and can predict before I can as to when I’ll need them. I can use this as a pick-up line: “Hey, baby, got any reading glasses I can borrow?” But, being in the middle, I can also use that pick-up line the other direction: “Hey, baby, can you read this to me?”

            I’m old enough that I can notice a gorgeous young lady with one of those perfect little figures that have blue jeans painted on and natural colored hair spilling all over her back and a face smooth so smooth not a line in sight…and I can smile at her, say hello, and not shiver with envy or turn to a mirror to wonder why I can’t look like her. I am now old enough I can even go up to someone like that and actually say, “Wow, you’re pretty.” And I am young enough that someone like that would want to spend a little time with me, chat, go for a walk, tell me her boyfriend problems. I can be a friend to youth and a friend to the elderly. I now have the patience and wisdom to be with the elderly. I appreciate all that lives. I know the differences between young and old. I am in the middle.

            My peers In The Middle have no competition going on. We like to help each other out. We whisper about those damned teenagers, and some of us already have sons or daughter in laws, or are already enjoying being grandparents. We have little spare time. We try new things. We climb mountains, we dance, we become members of everything and follow agendas and drink wine and complain mildly about the beginnings of aches and pains and the onset of responsibilities associated with our aging parents. We mutually sigh over the lines in our faces, the grey hair, but then the lament only lasts for minutes, because then we charge ahead with all the busyness of our lives. We are indispensable to everyone. We are in the middle. Everyone needs us. We need each other to explore our deepest thoughts, our grapplings with spirituality, and our desires. In the Middle, we have a depth as profound as the middle of the bay where you cannot see the bottom at all and only the largest animals swim by. We are not on the safety of the shorelines; we are in the part that is immensely vast. It took a lot to get here, and we look beautiful. Young men and women swoon over us.

            In the Middle, we get to be emotional in public. By now, enough has happened to us that it may not take much to set off a memory of something, and there those tears go rolling down cheeks, the sleeve takes a swipe at the snot, and we go on.

            Middles. The middle is a sort of safe spot. It’s the cocoon between two extremes, the place that is a kind of holding tank, where the journey is in place; it’s the richest part: it’s the creamy part of any fabulous or even processed dessert (think Twinkies); it’s the middle of a hike where you find a rock and sit on it, looking up at the power of the peaks, and looking down at the vulnerability of the new wildflowers in the valleys. In the middle, we are both craggy and vulnerable, beautiful and strong, and always full of color.

            We break things and we keep them or make them work somehow. We use duct tape a lot and we figure that’s good enough. We also love the best equipment possible. We have the best bikes, instruments, cars, pots and pans, and we are the first to buy the newest in technology, all inspite of the fact that those who are younger are better than us in each sport. We can laugh loud with snorts and not cover our mouths in shyness, and we freely hug people when we barely know them because we like making our families bigger and bigger. We laugh at ourselves when we do silly things, and in case someone didn’t actually see us do something like get our skirt stuck in our underwear in the bathroom then walk out in public, we then go around telling all our friends about it so they get the opportunity to laugh at us, too. We understand that the best stories of our lives are the mishaps, the survivals, the hard won accomplishments. We are practicing our stories for our elderly years, when we can hopefully luxuriate in the memories of all the sweetnesses, all the colors, all the loves, all the adventures, and all the joys.

            The Middle is not a phase; it’s the longest part, a part to savor and explore, to observe, participate and relish, and some of that comes with needed tools, like reading glasses!

Clarity is not Crystal

Clarity is not Crystal

            No, clarity is not “crystal clear.” Clarity is green, green tender and tinged with yellow, green that is new and fresh, the product of the deepest outpouring of the magma from the Earth, the color of smiles from the incubation of winter, the winter wet and cold and inward. Green erupts and then is fragile and stains on the knees of our blue jeans when we slip on slippery green growth criss crossing thick on overgrown trails. Green is the color of change, the color of truth. The truth that says nothing is permanent except knowing that the green will come back even though it seems to wither away as it falls spent from its source. Green, the color of beginnings that keep beginning, over and over again in spite of anything, anything at all. What was ever more beautiful to me than seeing Yellowstone Park oh so many years ago, miles upon miles of black charred trunks from that major fire, then green pushing up, forming leis around every form of blackness?

            Anger (red) is fuel for green. Let the green grow. Stay focused, feel the deepest beat of earth, trust the wisdom that the green is there. That, is clarity. Clarity is green.

            Andre Breton, one of my favorite existentialists who wrote Nadja, and who grappled with that three word preoccupation we humans have had for all eternity, right up there with our preoccupation of “I love you,” lamented about the other one: “Who Am I?” Breton says: “I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.” I would have instead carried Andre to a field of the newest green, left him there, and his waiting would have been over. He would then be intoxicated with being alive.

November 16, 2005 (On Hope)

November 16, 2005

There’s an apricot tree I have in a bucket in the backyard. When I got the house, it was pretty and lovely, and I managed to have one luscious apricot from it before a, well, “friend” chopped it down. After time, a sprout came up from down the stump somewhere, and I was sort of surprised, and thought I’d take better care of it to see what came of it. It continued to somewhat grow, but when Russ and I decided to build the shed in the spot that it lived, we dug it up, tossed it on a sandy mound and figured it wouldn’t ever come of much of anything, anyway. In the spring, lying there on its side with roots exposed, it had flowers. We got excited, put it in a pot, and started planning for a garden. Russ loves that little tree. The tree shows endurance, vitality in adversity, and hope.

I know that analogies can seem trite, but they make sense. We pull them out so often in life. I keep thinking about those birthday candles that would drive us to the point of frustration as we initially smiled, blowing them out, and they wouldn’t blow out, just wouldn’t blow out, and everybody would laugh, the wax would go all over the cake.

I was showing my students my little sketchbook that I carry with me in my pack. I hadn’t looked at it in quite a while. I have drawings of Russ, relaxed, plump, serene. I have a cartoon sort of thing of our life together; the Baja trips, the dogs, the kayaking, the morning lattes…and the knots build up inside of me.

Hope…we get up in the morning and immediately we have hope. Hope is stronger than muscle, stronger than statistics, stronger than herbs, stronger than medicine. Do we let go of hope? I don’t think so; I think the big challenge is to reconfigure hope…something like the Eskimos that have 80 or so words for snow, we need to develop 80 or so ways of understanding hope. I guess that goes along with the “Serenity Prayer.” I have a wallet-sized version of it I carry with me, one that my niece gave me that has a cute picture of a polar bear cub on the back. I really do say it and say it, trying to really absorb the cycle of life      and it’s hard…

I saw the moon yesterday morning; big and full and orange, reflecting over the water, dancing its color as it does so often for me for all those times I’ve spoken to it. I know life and nature isn’t trying to tease me, or test me or even provide me with answers; it just IS, and I guess I have to love it for that.

I think that’s all I want to say for now.

First Post for Death, Dying and Grief

February 12, 2008

            I was at the Farmer’s Market this afternoon, my usual Tuesday evening haunt which has the triple lure of being outside, meeting people, and buying produce. I bumped into a friend who reads this “blog,” (I always feel compelled to put that word into quotes. There’s just something annoying about that word that I refuse to adopt as normal vocabulary) and who, over the past few years, had been wondering about Russ and didn’t know that he had died. I wrote a fair number of emails during the course of Russ’ illness with cancer (and this friend somehow missed the list of all that), some after he died, and then in time, I started this blog, and I guess I haven’t been writing about cancer, dying, death or grief really at all. To analyze myself, I might be protecting any of you from the deep and sad stuff, maybe I’m protecting my own vulnerability, or maybe I was just plain tired of writing so much about it all for so long. So, periodically, I’ll post some of the things I wrote under the heading of, oh geeze…a label? I guess I’ll call it death dying and grief, and maybe include some excerpts from my journals that I kept after he died. I read a lot of books on grief then—ha, ha, 47 to be exact. It’s one of those odd stories that came out of that time. A few months after Russ died, a lady from Hospice called to offer me support in some way, and I simply said I wanted the books. I read them all; children’s books, poetry, scientific, religious, behavioral, psychology, and for some reason, I kept a list of the titles in the backs of my journals. I wrote several journals, and they are all precious to me, a deep and tender time of my turning inside out and inside and out again and again over that time. My friend asked me hesitantly if it was okay to talk about Russ right there in the middle of the market, with the guy selling jade looking on, the buzz of people going by. We had actually started our conversation about it when he asked me, “Do you have any stories brewing around inside of you?”

Tomatoes are from Greece

Tomatoes are From Greece

            I used to regard tomatoes the way most people regard that little splash of parsley adorned on plates of food ordered at average road stop restaurants across the country: it was the semi-red thing to be picked out and pushed off to the side. I learned food politeness early on; the small smile, the “Oh, no thank you, I prefer_______instead.” Years ago, when I was in Greece, it was immediately obvious that there was no choice but to eat tomatoes as they were served with absolutely all meals, and that a Greek salad had nothing to do with my concept of a salad; no greens to speak of, all tomatoes, some olives and feta. I had to give the things another try.

There’s this exquisite moment of fresh, unexpected, almost shock in discovering an edible that is off the chart delicious. Conversation stops, almost the heartbeat stops, and the overload of one sense alerts the others to come into play: you halt, you lean back, you look again at what you are eating: How can that be so good? So then I decided the only good tomatoes on this planet came from Greece, until Bob started growing them in his backyard. He let me water the fat, loaded bushes when he left on a trip in the summer.  Happily, I supplied myself with squishy, plump and thick tomatoes, and took them home to adorn my kitchen with their redness until I ate them.

            This fall I got my supply of tomatoes from Steve, who retired, and retired with this declaration: “Do not retire until you have a passion to do something else.” His passion is growing his garden, and specifically, tomatoes. He let me have one, and that freeze came over me, so he then returned the next day with a huge bag of them for me, every size and dimension and color from tiny yellows to purples and big like softballs. He practically had them all named, and allowed me the 20 minute or so show on his laptop of each plant photographed in each direction. You can taste the love and pride in every bite. I let Maria, a 7-year-old girl I work with, have some of the little ones while we were chatting. We popped them into our mouths, one after the other, and when I saw her a couple of days later, she kept asking me for the “dulces.” I argued with her, as I would never give the children candies, then it dawned on me that she was referring to the tomatoes. A big revelation: a child begging for tomatoes so rich with sweetness she naturally confused them with candy.

            There were so many foods I decided early on at Maria’s impressionable age that I didn’t like at all, and for my entire life I avoided.  Such as melons, that I thought must have grown into those perfect round green and orange balls to be pushed around in bowls as I forked out the grapes. Melons I rediscovered in Mexico, sliced straight out of the entire fruit; wet, drippy, so sweet, I had no idea that it was at all related to the balls. Mangos fell out of the trees after the storms, and we ate them as we watched the rain fall, smiling stringy yellow smiles. For all that people say about the food in Mexico, the freshest, most flavorful of produce I discovered there, as though I was lead on a rebirth of fresh food introductions. I obliterated my negative judgments of many fruits and vegetables, and learned to sample them all, as they had no relation to my prior experiences.

            Jody managed to get me to try out my last hold out of learned food refusals from my childhood of Jolly Green Giant. Jody is the perfect cook. Like Steve who grows tomatoes like his children, she cooks with her heart and spirit. She is the “Food Whisperer,” and I’ll bet when no one is looking, she probably walks around Farmer’s Market listening for the produce to call out to her: “Hey, Jody! I’m the one you want, and get my friend over there, the celery root!” I think I’ve caught her putting her ear to the greens spread out over her counter. And that’s what she does: she makes an array around her, an edible pallet, and pauses, breathes, listens, and lets the food magic happens. When you eat her food, you feel it moving through you, and you immediately feel simultaneously energized and serene. I think I’m a pretty good cook, but when I follow her around at the market, it becomes clear: that lady is blessed. So, when the beets showed up at her house, I thought, oh, I can’t tell her that those things make me gag. But I told her, and I also told her I trust her magic, so I had her beets. And there it was, the frozen moment. Beets? She got me to eat them?

            Last week I thought I would try cooking them myself. I bought an assortment from Alex at the market. I took them home, sautéed them in honey and sake, a little salt, a little pepper, and there it was: even I could make them wonderful, though it’s not me; it’s the earth they grew out of, and how soon they came from the earth to me. It’s also encountering the person who had something to do with its growth, who took pride in their quality, and that is part of what nourishes me, too.

            My body? It knows. It was smart for all those years to pluck out the nasty flavorless forms that were only small semblances of what I was told was good for me. My body? My senses? They know. The frozen moment. Ah, stay here, this is right. Linger and enjoy. Get that produce from the source, shake the hand of the person who knows the food.

           

           

Sick Day

Sick Day

            I called in sick today. Okay, so I was sicker on Sunday, and on Monday I had an air deprived raspy voice, and yesterday maybe I was more grumpy than anything. Favorite coworkers highly encouraged me to call in sick. They felt I looked and sounded sick enough, and maybe they just plain didn’t want to see me around looking like a frustrated gloom cloud. So I did it. I was told to sit around in the bathtub reading all day, only moving to the couch to watch movies.

            It is worth calling in sick to simply be free of the alarm, though I’ve made my alarm as gentle as it can possibly be with the CD of Dennis Kamakahi singing “Ahe Lau Makani” and “Sweet By and By” to me over the last five years. When he gets to “Kapela,” I know I’m on the last call, and leave Cholla to snuggle in the comforts of down as I stumble down the banister-less stairs to bright lights and a shower. I love to turn poor Dennis off on the weekends, and the mid week treat of waking to a blue sky instead of darkness gave me instant healing all to itself. With clear vision I made it to the shower and decisively went out to coffee with my newspaper and journal in tow. My coffee shop overnight has become famous. Everyone in town was there, and I exquisitely performed my coughing skills with all, complete with singing a broken version of “Las Mananitas” to someone who had a birthday. I said I was going to ride my bike, sweat out the illness, but when I went home, I instinctively pulled out my backpack, warmed up my pea soup on the stove, and headed out to Soberanes for a hike.

            It’s a favorite hike, though I have to say it’s also a favorite hike for many. It’s not unusual to come across a friend as one might encounter someone at the market. The trail is steep, and beautiful, and goes through a change of several ecosystems all in one trail, and it always gives me great joy to come around a bend to hover over a span of ocean that is as close as I can get to hang gliding (no, I’ve never attempted that). I hike it a lot at night, too; I love the night shadows and moon beams. Today, no one was there. I hiked up and up, pausing to breathe in those massive views of greens, of blues, of clouds, of cool air, noting changes in colors with the rain we’ve had, and somehow, wanting to keep the views and the way I saw them; the severe giant land fingers reaching down, down, the hawks swirling, and opening my eyes as wide as I could to take it all in without paints, camera, or even a pen to write about it. Up at the top, I nestled into some rocks, happily stripped off my sweat soaked t-shirt for my fresh one, put on the red sweater my sister knit (and amazingly just handed to me as she didn’t like how it turned out. I love that sweater), and there looked out at “my hills” (I’m sure we all say that), hunkered in there with my pea soup, loving that I was looking at green and eating green at the same time. With my wet t-shirt on the rock, my soup and the coziness of the rock, I was getting the rejuvenation I needed. After the hike, I called out “thank you,” and blew kisses to the hills.

            A sick day! What a great thing! I did also read, and knit, and then walked Cholla on the beach. Odd things were going on. About twenty people in something like “moonsuits,” as one person put it, were out in a pack collecting the blobs of black gooey stuff that the local authorities told us were perfectly safe. They had on head to toe protective gear, an odd juxtaposition to us folks with dogs and Frisbees. Another guy was up on the eroded part of the beach with his shovel. I knew what he was after, and went up to join him. He was scavenging for the old bottles and cool stuff that was junked on the dunes back when the local beaches were considered undesirable places to be, perfect for tossing garbage at the turn of the century. So we chatted along, finding old Listerine bottles, crocks, Chinese plates, cups. I never got this guy’s name, though we shared lots of local stories and mutual wisdoms. He said he comes a lot, and has collected baskets and baskets of bottles. As the sun set, I grabbed my little stash, my clothes covered in soot, and headed home. 

            Sick. It’s a good thing. Sick. I think it happens when all the subtle parts of our being try gently to remind us to take some time, turn off the cell phones, forget about the work, forget about the anythings that twirl around in our minds, and as we neglect to notice the quiet reminders, another force within our bodies says, “well, since you’re not listening, here goes…take that! So NOW will you take a break?” Then it’s no voice (shoot, so now I can’t talk at meetings?), Kleenex box in a constant embrace, (no one wants to stay with me for very long?), coughs (wow, those rooms can clear out fast), and there’s no choice: attend to the self. I’m kind of glad I waited until I was pretty much on the other side of sick to use this day, do those things that keep me in my happy balance. To be repeated again soon!

Peace Takes Courage

Peace is Courage

            A couple of days ago I was behind a car with a blue bumper sticker that stated: Peace takes Courage. I knew that the words were really directed as a reflection about our war, but I decided to read it for exactly what it proclaimed, and how it applied to myself. My first thought was that peace generally isn’t difficult at all: Saturday morning, me with my latte, Cholla playing at my feet; that peaceful stuff comes mighty easy. Then I flashed on my recent panic during the holidays about driving over the Siskiyou Mountains in the snow.  I stayed in a motel overnight, and practiced putting on chains over the trash can with visions of me spinning out over the mountain in the snow. I snuck Cholla into the motel room, fearful of her freezing solid in the car, and of anyone seeing me slipping her in. No peace there. The big events: Russ and his diagnosis of cancer, my heart beating wildly and shock climbing in enough to somehow force my brain into some semblance of management.

            So peace. Visions of calm, of Mona Lisa sort of smiles, puppies rolling around on their backs, sunflowers turning lazily towards the beams of the sun, holding hands with a loved one, homemade bread coming out of the oven perfectly plump and rich with the smell of molasses. I think of evenings in Hawaii on the beach, poking slowly through the sand looking for the tiniest shells possible with the push of the wave surge exposing the best, and finding those shards of sunrise shells, orange and brilliant and beautiful.

            I’m not going to look it up, but this is what I know about courage: it is doing whatever it is that we are scared of. I told my sister that I was courageous to drive over the pass in the snow because I was scared out of my mind to do so. For her, it’s no big deal. She learned to drive in the snow. She drives on black ice. Me, I hadn’t had snow fall on my head since I was 6. Most fear comes out of whatever it is we haven’t experienced, any unknown, and this could be little, in our small sheltered lives. I see it in kindergarteners each year on the first day of school. Big round quiet eyes, a mild look of panic, some children try to make a bolt for it to escape the thirteen year public school imprisonment, and wrap their tiny arms around the legs of a parent.

            As a society, these are immense: fears about land, about skin color, religion, language, education, money, health care…and we hang on so tight, and we fight so hard to control and defend and we get so lost (over and over again through history) whomever is fighting doesn’t even really know who or what he is fighting for because in the trenches, it’s all about survival, not idealism; like the shock that helped me along through the illness and grief, when the battle or the storm or the illness is right in your face, you will survive. Throughout the hundreds of letters my father wrote during WW2, he didn’t especially write about the issues we discuss in our history classes today; I don’t think he even once mentioned the name of Hitler. He wrote about loving my mother, about tossing hand grenades around, about towns being obliterated, finding a coat from someone “who didn’t need it” to stay warm, about the friends he made, about whatever sort of details he could find, written in a way to amuse my mother. In one letter, he said he was so scared he wanted to crawl into his helmet, and even that was written without much intensity. Survival is immediacy; the names of peace and courage are irrelevant, and only arrive as labels far into the future when the heartbeat comes into a normal thump thump pattern and reflection begins to organize experiences.

            Survival is just that. Survive. Ultimately, isn’t the intent that we all survive? We do survive, and wouldn’t the best choice be to survive as long as we can, as humbly, as peacefully, as possible?

            I might have missed something somewhere, but from what I tell children and what I see is that we have this one round planet with land, with water, with whales and birds and clouds that rise and fall without knowledge of which is what country. One planet. The globe I have here on my desk is one my mom gave me. It’s very simplistic; each continent is a different color, and the ocean is all blue. The concept of a shared space couldn’t be clearer. I love simplicity. It is stunning to think we can divvy up the space, say everything belongs to each share holder, and that no one can come or go; well, but maybe we’ll let some people sort of sneak in to do menial labor, and then we’ll build really high fences to make it harder for them to go home to see their families, and then make remarks about them because we don’t want to hear their language, and tell them to go home but then we need these people here so badly because who will cut our lettuce, clean our houses, serve us our water at our meals? Go away, come back; we play the tender ecosystem and heart of heritage and people like the master of a marionette without looking into future.

 I suspect we do all this because we are afraid. As a political culture, we don’t like to wait for change to happen; we don’t like creativity and boldness. We don’t like patience, we don’t like to solve the source of problems or take the courtesy of finding understanding. We don’t understand that health care, education, environmental care ultimately helps us all.  We don’t like to upset our implied sense of immediate peace, of those lattes in the morning when people around the globe don’t have rice let alone a coffee made with the indulgence of milk steamed on an expensive machine with electricity. As individuals, perhaps we don’t know what to do. We know the 50’s and 60’s adage of “eat your peas because someone in Africa is starving” is ludicrous, but do we get it in our guts the vast differences there are between cultures, and how much some people truly need simply to survive, never mind the peace and courage?

Peace does take courage, and it takes courage like this: in the face of conflict, of bitterness, of shame, of fear, of pain, can we/I take our/my breath in to push into, through, that fear with peace? Peace is easy when there is peace. It’s easy to smile and dance in the sun. In war, in conflict, making peace doesn’t come naturally, and it’s not exactly Wonder Woman or Clark Kent slipping into a telephone booth to radically change a persona into a pumped up bigger than life being. Peace is the overall, steady, actual heartbeat of the earth. Peace is the undercurrent of it all: the air that moves about all our collective bodies, the water that laps onto all the continent’s shores; the understanding and acceptance that earthquakes do happen, disagreements happen, people get sick, we get together to help, and life goes on.

            Peace during peacetime is easy. Then conflict: conflicts need courage in order to sustain peace, our desired gift of living.