Peace?

 

Dear readers,

One by one, your holiday cards appear in the mailbox. 'Tis the season for enjoying messages from family, old friends and new.  So many of them, like the one above (isn't it beautiful?), wish us peace.  I have sent my own cards out wishing the same.

Peace, though.  What is that? I have begun to wonder.   Certainly, it is one of the traditional words for these holidays...joy, peace, happy.  We all use them.  We hope for that indefinable mood and in a broad gesture we hope it becomes universal.  Becomes us. But, though joy and happy are easily perceived, sensed, defined, peace, it seems to me, remains a figment of our imagination.

The other morning I made a card (yes, sorry, there are still a few left to do) for two friends I haven't seen lately.  I'd begun to collage it out of a variety of small scraps, when, one by one, it became a house with spire and, apparently (my friend Alice noticed it when I showed her), a kind of angel in the rafters.  It named itself:  House where all are warm and dry and fed and at peace with each other.

That is the longest title I've ever given a piece of art, except those very few which have a poem wrapped in or around them. It may have begun to answer for me a greater  meaning of peace. I don't mean the meditative state we try to accomplish in yoga, but the sense that all is well among us...every one of us...the whole world.  It gives wellness a much greater distinction (and spirit and empowering) than simply the icon of an exercise facility.  It is a travesty that the weekly spiritual chant in some religious houses...peace be with you....goes no farther than that moment.

Why can't we get along with each other? we (some of us) ask, naively, you might say.  But peace among us is more than getting along.  It's more than tolerating, or accepting, more than inclusivity, too. It's more than being neighborly, that cozy word. It's even more than kindness.

To engender peace means opening the mind to the deeper sense of who we are, who all of us are.  It needs an opening of the self, really.  There is responsibility at its core (pun intended):  being responsible for one another, being responsive to one another.  Understanding the bridge that connects us.  Peace is bigger than we are.  I am hoping it is not bigger than we can be.

All these holiday cards, while beautiful, are a welcome but fleeting reminder of what, as yet, we have not reached among us.  I thank you for them.

May you begin the new year bringing with you Peace in all its fullness.