Yesterday, September 21, was the International Day of Peace, also known as World Peace Day. It was established in 1981 by the United Nations as a day for people all over the Earth to reflect on and commit to creating a culture of peace across the planet. I spent a lot of time meditating and reading about peace yesterday, feeling it was important to focus on peace during a time where it seems like there is so much not-peace, not just in our country, but across the world.

I found a quote that I really liked, even though it came from someone that I disagreed with politically. But it’s that part of embracing peace? No one is right all the time, and no one is wrong all the time. So when I find something that I found true and uplifting, even if I disagree with them on their policies, I think it is great to call them out.

So I’m highlighting this quote from former President Ronald Reagan that I think has a lot of wisdom:

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.”
–Ronald Reagan

Here he is saying it himself at the Commencement Address at Eureka College:

This really struck me because it is in the nature of human society, especially in America where we are encouraged to have our own ideas and follow our own paths, to have differences, which are “conflicts.” The one person I have the most conflicts with on a daily basis is my son, when he is home from college and living with me as a young adult. We disagree on many things, and can have “spirited discussions” on everything from when we should eat dinner to whether or not the American health care system is the worst one on the planet. And yet, there is no one I love more than my son. I believe we are very, very close, but also very, very different.

So personally, I don’t think love or peace can be based on agreements about everything. My son and I disagree, but I think we try to keep our disagreements within a framework of respect and love and peaceful resolution, which is often just to agree to disagree. If we can practice that at home with those we love, maybe we can be better at bringing out into the world with others that we don’t necessarily feel that love connection.

The other thing most inspiring thing I found among my research was a poem called “Wage Peace.” It is by an American poet named Judyth Hill, although on the Internet it is often accredited to Mary Oliver. (As a literature teacher, once more I have to say FIND A CITATION before just passing on stuff you find on the Internet. To me it is a moral issue to make sure I give credit to the rightful creator of such wisdom rather than just passing one what someone on the Internet says is the person who said/wrote/created whatever you are sharing. When possible, add evidence, such as the video footage above, to prove your point.)

This is a poem that Hill wrote on September 11, 2001 after the terrorist attacks on the US. She lives in California now, so I assume she was watching this unfold from the other edge of our nation. But I believe it was her gift to a country, and really a world, reeling from a terrible act of violence and conflict. And just like President Reagan’s words, it carries a wonderful truth beyond the specific circumstances. The poem is entitled “Wage Peace.”

WAGE PEACE 
 Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
 
Breathe in terrorists 
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
 
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
 
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
 
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
 
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothespins, clean rivers.
 
Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

imagine grief 
as the outbreath of beauty 
or the gesture of fish

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea …and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.
 

Judyth Hill ~  September 11, 2001

I’m interested in what speaks to me in both these very different quotes. But I think it is peace is not just a kumbaya feeling while meditating. Both acknowledge that in this human world, there is conflict. We can’t pretend there isn’t. And yet, they both say we have a choice about how to deal with that conflict. We can choose to deal with it in loving, compassionate, respectful, sometimes humorous ways. We can acknowledge that there are issues we aren’t going to agree on and let that be. We can also find ways to compromise, like when one person wants to eat at 10:00 PM and another person wants to eat at 7:00 because they need to get up and go to work the next morning and the other one doesn’t…so, yeah, let’s eat at 8:00. Maybe even 7:30. And other times, it means someone has a position that we absolutely can’t agree with or go along with, but somehow we try to maintain our common humanity, our common divinity.

Sometimes peace is easy for me. But sometimes peace takes work. Sometimes A LOT of work. Sometimes it takes a radically different point of view, like grief as the output of beauty, or breathing in terrorism and breathing out sleeping children. Sometimes it takes believing in a future that our rational brains can’t imagine but our souls know to be the the underlying truth. Sometimes it is celebrating that armistice has arrived, even if we can’t see it in our shared reality.

So that is what I’ve been thinking about around the International Day of Peace. I would love for you to share your thinking about how we can create peace in our times.

PS–Here is a choral version of the Wage Peace poem done by people who live in New York City with visuals from the site of the majority of the 9/11 violence. Again, may this lift us into peace.