Month: July 2025

For all the differences between my brother and me, there are deep similarities that can take people a while to recognize. We’ve both lived away from home for much of our adult lives, we’ve lost the family members who made the bridges between us obvious. Now, at this stage of life, we are losing those who knew us when, those who totally understood how we are connected.

Slightly more than ten years ago, I dared to add a comma to my name followed by the word Peacemaker. Over the years there have been others, as I identified my gifts. Priestess became part of my identity in the 90s, as I began a communal liturgical ministry creating “Ceremonies Celebrating Your Life.” Poet was added when I realized that I had been writing poetry for the public daily for a few years — beginning to understand that Poetry is my way of sharing not only what I’m thinking, but how – and what – I’m doing about that thinking!

After reading my column in our daily paper on helping soldiers to find Peace in our communities, a friend reminded me, “no one ever writes about the Peace Corps.” Of the many Peacemaker’s Ponderings columns I’ve written, I realized that was certainly true for me — despite knowing quite a few people who have served. This includes people in my life and people I’ve met in the course of performing weddings and other ceremonies. Peace Corps couples’ weddings are often filled with other Peace Corps folks. By the time I was doing weddings, the Peace Corps had been around long enough for me to celebrate couples whose parents had also been Peace Corps volunteers. Those were some story-telling weddings! That ability to tell stories, learned in the course of living in other lands and cultures, not only enabled the volunteers to understand other cultures, but also helped them make sense of the work they had done or were doing, allowing them to extend that way of working and teaching into the rest of their personal and professional lives.