Peacemaker Priestess

Playing for Peace

Before we look at why we don’t play, let’s look at why we should…

In children, play is essential for developing social, emotional, cognitive, and physical skills. These days, we find an emphasis on structured play as opposed to simple send the kid out the door play, believing that’s how we keep their brains growing. But rather than a waste of time or just a fun distraction, play is a time when your child is often learning the most. Sometimes, however, play is simply Joy. The sweetest ending of a day of play comes supper with a family, a bath, a couple books and a good night’s sleep. Any of you who had that opportunity, knew that time as Peace.

Slow Down, We Move too Fast Now

The story goes that in agricultural times and even in times before industrialization. We lived slower lives. Yes, we might have worked from dusk to dawn during growing seasons, but there were whole periods of time when we could rest, and spend time with friends and family. Without as many distractions, stories were a way to pass time and pass along culture and history. Slow times leave spaces in between. That space is Peace.

And chores were often communal. Women put up food together and made candles, clothes, and baskets. Men gathered in crops and raised barns. Children herded the grazing animals to their seasonal grazing lands. Repairs were often shared. Again, stories were shared. Traveling laborers, such as spinsters (yes, that’s where that word came from) visited one farm after another, plying their trade for cash and bringing along tales from other places. The Peace of others became our Peace as the yarn and the stories were spun and we were woven into the stories.

Being Present to Realities, Possibilities, and Peace

Here we are in this moment. This one moment. This one place. This one experience. This may be the last place we ever considered being. The last we’ve wanted to be. It may be the realization of our dreams. Whatever it is, it’s where we are. Our options are to be here, fully present, or to distract ourselves with whatever we invent as the reason we couldn’t possibly pay attention to just this moment.

I feel as if I live in a world of constant distraction. Even my writing, which needs a fair amount of presence and is my deepest passion, is easily pushed to the side by incoming stimulus. Heavens, I write on a machine that is constantly providing opportunities to stop thinking and to stop being with my subject matter.

Making the Connections that Make Hearts Sing

I cannot be at Peace when I am unconnected. We live on a planet, indeed, in a Universe that is connected. Gravity. Symbiosis. Love. Yearning. Friendship. Seasons. Ideas. Values. All of these forces and feelings exist in connection with one another.

To be alive is to be connected. When we break those connections — or try to disconnect from these powerful forces — we lose our strength and wisdom.

On Being Certain Our Spiritual Rubber Hits Our Peacepath

Among the many things that matter as we are becoming full expressions of our spiritual selves is whether or not we take the time to allow what we’re developing on the inside to manifest on the outside.

Examining our inner life can be intriguing. Socrates supposedly taught: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Values Make Us Who We Are

Asked us what our deepest values are, we’re probably quick to reply. Everything we mention will be meaningful and valuable to us and to the world.

But here’s the question. When you look at your life, at the way you go through your daily endeavors, how much are those values represented in your experience? Could your best friend or a colleague readily identify your values based on their observations of your actions? What about someone who doesn’t know you well, like wait staff or service people? Based on your interactions with them, what values might they say you live out?

What verb do you use with Faith?

People ask, do you have faith? Presumably they mean in something. Doesn’t that question seem lacking in ambition? It’s the “Yes, I believe in something and that something doesn’t require anything at all from me to take care of me,” answer to living life. It’s lazy.

Faith requires a far more active verb than simply holding. The verb that best suits Faith is keeping. We keep faith with the things we believe by doing work that models that in the world. If we believe Peace to be the utmost possibility, how can we, why would we keep from delighting in it, being grateful for it, pointing it out to folks when it shows up, and practicing it so that others might consider participation?

Your Beliefs: Where Your Heart Rests

At some point in your very young life, you believed in something wholeheartedly. It might have been your parents, the Divine, Santa Claus, Fairies, Trees, or Magic. Probably it was a heady elixir of all those things.

Hopefully you learned as you grew that they perhaps were not as omnipotent as you had thought… at that point, you began seeking other places your heart might be safe. All too often, someone takes it upon themselves to let us know that one or many of these entities were, shall we say, not as powerful as we had hoped.

The Call: Hearing Your Heart’s Whisper

February 1^st celebrates the seeds of the next section of our lives. In addition to its celebration of the light and the first new agricultural babies of the year, and the milk their mothers let down, in earlier times it was also a season of initiation. After several days of fasting and meditating, initiates would emerge from cells to claim their place in the community and the gifts they would share.

This makes this a particularly important week to consider your “call.” What is a call? I believe it is the thing the longing to do the one thing you are best equipped to do, the thing, which when undertaken, is not a chore to develop, and even when challenging, makes you know you are using you gifts to their deepest abilities. You’re where you belong to be, doing what you need to do.

Living a Peacemaker’s Life

Becoming a Peacemaker is an honorable goal. As with every goal, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you are really living into Peacemaking. (Keep reading! It gets more encouraging!) You don’t have to have completed all the work before beginning your Peacemaking — but it’s a good idea to engage with all of the components I detail below so that your style of Peacemaking becomes a natural expression of who you are.

Each of us finds our own way into Peacemaking. Writing about Peace set me on the Peacepath. As many of you may know, I have been writing daily musings for 12 years now. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Since October, I’ve also been reading them on TikTok, so if you’d rather listen, find me there at Tiktok/annkeelerevans. My current musings explore what comprises a Peacemaker’s life. They are reflective exercises on principles and values – the components I consider central to Peacemaking. I now have a list of fifteen components which are detailed below. They are mostly in the order I think makes sense to consider, but you may find you’ll want to reflect on them in the order that is most meaningful for your Peacemaking.