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?

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“The Dark, Sacred Night”*

On the first of December, in my little town, we celebrated the December sky and the encroaching Dark. Working with Fact, Story, and Music, we discovered stars, watched a grandfather assume the responsibility of being a revolving earth while a little one embodied the Sun with so much dignity and finesse. We learned how to find the North Star and wondered if it would help us find our way home. We heard the Gong whisper the night sounds of winter as together, we formed a tree and became a connected living entity that slowly transformed into a festival of lights.

The glittering sky was, in that moment, all the holiday we needed and everyone was invited.

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Peace Outside My Door

Last week, a friend brought me, and helped me install the most wonderful present I could ever receive. A Peace pole. How well he knows and loves me!

Ann: Happy with her Peace Pole!

Look at this — and look how happy I was the night my friend gifted me with beautiful, colorful Peace on stick!

It’s planted right outside my door. When I posted this on Facebook, someone suggested what a wonderful reminder it would prove as I left my house to take Peace with me. Indeed. I try to keep Peace on my heart and in the forefront of my mind, but you know, we all encounter that rude driver with whom we feel inclined to share exactly how we feel about their driving — which is rarely Peaceful. So, Hello, Peace Pole. May I always take your message with me as I set out in the world.

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Find Your Joy, No Really, Find it!

The reason I capitalize Joy when I’m writing about Peace is because I’m writing about something larger than small joys. 

Some reading helped me to discern how real that distinction might be. In particular, I was wondering if people with depression can experience Joy. Although depression means a lessening of possibility to experience Joy/joys, there can still be a place for it.

In particular, I’m referring to a focus on those things that make me feel particularly alive. For me, that is being in what scriptures refer to as Living Water. It’s a challenge for me right now that the temperatures have dropped and I am not walking in the water. I haven’t replaced that yet, neither the exercise nor the experience. 

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Community Tending is Peacemaking

The number of fatalities in the wake of Hurricane Ian are still climbing as the clean-up continues. What is clear is that most of the deceased are elderly. As a woman who has suddenly found herself in that age cohort, it gives me pause. 

As always, I have questions. Why? Were they slow to heed warnings? Were the warnings mostly on technologies that aren’t part of the lives of most seniors? Did they not take warnings seriously? Was there no place to go — or no way to get to safety? Do we become rigid in our age, and think we’re invincible and we know better, even as we become physically frailer, and often, and, this hurts, are we not thinking clearly? And then there’s that other question… Where are the family and community connections that involve people in preparation and decision-making, that help everyone get to safety?

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In Our Hands

Peacemaking isn’t a trickle-down activity. It requires believing in possibility and living into it. And sometimes it just depends upon our taking matters into our own hands.

As I was reading about hurricane Ian clean-up today, I read about two guys who spent the day before the hurricane hit picking up more than 350 pounds of trash on the beach — trash like lobster traps and other things that can do a great deal of damage blowing about inland. (I’m not sure where I read this and haven’t found it again, sorry.) A father and son joined them and they piled up the trash which was then picked up for disposal by their city. These two men have been plucking trash from beaches for years. One has promised to do it as long as he is able. In particular he works to clean up mangrove swamps because these trees do so much to sustain the environment.

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This Turbulent World

A friend of mine once had a bumper sticker on her car that read “Where am I going, and why am I in a handbasket?”*

Sometimes, if I’m living in my fear, I look at the world and think that it’s all too much, that so many things are monumentally wrong, there’s nothing I can do or we can do to make a difference. There’s so much war; there’s so much fear; there’s so much hate. 

I get it. There is so much that is wrong right now. The planet is damaged. The hatred is visceral and ugly. The divisions seem overwhelming. And they are. But I strive every day to remember, that this is not all there is. Those involved in this behavior are not the only people in this world. They’re just loud, because anger can be loud.

But you know what else can be loud? Joy. Delight. Possibility. Ecstasy. 

Both fear and joy are contagious, but only one is what we want to foster. And we are the ones who remember that Joy is possible. Central to Peacemaking is the notion that of Possibility. Peace is a heartfelt yes! Hatred is a sneering no. But no is not a final answer unless we allow it to be. 

Now is the time to make different choices. Now, in this moment, is the time time to climb out of that handbasket and turn ourselves around. There are others around who will help us carry that handbasket. Others still who will help us fill that handbasket with things like hope, encouragement and love, that can help others on their journey with us. 

Today I saw an ad from the World Central Kitchen. Jose Andreas, who started WCK, told us starkly that winter is coming and with it an unparalleled humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. But here was his hope: If we start anticipating now, we can handle the need. It is so easy simply to shake our heads at the magnitude of the need. It is helpful to contribute what we can and ask others to be helpful with us. My twenty-five dollars added to your twenty-five dollars added to all our neighbors’ gifts can add to governmental aid and turn it into Love that feeds hungry children. And if not the WCK, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were recently devastated by a hurricane. People there need help. (WCK is there as well) When I was writing this, Hurricane Ian was bearing in on the Western Florida Coast at 155 mph. And if you’re reading at some other time, another extreme weather situation or natural disaster is threatening.

It can be overwhelming. How do we find the stamina? Let us turn our heads and hearts every day, toward the Beautiful and the True. Get out in Nature and absorb the grandeur — or simply look out the window. Notice Love where it shows up. Revel in it. Tina Turner famously asked in a song, “What’s Love got to do, got to do with it?” The answer is everything. Love has to do with everything that is Peace and Peacemaking.

Where are you heading, handbasket in hand? Who has come forward to share the weight of the basket? Whom have you asked for support? What small and glorious possibility to move from fear to Peace have you envisioned? 

I’ve envisioned us walking toward Peace, handbaskets heaped with what is needed, reveling in the delight of the Journey we share. Share the bounty. Throw back your head and laugh. Peace lies in that direction.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace. Blessed be.

*For those of you who don’t know, there’s an old phrase about going to hell in a handbasket.