Where is the Peace?

This has been a difficult week for me personally. Challenges abound. Yet, I clearly see how the challenges are in the mind and heart, and how reality certainly is what you believe about whatever you are facing. This last week, my daughter married. Without my knowledge, without my blessing, without me. I discovered the marriage on my Facebook page. She did not tell me because she knew I would not approve. As I dwelled in the feelings of confusion, shock, sadness and betrayal, I tried to remember to be the observer and to remember, these feelings shall pass, this is her life not mine, and there are always tremendous life lessons to be learned, for all of us. I do not want to dwell on the pain, as I am sure all you mothers can understand my feelings without further description. You have all heard me say divorce is a gift. Well, if I can say that, couldn’t I also say this marriage is a gift? What are the gifts this marriage will bring? I am not sure, yet I know, I need to stay open and ready to receive these gifts.

For now, my daughter is happy and needs the love and support of her family. Motherhood certainly is about giving, and very often about setting aside our own needs and desires, for ourselves and our children. Maybe this is challenging me to be the best, most unconditionally loving mother I can be. Maybe I get to learn what unconditional truly means. So, what is done is done. Let us all send Tamar and Shane all our love and best wishes.

It is getting dryer here. It feels like Oregon in August, when the green starts turning grey. However, the Ylang Ylang trees are blossoming and the smell at sunset is like heaven on earth. I think if we could all smell that smell every day, there would be no war, only peace.

On a worldlier note, I am reading a book that talks about our responsibility in the world and how we are destroying the world to stop destroying the world. You know, it’s like the Holly Near song, why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong. In this book, I came across this part of a speech from Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.

Here is part of his Cross of Iron speech: “…Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocked fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities…. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron….”

I get so choked up by that image! Feel that, “it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron!” Can you feel that? How significant is that which was written 54 years ago! How sad that we have not advanced. How many plant and animal species have disappeared since that time? How many people have starved to death since that time? How many, how many, how many….Is this the very best we can be??? I know in the US we have this department of defense. I call it a department of war, because that is what we do with it, we create and fight wars.

I still do not understand why is it that our brilliant and best minds are spent on war and not on peace or making the world a better, safer, more loving place? Why do we not have a department of peace? Maybe it is because of all the turmoil we feel internally.

Peace truly starts within. I think we each need to carve out a piece of ourselves to create our own private departments of peace. What would it take for you to feel peace? If I can find peace within me during this emotional crisis I am feeling, then I know, without a doubt, we can all breathe some peace into our cells. Peace begins at home. Shalom Bayit. Respiracion en la paz. Breathe in the peace then breathe it back out into the world again. My intention this week is to be peace, be peaceful and feel the peace in my family.