Be Still, Be Kind, Be Peace
“When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
“Reality is always kind”.
- Byron Katie
Watching the Buddhist monks trek, on foot, across half the country (from Texas to DC) often brings me to tears. People from all walks of life, all ages, knowing they will be in or near their home town, meet the monks, bowing, offering flowers, pinning badges on the monks’ shoulder draped clothes, meeting their gaze and grinning widely.
People are leaving their homes, driving a distance to meet and greet these inspiring monks. A hungry and exhausted people going out of their way to be in the presence of genuine kindness and peace.
I spoke with a beautiful young woman who lives in Europe. She, inspired, by what she had been reading and seeing as the monks’ touch so many hearts, chose to make her own walk of kindness, in her own neighborhood.
In our heart of hearts every one of us knows how it feels when kindness enters the room.
It is, undoubtedly, a very dark time in the world. There is a collective sense of fear, helplessness and disbelief, as we watch cruelty, power-hungry behavior, and might is right belief seem to overwhelm the senses and what we would have called routine beforehand.
Darkness is not really new. Throughout human history, we have seen, been part of, died from or survived the darkness of power, greed, violence and ignorance.
It might not be new, albeit, more intense and seems to have much larger stakes (climate) but the truth is we are living in and through THIS dark period.
So often awakening shows up, bursts, opens up when our lives are in upheaval . . . suffering often the portal for us to rub the sleep out of our eyes and remember what we are truly made of. Presence, the ground of our being, enveloping us and revealing an infinite and deeper reality than our mind-generated suffering.
As I watch, listen and feel the state we are in collectively . . . so much falling apart amidst great chaos; heart-breaking division. . . I find myself wondering . . . doesn’t the same spiritual principal apply to the collective as well as the individual? Isn’t the call to wake up; face reality as it is. Might this joint coming apart at the seams be shaking all of our shoulders, looking deeply into our eyes; be a holy, loving wake-up call.
Staying awake to our present we-are-all-in-this-together human experience; not putting our head in the sand and not getting lost in the exhausting details, but, through our very beings, permeate the energy field with peace. A peace that lives in you through and through, taking into serious consideration your thoughts, feelings and reactions to the rupture in our collective fabric. Consciously not projecting; alchemizing every intelligent reaction to our circumstances – allowing yourself to face what is real . . . what is true . . . what is actually happening right now, in you and in the world at large; and in every sense of the word, making room for the larger sacred to flood the zone. This is no easy task. I am very aware of an automatic repulsion in me when I see or feel violence and cruelty and listen to misguided leaders willing to use any means possible to garner wealth and power, creating an even wider gap of inequality and injustice.
Keep my anger
from becoming meanness.
Keep my sorrow
from collapsing into self-pity.
Keep my heart
soft enough to keep breaking.
Keep my anger towards justice, not cruelty.
Remind me that all of this,
every bit of it,
is for love,
Keep me fiercely kind.
Laura Jean Truman
Some dam in me broke wide open when Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis. I hadn’t caught my breath after the killing of Renee Good. It is easier to feel – deeply and fully feel – when tragedy born from division happens to “one” . . . it often is too abstract when it is happening to hundreds or millions. It comes to me that in our native oneness:
In loving one, in grieving one, I was loving the entire world.
The citizens of Minneapolis are training to peacefully protest; they are gathering and singing their hearts out to change the narrative. They are standing and marching in sub-zero weather, including their neighbors who are indoors as they chant, we are doing this for you as well.
The monks are silently walking, peace radiating from them and poets and singers are writing and singing their hearts out to stand in solidarity.
Since I live in the United States, I am writing about what is up close. I have to wonder if there are similar pockets and swaths of kindness happening in Palestine and Israel, in Ukraine and Russia. I know the folks in Greenland have been very vocal. And Iran.
At some deep level we KNOW that love and light are more powerful than the darkest of dark. It might be easy to forget that; perhaps that is our marching orders right now. Find the inner pockets that are conditioned to believe in the power of the dark – bring kindness and peace to these buried or forgotten places inside and brick by brick reconnect with kindness and clarity, with what is most real and what is most powerful. This collective helplessness is not healed in the abstract, but through each and every one of us open to the sacred process of marrying our humanity and divinity.
I do not underestimate the power of being kind to each other, to uniting our division inside our own souls, to treating each other with respect and remembering, viscerally remembering that I am you and you are me. I do not have to agree with you; I can viscerally recoil from lies and raw power and greed, but I can be open and understanding as I listen to your side of things. I can be gentle with myself when I do not feel open or understanding and need to take a step back and breath more deeply. I do not need to engage with anyone who is out to harm. I can meet the moment with stillness, with kindness and with openness.
No matter where we are in this mysterious, challenging, beyond words spiritual journey, we can add our drop of kindness into the universal energy stream.
Open the door for a stranger, offer a compliment, call a friend who is having a hard time, heal our own fears and doubts, listen to someone (or yourself) without judgment; letting your soul hear what is being said or not said, (gentle as a dove, wise as a serpent- meaning meet all with kindness AND a wise no-thank-you when needed) join your voice and your energy with your neighbors or community. The important thing here is: each ounce of our energetic healing, our uniting the divide, our recognizing each other as ourselves, recognizing our shadow as our own. . . however you are being called . . . each ounce holds weight. Each ounce adds to the energetic field of light. Each ounce of kindness and peace and healing can move the dial . . . even when the outreach is anonymous or the prayer is private and silent.
When we are still, we know we are part of something larger than our individual selves.
Be still and cultivate the “God” like qualities that arise in us: compassion, courage, creativity, the impulse toward meaning and justice. The world, as always, is aching for this remembering.
I am using the word God because it sings (to me) a seamless intimacy, a felt sense for what is most real. The word as a metaphor for the mystery and vitality of our fundamental existence.
I am using this metaphor for the greater power that lives within and as all of Life; recognizing that it defies logic and we cannot find measurable explanations that will hold up to the profound reality that kindness and peace are more powerful than all the dark the world throws at and in us. “Reality is always kind”.
I am using this metaphor . . . God . . . as poetic shorthand for the sacred, for devotion and to that unmistakable urge in us to live well.
Whether you are most comfortable with God, Non-Duality, Ground of Being, Awareness/Consciousness, The Great Spirit, Tao, or Quantum Field Theory, we can keep it really simple.
In our depths we know a higher power, calling out to us to make that connection. We know we are formed from one source and, in our depths, we know that kindness, stillness and peace are home and can heal a weary, ignorant world.
May we find and rest deeply in our most real home. May our light be known.
FOR RENEE NICOLE GOOD
They say she is no more,
That her absence roars,
Blood-blown like a rose.
Iced wheels flinched and froze.
Now, bare riot of candles,
Dark fury of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power.
The howl where we begin,
Staring upon the edge of the crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labor
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the live
& better angels of our nature.
What they call death and void,
We know is breath and voice;
In the end, gorgeously,
Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone
When they forever are so fiercely Good
Amanda Gorman
FOR ALEX JEFFREY PRETTI
We wake with no words, just woe
& wound. Our country shoot
ing us in the back is not just brutal
ity; it’s jarring betrayal; not enforcement,
but execution.
A message:
Love your
people & you will die. Yet our greatest threat
isn’t the outsiders among us, but those
among us who never looks within. Fear not those
with papers, but those without conscience. Know
that to care intensely, united
is to carry both pain-dark horror for today
& a profound daring hope for tomorrow.
We can feel we have nothing to give & still
Belove this world waiting, trembling
to change. If we cannot find words, may we find
the will; if we ever lose hope, may we never lose
our humanity. The only undying thing is
mercy, the courage to open ourselves like doors,
hug our neighbor, and save one more bright, impossible
life.
Amanda Gorman