Skies of October

Soft, warm, early October night

We find ourselves walking

on the trail

by the lake

in the dark.

Stopping to look through the trees

at the still water mirror,

Our eyes are drawn skyward.

And there,

suspended

over the lake

Is the Big Dipper

Low over the water

Monumental and mythic

As if it was about to swing on its giant axis

And scoop water out of the lake.

My imagination soars and

I can see it all taking place

Water splashing

soaring into the sky

in one long arc

Bringing a drink to the sky dwellers

Backwards rain

Replenishment

Nourishment,

Life.

The Big Dipper, Ursa Major to some

Pointing to the North Star on a freedom walk

Hunters, a fisher and more

The pattern becomes the story,

Rich in meaning and history

Both personal and collective

The stars, our first maps

Leading us home.

But then the sky grows bright

As Grandmother Moon in all her fullness

Rises in the East

Calling us.

And we follow her

Back along the dark trail

To our dock

Where her light shines on the waves of the bay.

Mirrored, rippled, dancing light on the lake

We, entranced by her slow elegant journey

Unable to move,

Sit silent,

Mesmerized,

Filling up.

Days later,

just before a mid-October sunset,

A familiar trilling call catches my ear.

Maybe the local crow family making small talk.

But it gets too loud for them.

The sound pulls my eyes to the sky

Searching for magic,

And I find it

in a huge V

of Sandhill Cranes

A hundred or more.

Wide-winged, long legs trailing,

They fly from the West

On their long autumnal journey.

My hearts burst wide open and

Joins in their flight.

Now, late October

A clear, blue, becoming-yellow dawn

Over another lake and

I am on my way to work but

The light calls me to bear witness

And I take my hot tea to the shore.

The warm lake water

Kisses the cold night air

And gives birth to swirls of mist

That dance and twirl over the water

Like women in gauzy white robes

Dancing with abandon

As if no one was watching.

They make their way eastward

In a line on the soft breeze

To the mouth of the bay

As if greeting the sun.

Dancing in sheer delight

For the morning.

And my heart is delighted,

Lightened, warmed, enlivened

With the beauty of the water

And the air and the fire of the sun.

The skies of October

Have nourished me,

Sustained me,

inspired me,

And reminded me of who I am.

That my story is woven with

The stars and the moon and the sun

For my cells emit photons of light.

And the water of the lake and the sky

Is the same water that flows through me.

The cool night air and the warm breezes

Flow into and out of my lungs.

I am a part of all of this

I am home.

Disturbing the Peace

 Disturbing the Peace (2016) is an award-winning film about Israeli and Palestinian combatants who took part in the generations of armed struggle in the region until something happened to each one of them that allowed them to see the conflict from the others’ point of view.

Through the use of interviews, archival footage and dramatic recreations, each person's story is told.  They relate their first experiences of violence created by the “other side”, the part they played in the armed conflict and the event that changed them forever.  And then the story of how they began to work together for peace unfolds.

Chen Alon is the grandson of a Polish immigrant to Palestine.  The rest of his family were all killed by the Nazis.  “Zionism saved his life,” says Alon who learned to feel that Israel was the only place where Jews can be safe. He remembers being bombed when he was four and joining the Israeli army at age eighteen.  At one point he was confronted by the father of sick Palestinian children at the border were he was on guard while he talked to his wife about his sick daughter on his cell phone.  He suddenly felt a split between himself as a father and as a soldier and realized that there were fathers on both sides of the conflict.

Jamil Oassas talks about the Palestinian people’s journey. “Israel’s creation was our catastrophe,” he says as he tells the story of how the Israeli army invaded his family’s village and took them all away except for his grandfather who refused to leave and was therefore killed.  His family was moved to a refugee camp where they have lived ever since  He remembers the Israeli soldiers in the camp shooting his fourteen year old brother for breaking curfew to visit his uncle next door.  And so Oassas took part in “resisting the occupation.”  Later when many Israeli children were killed by a suicide bomber, his mother was crying because the mothers of those children would go through the same pain as she did.  “Blood is blood.  It doesn’t have two colours,” she said.  This shook him to the core when he realized that mothers were suffering on both sides.

Israeli, Assaf Yacobovitz  worked as a controller of missions that included the dropping of bombs.  He never connected the work he did on his radar screen with the actual reality of who the bombs were being dropped on until one day he saw on TV the destruction caused by the mission he had just been a part of.  He suddenly felt compassion for the people he had killed by being a part of the mission and something changed inside of him.

Shifa al-Qudsi remembers a childhood of seeing the Israeli army killing Palestinians.  She remembers seeing a student killed in front of her house when she was a child.  One day when she was an adult, her daughter came home after seeing a girl killed in front of her.  She describes how she wanted to do something to protect the Palestinian children.  Since there was no Palestinian army, she decided to carry out a suicide attack.  “Our world was a cemetery of the living,” she said.    Before she could carry it out, she was arrested and taken to prison.  She always thought that Israelis were evil but one day a guard’s sibling was killed in a suicide attack and Shifa could see that people were dying on both sides and feel compassion for her captor.

The stories go on an on.  Stories of people who have only seen one side of an armed conflict but then suddenly can see it from the point of view of their previous enemy.  A group of Israeli soldiers including those interviewed in the film, wrote to the Prime Minister of Israel saying that they would protect Israel but they would not patrol the occupied areas or do anything that degraded other human beings.  This became a big story in Israel and there were many people who called them traitors.

At the same time a group of Palestinians who had studied non-violence while being held in prison had been released and were looking for ways to put these new strategies into action.  They invited the Israeli soldiers to come for a meeting.  Although it felt extremely dangerous to these soldiers, they came for the meeting and eventually Combatants for Peace was born.

The first step to build trust for healing was to confess.  Each told their story while sitting in a circle.  They found out that they had something in common:  the willingess to kill people they didn’t know.  But now they all wanted peace.  They started to see things from the other side and in 2006 Combatants for Peace was created.  

Combatants for Peace have worked since then to create alternatives to armed conflict in order to create peace in the Middle East.  They studied non-violence and were inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to hold rallies, ceremonies and other public events to present an alternative to their fellow citizens.   “Each time we are creating this alternative of this reality of Israelis and Palestinians communicating with each other, it is a revolution,” one of them says. 

Protest at the wall that divides Israelis and Palestinians included giant puppets.  The two sides met at the wall and ironically, it was the soldiers that were symbolically trapped between the two groups of peaceful protesters.

The approach that each side is the victim and the other side is the perpetrator has to be rethought.  “We are all victims of the conflict and also its creators,” says one member at a rally.  If they are creators of the conflict then they can be creators of peace, is how they now understand the story of the conflict.  On Memorial Day in Israel CFP holds a ceremony to remember the lost lives on both sides of the conflict.

Image from Disturbing the Peace

What keeps them going in the face of ongoing conflict?  They know that if they could change their minds about the conflict then it is possible for others to do so.  They have empathy and compassion for those suffering on both sides and when they feel discouraged, they support each other to keep on going. 

  Although Disturbing the Peace is about what seems to be an intractable conflict, the principles that stand out have a universal truth.  The knowledge that we are connected to one another, compassion, empathy and the strength of community are the arms of these combatants.  The DVD case reads, “DISTURBING THE PEACE is a story of the human potential unleashed when we stop participating in a story that no longer serves us and, with the power of our convictions, take action to create new possibilities.” 

Disturbing the Peace is an example of a new story that is being told and lived and one which can inspire all of us to rethink the stories we tell about conflict.  You can hear some of their members in this youtube video.

Members of Combatants for Peace

Women Wage Peace

Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women marched across the West Bank and Israel to demand a peace agreement.

After walking for two weeks they arrived in Jerusalem on Oct. 8th, 2017.

“Women Wage Peace” s an Israeli grassroots movement.  Its members span across political and religious spectrums.

The women’s group doesn’t have a particular agenda but wants to get both sides talking again.

Listen to their voices here and you will hear a new story, a story of women listening to each other and working together so that everyone's needs get met.  It may feel like a familiar story to you, one you live each day, not such a new story after all.  But this story is being told in an area of high conflict and that is something new.

With My Own Two Hands

Playing for Change has released it's latest world video called With My Own Two Hands written by Ben Harper as part of a partnership with the international anti-poverty NGO, 

ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World and their #StopPoverty campaign. 

October 17th is the 30th World Day to Overcome Extreme Poverty.  

You can find out more at All Together in Dignity Fourth World.

Check out the video:

 Here are the lyrics by Ben Harper:

I can change the world

with my own two hands

Make a better place, 

with my own two hands

Make a kinder place,

with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

I can make peace on earth, 

with my own two hands

And I can clean up the earth, 

with my own two hands

And I can reach out to you, 

with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

I’m gonna make it a brighter place, with my own two hands

I’m gonna make it a safer place, with my own two hands

I’m gonna help the human race, with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

With my own, with my own two hands

Now I can hold you with my own two hands

And I can comfort you with my own two hands

But you’ve got to use, use your own two hands

Use your own, use your own two hands

Use your own, use your own two hands

What can you do with your own two hands?  There are stories of what other people are doing on the All Together with Dignity (ATD) website.  You can be a part of this story too.

Thanksgiving in the Woods

It is Thanksgiving weekend and I am walking in one of my favourite areas, Grant’s Woods, near Orillia, Ontario.  This land was owned and loved by the Grant family for over a century before it was donated for to the Couchiching Conservancy for public visits.  It was not “logged” like most of the land in the area and so there are huge old growth white pines, red oaks, beeches and sugar maples throughout the forest like grandparents and great grandparents of the smaller, younger trees and tiny saplings.  It takes three people holding hands to encircle some of the trees and I usually bring my attention up into the canopy, straining to see the tops entwined with each other.

Wild Ginger leaves

But today, the ground feels spongy beneath my feet and I bring my awareness to the earth and what is beneath me.  As I look to the forest floor I see the abundant, dark green, heart-shape leaves of the wild ginger.  My thoughts are sent below the surface to their gingery-smelling roots.  I am instantly surprised at the feeling of energy building below the surface, in the roots of the trees, shrubs, and plants that surround me.  “Of course”, my left, rational brain declares, “they are all storing sugars in their                                                                                       roots in preparation for                                                                                         winter.”

As often happens in the woods, I try to apply what the forest teaches me, to my own life.  My partner and I are in the autumns of our lives.  We are in the process of sorting out memories of decades of life, deciding what to store and what to let go of so that we are not burdened by the weight of life as we move forward.  The image of storing one’s sugars in the roots makes sense.  We can store the wisdom of our life experiences as roots do, wisdom and knowledge that can be drawn on whenever necessary.  Past experiences don’t need to buzz around our heads as unresolved conflicts or burden our hearts as unhealed pain.  The leaves that generated the sugar from photosynthesis will fall away, like the experiences themselves.  But we can take the sugar, the wisdom from them and store that.

As I continue to walk, I can feel all that reserve, that energy below me and I think again of how we access knowledge, wisdom.  We search out facts on-line and listen to the news and other people.  But the earth holds much wisdom in the stones, the roots, the soil and the networks that exist within it, that we can access whenever needed.  We simply need to pay attention, listen and be grateful.  We don’t need to pack our heads full of fears and possibilities that distract us from the present moment.  We can walk on the earth and learn what is needed on a daily basis.  I remember a piece of poetry from a book I am currently reading entitled, If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie.  The poem is by Rainer Maria Rilke and in part says,

If we surrendered

To earth’s intelligence

We could rise up rooted, like trees.

I walk gently on the earth, stopping to touch giant trees as I go, trying to soak up, to breath in, the intelligence all around me and I do feel stronger, more rooted, calmer.   And for this, I am truly thankful.