"Like wildflowers, suddenly"
May you hold your own hand today.
May you nurture a creature smaller than yourself.
May you believe that peace, a wild peace, is growing.
Icebound by John Henry Twachtman, c. 1889
Wildpeace
by Yehuda Amichai
Not the peace of a cease-fire,
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—
who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
from Selected Poetry. Copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai, University of California Press.
Creative Invitation
The memoirist Melissa Febos has a famous writing prompt: “Write your sexual history in five minutes.”
Today, write what you have learned of peace in five minutes.
We have our own meanings for peace/healing. For me, I mean the commitment and work to transcend conflict, war, cruelty, violence, extraction and power-over. The journey to the place of peace within that can be shared; the astonishing rate at which it can multiply from heart to heart. For me, peace includes the absence of fear. It can pass silently from body to body. Often, it must transcend many attempts to derail or distract it.
What is peace for you? Who did you learn it from? Did you learn it in the presence of its opposite? What does your body know of peace? What do you do to create it, bring it alive in the here and now?