The Readers Blog is a group blog, a collection of provocative, passionate people who represent a broad geographical, professional, personal and vocational range. New bloggers from other places and other points of view will join the conversation from time to time. Here, we invite them all to share their perspectives and opinions on the issues that matter to them most. And we invite you to respond. Let the dialogue begin!
Peace begins at home
Is there room in your home for peace? I’m really asking.
How can we expect to create peace on this blessed orb if we don’t or won’t work to create peace in our own homes?
Peace in our environment is a worthy objective. The way to allow it to come forth is for each homeowner to look with a curious, peace-discerning eye at his or her own home. Each corner, each room, each porch, sofa, chair, book, lamp, table, balcony, deck, picture, closet. Every inch.
In contemplation, ask a question: does this room make me feel peaceful?
If it does, magnificent!
If it doesn’t, ask a second question: what change(s) might I make to allow this room to let me feel peaceful?
Change on our planet is a wonderful goal, and I’m thrilled that Al Gore and his work for climate change has been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, but peace begins at home.
When a home is at peace, it has a ripple effect. Radiating peace to its environment, its environment has a chance to be at peace. That’s the fastest way to climate change I know.
I work with The Peace Alliance campaign for the U.S. Department of Peace and I can tell you from my personal experience of the other people in this campaign that for thousands of us peace really does begin at home. However, the home of which I speak is more internal than the house in which I live.
I have become convinced that I have the power to transform the world into one that is free of domination. I believe that all it takes to transform the world is for me to transform myself into a more mature, responsible, and loving person. That’s all I have to do, nothing more than that, nothing less than that, and nothing is more important than that transformation. When I change my inner world, my external behavior shifts to match, and I become a creative source of systemic change.
Moreover, if I can do it, with my history of dysfunction and wounding, certainly anyone can do it. The ripple effect from this transformation is immeasurable, and it has the power to stimulate the largest institutions of repressive domination to implode. This turns conventional thought on its head, and would appear to be insane to most people, a kind of megalomania, which it is not, it is the exact opposite of megalomania. It is acknowledging our critical participation in energetic systems far larger than ourselves.
I do not accept that I am the victim of the military-media-corporate-government conspiracy. I am 100% responsible for it, another apparently “insane” idea, and yet what I mean is that I am 100% able to respond to it. I have an answer. I have more than one answer. Having a better idea is far more effective for producing social transformation than recrimination and revolt. Very soon the world will be ready to hear hundreds of thousands of people who have transformed themselves internally to be the change, and not demand the change from some external source.
The wave of transformation is happening all around us if we are open to perceiving it, and it is time to paddle like hell to match speeds with the wave so that when it breaks we are moving forward and not left behind. Those who ascribe to the “Left Behind” series of fictions, those who cling to blaming others and feeling superior, who refuse to accept that we are all in this together, are in for a big surprise.
posted by Davoid on 5/29/2008 10:39 am