practical peace

Talking Story

Apr 18, 10:44 pm

About three years ago I got a call from the filmmaker Helen Whitney, who wanted to know if I would participate in a film about forgiveness that she was making for PBS Frontline. She sent me copies of some other films she had made, and I found them thoughtful and open. I noticed how she let the story emerge in the words of the people in the film.

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The Ice Story

Dec 16, 11:17 pm

I’ve been watching the waters freeze over. Not minute by minute—day by day, first, barely perceptible, a thin film on a cove of Farrar Pond, planes of faint solid crazed like wrinkled plastic wrap, after a night that didn’t seem cold enough. I doubted my senses, and then looked again the next morning. No illusion, no confusion, that is ice forming on Farrar Pond, looking less like a flimsy film, more like something that I could imagine a coyote running across eventually. By the third day, a gull was standing right on the ragged edge of the forming ice, twenty yards from the shore.

It only took two nights and one day of below-freezing temperatures to ice up the edges of the Sudbury River. I am surprised and a little confused by the dozens of ducks packed wing to wing in the small open water of the main current. How can it be? I haven’t started to wear a hat yet, and even the running waters are freezing.

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What is Practical Peace?

Aug 6, 12:16 pm

Practical peace is a way of understanding the world, along with some habits and practices that make it possible to act out that understanding. For me, if it’s going to work it has to be flexible, it has to be creative and it has to reflect a pretty good understanding of what the forces are that we’re embedded in; how things work.

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Poem Found Among the Prison Diaries

Jun 27, 04:15 pm

You say you’re lost
And no place feels like Home?
Right where you are standing
Dig a garden
Any way you can

Depend on it
For everything you get

The sky will tell you
If it’s going to rain.
Your skin will tell you

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Dying in the Oil Spill June 22, 2010

Jun 22, 08:06 pm

Grief never really goes away, the mind-healer told me. It’s just that new things continue to happen, and they become part of our experience too, so the grief is not the only thing, and then it’s not the biggest thing…

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The Gulf Oil Spill May 12, 2010

May 12, 04:06 pm

I am noticing how what I would write about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico changes over time. When it was just a headline, I started out a petty kind of mean: “How’s that ‘Drill, baby, drill’ thing working out for ya now? Huh?”

When I started to hear about thousands of gallons of oil spilling into the ocean day after day; when I learned that BP’s first quarter profit in 2010 was six billion dollars ($6,000,000,000); when I learned that BP had successfully lobbied its regulators against requiring a back-up system that would have shut that oil off by now; when I read that punitive damages against BP for this criminally destructive hubris would be capped at 75 million dollars ($75,000,000), my response turned to anger.

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Reasonable Suspicion in Arizona

May 2, 05:57 pm

I don’t read a newspaper very day, or watch/listen to a regular news show. Since perils can be deadly and require pretty urgent attention, “news” is by nature about the dramatic, the lurid, the frightening. If I let every story in the news in too deeply, I would be crippled by how awful everything is and, worse, by how powerless I am to change it all.

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Spring

Apr 23, 05:55 pm

Yesterday, I finally saw the beauty of this spring. I had been seeing the evidence of the season everywhere —the pink of the flower buds and the pale green of the new baby leaves, the dogwoods and tulip magnolias, even the first white lilacs just opening. The problem is, the 85 degree days had thrown my sense of timing off. I can’t trust the meaning of all this flourishing life. Is it really the right time for the flowering fruit trees? Aren’t the tulips awfully far along for this time of the year?

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