What is Peace? What does it mean? It’s more than a cessation of war, of violence or fighting. It’s more than keeping up a façade of pleasantness, or “appropriate” behavior. It goes much deeper than appearances, pat phrases or pretense.
Deep within, we are connected. Connected with everyone and everything, vibrating and oscillating, breathing with life and energy. Resting in the mycelial network, we are One. We are home. At home in the thrumming of creation. Fully alive and deeply embedded in the living, breathing life-force, the energy of Love that inhabits World-Soul. Like the life-blood of tiny veins coursing through vibrant leaves in full bloom, or the bare, sinewy branches of the arbor elders awaiting their spring buds, we are connected. Witness the engorged alveoli of the robust pulmonary airways in our lungs, or the tiniest capillary blood vessels in our hearts. Together, what a miracle of collaboration and energetic impulse and flow! We are most at peace when we feel fully how inextricably connected we are, and interdependent with the whole.
So much unrest, anxiety and loneliness is about not feeling we belong, that the circle is too small, or that we are somehow “outside”—forgotten or excluded from the great Web of Life, or somehow “less than,” or “unworthy” or “damaged goods.” Really, we are magnificent beings of light who shimmer most brilliantly when reflected through the eyes of love.
As we move through this tumultuous period of the Sixth Great Extinction, our human-inflicted, global eco-cide, fraught with geo-political warfare and existential unrest, terrible dis-ease and violent discord rampant among our human-kin, we are finally becoming aware that the damage we inflict has cosmic implications. Our ungracious anthropocentrism, domination, excess, pillaging and waste extend inevitably toward all our relations. No wonder we are far from peace in our hearts. No wonder we can’t breathe.
Perhaps we can learn the way of peace from our other-than-human kin. Creation is speaking. How are we listening? Our arbor elders and plant-kin especially teach us to ground ourselves, to breathe with deliberate fullness, and to plunge deeper into the Mystery that binds us. They teach us radical hospitality and the art of collaboration. They teach us to trust in the moment that is the potent NOW.
“Leave it alone.” “Let it be.” “Be at peace.” “Ground yourself.” “Just breathe.”
Many ways to say it. Many paths to resting in the Love that made us.
Deep peace comes with knowing we’re held and loved. All of us, together. The wider “We.”
If “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” (Emily Dickinson),
Peace is the Thing with Leaves.
So, reconnect. Go, plunge, emerge, bloom, grow, reach for the light, soak up the moisture, bend and dance with the wind. Then fall, morph, burst with vibrant color, find your way back to Earth. Die brilliantly. But stay connected. Learn from your elders and play among the seedlings. Just stay connected. Remember how loved and held you are in the lap of Love, and peace will find you resting.
Peace is the thing with leaves.
—Laura A. Weber, Ph.D., Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator