a nature-influenced perspective of my past four months and the p word.

Personal Peace Code

I pray to write my heart.

We are all on a journey. I do not wish to go back to Hawaii—where I am now is where I am supposed to be. Attending Israel with Chad, Tenealle, and Taylor was a monsoon of love and mountain peaks with perspective before I stepped into my journey ahead. I embraced every second, and learned very core principles, which I express to share into your minds and hearts today. Our personal peace code should not be dependent upon systems, examples, or heroes, but something much deeper, less flawed, and far more attainable.

In life, things will fall apart. We will still have our gifts and talents, but those we look up to will fall, mountains will quake, never ending storms will loom ahead, and sometimes we will be perpetually wet, toeing the line with what seems to be soul paralysis and the onsets of spiritual hypothermia. People will make mistakes, control of others and circumstances will not be an option. You will be less than yourself, and you will lie and justify. Life is messy: the question is, what do we do with it?

I am currently in a state of being broken down. Like a wood carver to a spoon blank, slices are being taken away from the tenderly cared for and special-picked, timely-shaped blank that I am. These slices are painful and disorienting. This pain is real. As the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh states, “It is from garbage that we produce flowers; and similarly, it is from suffering that we produce understanding and compassion” (You are Here 10). Our suffering is not to be resisted, but rather to be embraced, and held with compassion (11). Recently I was guided through a wise old gypsy’s tale, taken on a journey and invited to answer questions about my mind's creation of that journey. When brought to a wall in the way of the journey’s path, the question was asked, “What is this wall made of, and how do you cross it?” While my answer suited my reality, a friend of mine answered very differently: “The wall is made of fog. I walk right through it.” With the wall being a symbol of our problems, more specifically how we perceive them and how we overcome them, I cannot help but ask myself after hearing this deeply different viewpoint, how do I view my suffering? While trials are real and can feel heavy, if we, as the Buddha encouraged, “embrace our suffering” and “not try to escape from our pain” but rather look at it directly, and try to understand it, in this compassion our personal hells can turn to fog, and with the pouring down of rain, the feces will turn to fertilizer and our flowers will grow. Water is a gift. Monsoons are not always comfortable. Carefully selected and split pieces of wood are tenderly yet directly sliced at by the Creator, almost a relieving release of the unnecessary. To be content and grateful with myself opens a channel and a way of being to those that feel my presence, to all those that I press my intentions upon. To love others is to be alive.

The world is a messy place. This is something we cannot control. But something within my jurisdiction is how I allow that to influence me. I choose to believe in the core of the mountain. The pieces that are shed during the quake are not stable; they are not constant. They are the humans that make mistakes, the people I love that choose different paths, the organizations I believed in that have skeletons in their closets and sometimes even fall deeply and short of their very philosophy. They are me and you, and they require mercy.

I am grateful my mountains have been shook, that I have been invited every week to rethink where my belief in peace lies—jumping from the loose shale rocks as they fall and disappear below, until the next rockslide before me, too, falls downward. Every time I am left with different stones under my feet than before, each foundation being exactly what it needs to be until it falls, forcing me to jump closer to the core or fall with the stones. I am excited to stay on the side of this mountain, leaving me every time with deeper stones and core truths. After many quakes, many trials, many fallings, many choices, I imagine myself at the end of my years, many cycles of my mountain being shook, many layers of rock being shed. In the end, as I lie on my deathbed, I hope to be pleasantly surprised, finding in my journey’s end, a moment of the quakes ceasing, lying on a beautiful vein of aqua colored jasper. As I slip from this earth life into my next journey, I hope to feel a quiet quake and a crumble, the jasper cracking open to a curious beauty, an excitement for the unchartered terrain ahead. I am excited for that day to come true. In the meantime, I will continue to make my stone walls of challenges turn to fog, my trials an exciting game to live, and enjoy jumping off the shifting shale rocks to the ones that lie deeper and yet keep shifting until I find myself on the deathbed of content, a vein of aqua jasper within a stone: a personal truth I have chosen.