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.
