choose it.
wouldn’t you just know it, mine turned out to be a most sensitive soul, tender and easily bruised. you would not BELIEVE the route i took my body on to discover that. together we sewed the skin of genocidaires, watched a rash of small graves pass through a town, sent people from warm hospital halls to sleep on cold toronto streets. once i watched a man with a gun shout at a bunch of twelve year olds in the high sun to crawl closer to the ground than they already were, so their enemy wouldn’t shoot them in the shoulders. i certainly haven’t seen it all, but think i’ve seen enough.
i’ll spare you the autobiography, but conflict caught something in me as a doctor early and hard. a yearning to know peace in myself maybe. if the war that lived in me came from the same place as the ones in cambodia, sudan, somalia, perhaps a deft move could sneak me around.
didn’t turn out like that. it was too complex, too confusing. identity, power, geography, resources, history, all these at the same time. even the people in the middle of it couldn’t really say how they got there. i decided i was far too small, my mind too feeble to understand. the best i could do was to retreat where it was safe, reconsider the route. maybe if i stayed close to peace, it would seep in, and i could know it that way. i landed in ethiopia, as alive in the koran as the bible, so many languages, so little halloween. people, who eventually became my friends, wanted to build emergency rooms all over the country. i dropped my bags, and found a kind of home. at least for a decade.
war has arrived there, as it does in countries and people, as it does in me. my friends who i love are in the middle of it, so i am too, me and the part yearning to be safe, the one i share with you and all people.
in twenty years of puzzling hard about how i might do that, trying, failing, trying, in real life and daydreams and nightmares, i’ve only come up with two answers that have stuck around. first, you can’t get around war, in the world, or ourself, only through it. it keeps rising, seems sewn into my nature, wedded to the peace i seek. second, and this discovery feels newer, but to find a way through those days or months when all seems bitter, i must choose love. actively and every time.
sounds so easy. it isn’t, but then one day…if we choose love and then love and then love, in all the valences, every time, of ourself, another, all people, god herself, it becomes where we dwell.
or we can choose fear, or lust, or hatred, or greed, or anger. as we do, the route becomes riven. unbidden, it starts to choose us, and the narrower, ancient view do their perversely successful evolutionary thing: shake us into individuals instead of interconnection, and we feel alone on the losing side of a zero-sum game, with no option to but to fight. nowhere is safe, no home will fit, at least for long. the devil only needed the one move: deceive us into seeing scarcity in the face of plenty. with that inversion, anxieties treble. gunshots too. stock markets. take what you can, the little man says, before someone takes what is yours.
nothing is. ours i mean. not even us is, not a single atom sticks around save for a few in whatever teeth we’ll have left. everything else just flows through. anions, identity, scrambled eggs, love, hate. thank god to the holy highest, in that that magic mindbodyspirit land of ever-shifting awareness, she placed her answer to every one of the devil’s tricks: we get to choose.
i wake up every morning, and i choose love. and when i have forgotten what it is, i do what my friend dave courchene taught me: go into ceremony, prayer or solitude or fasting or meditation or nature or or or, and keep on doing it until you realize your life was a ceremony this whole time, and on that day, when you glean that truth, all you see is spirit, and because you are it and so is everything that ever was, there is nothing to hate.
and the next day it’s gone, and there is nothing to love. ever-shifting. so we choose again, every day, in every way, and when we commit to love, commit to peace, in a forever-way, the billion bells built into our bones chime, and mother nature does a double-fist pump, and her tears of joy fall from thunderclouds stacked a mile high, because another of her children found the way. how much closer could the breadcrumbs be, she asks, for the 80 billionth time, and goes back to waiting.
thich nhat hanh, a living buddha, says that we don’t have peace because we don’t choose it. peace talks as they are done now, he says, are doomed to fail. they should never be attempted over anything less than two weeks. the first week, no talking about what you want, only being with each other, each other’s families, making food. at the end of that week, you start to talk about the people you love, how they are suffering. we choose love, and peace follows.
i lost my mother last year, to a fall in hospital. she hit her head hard. i almost wrote “never got to say goodbye”, but i mean …never got to hear it. i said goodbye for days. in the last of them, when she seemed disturbed, in pain or confused, i would lean into her ear, smell that first smell, my favorite in the world by a fathom, and whisper:
….shhshhhhhshhhhhh
peace peace peace peace
love love love love love
rest rest rest rest rest
peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace
lovelovelovelovelovelove
what a beautiful home
do you see it? what a beautiful home.
peacepeacepeacepeace…
her brow would soften, then smooth. one morning, she found that beautiful home, and stayed.
she dwells there, yet somehow is still with me. not just in my nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but if you can believe this, science please forgive me, in her spirit, sweeter than ever. i wonder why no one tells you this about grief, that it is a healing thing, growing over the hole a body leaves behind in our heart, but after it’s done, we are left alone with the spirit, and the best of it, it’s clearest signal, for it has nothing to fear, and the chimes on our side become louder than ever.
as i wait to see what type of world approaches for my friends in ethiopia, i send them the same wish i did for my mother, the same one i had for myself when i stepped onto the tarmac in phnom penh twenty years ago, and have still : peacepeacepeacepeace, lovelovelovelovelove, restrestrestrest. may we abide in the most beautiful home we can know in this lifetime. as we choose it, it chooses us.
i miss you. i worry for you. i trust you will be well, because you have always chosen love, and by doing it, taught me how. i will be with you soon, learning from you how to find space, for the sick and the worried, how best to place all of this love.
