It is Memorial Day in America. I am feeling sad.
The words above have come into my mind a few times lately. Strangely, it was just the words without any definition of them. I thought that by writing about them I might get a chance to define what they mean.
My guess is that it has something to do with perfectionism. Perfectionism is not a good thing. It is far less stressful, and much more balanced to admit we are not perfect beings.
I have realized that I do not get everything I want. I get some of the things, some of the time. And that is probably a good thing. If we got everything we wanted, as if we had a genie on retainer or something, life would become pretty mundane. We’d just go around wishing and getting, wishing and getting. The way things are now, at least we have to work for most of what we get and not feel too sad about what we don’t get.
Maybe, SOMETHING, NOT EVERYTHING is about acceptance. Words to tell me to accept the great gifts I have been given—to be thankful for them—and don’t worry about what I’m going to receive in the future. It’s good to know that pretty much everything happens in degrees—that most of life is not all or nothing.
Dedicated to my mother & father on May 9th, 2004.
I often wonder where do I find peace? Where does it reside? Where does peace come from? Where does it go when it goes away? Does it turn into anger or discord? Is there only peace and lack of peace, or are there degrees in between—mostly peaceful, somewhat peaceful? These are all questions I have.
As I write these words down on paper, I am sitting in an orchard beneath some fruit trees in a quiet grove. It is late afternoon. I feel a breeze moving across the orchard. I see it, as if it was some invisible hand, weighing the blades of grass down to the ground and moving the leaves around on the trees. I feel the breeze against my face. It is a peaceful breeze, not a violent warlike wind. The breeze actually seems to push me towards peacefulness, to a place inside me, somewhere in the direction opposite of discord.
I know that peace exists because I feel it now all around me. But I am also aware of wars being fought in other parts of the world. I know that war seems to live in the Middle East. At this time last year I was in Iraq as a photojournalist where I saw the damage war had wrought. I saw hundreds of buildings crumbled by the winds of war. I saw people wounded by battles lying in the hospitals of Baghdad.
As a journalist, I have seen and felt the winds of war. I experienced it as a combat correspondent in Vietnam when I was still a young man. Being there changed my life forever. I have seen the angry face of war in other places too. I saw it through my camera lens on 9/11 from an Army Black Hawk helicopter, a bird with a warlike name made to fly in the winds of war.
Seeing war has been disturbing fact of life for me as it is for anyone who has felt war’s wrath. It has made me both angry and depressed at times, which in turn has made me seek ways to quell these emotions. I found that seeking peace in artificial substances worked only for a short time and dealt only with the symptoms not the root of the problem. Substances create something more like pacification than real peace.
Back at home, some months after returning from Vietnam but still very much in its grip, I parked in front of a market where there was a poster in the window with the picture of a Yogi on it. He had a happy and peaceful look on his face and it turned out, when I went to meet him later, that he truly was both a happy and peaceful man. I followed Maharishi around the world to Europe and to India learning what he taught about peace. The most important thing I learned was to meditate, which brought me real peace and still does—the same sort of peace that comes from being in this orchard.
Just because I meditate doesn’t mean that I’m always peaceful. I am not. I still get angry. I still sometimes grow depressed and I still meet with anger in others and, because of my job, I sometimes run into wars.
But I have learned that peace resides within each of us. This makes me think that the solution to ridding the world of anger must happen one person a time. In order to create a more peaceful planet each of us must be responsible for our own behavior. Each of us must find our own peace. A forest of green trees is made up of individual green trees.
A short time ago while working on a story I attended the logging conference at the Ukiah Fair Grounds where I watched some artisans making sculptures out of Redwood logs. Beside them was a bin filled with large scraps of redwood, free for the taking. I threw two large pieces onto the bed of my pick up truck and brought them home. When I moved them to my backyard, I inadvertently rested one piece crosswise on top of the other. Then, when I saw them the next morning, I knew the Peace Podium had been born. It seemed as if Mother Nature had begun construction, not me. For weeks afterwards, I sanded and varnished, finishing what had been so beautifully begun.
Whenever I have walked through the redwood forest in Montgomery Grove, I have realized that the trees have been around for centuries—some were here when Christ was alive. These ancient living things give you pause. They make the present seem like only a blip on the screen of history. That must be why the Peace Podium is made of redwood—to represent the possibility of peace that lies within the timelessness of nature.
The Peace Podium exists to help create a more peaceful planet. The podium will be a platform from which people can share their hope for peace. People can come, one by one, and speak of their own peace, how they find it and where they find it. Others will hear what they say and will hopefully learn ways to find peace in their own lives.
Each person can share what works for them. In this way each of us can speak of peace and listen peacefully. There just one rule: Those who listen are asked not judge the words of another. Instead, each of us must find acceptance within our own hearts. If we do not agree with what someone says, we just let their words roll off us and be thankful that something works for them. Judging creates discord, so we do not judge. We should remember that no one, ourselves included, is perfect.
The breeze in the orchard blows peacefully. The fruit trees listen silently and bear fruit. In the orchard, all is peaceful. I am experiencing that peace is not an abstract idea but a very real thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to spread the news that real peace like this exists right now? Why not tell our stories and let them flow like a breeze across the earth?
A bluebird flies around the orchard, as I write. He lands on the fence and, from time to time, pauses to rest in the trees. The bird delivers the message that peace is possible. The bluebird, for me, is a symbol of hope. Right now, I am hopeful that the Earth can be made into a more peaceful place.
Don’t rush! This is what I’ve been telling myself. Do things in their own time, not mine. For most of my life I’ve been an exemplary Type A personality. The fastest at everything I took on. Now I’m trying to take on less—just one or two things a day. And what I do take on, I let them happen. Try not to push them.
This being slow seems so good for the soul. Yesterday, while lying face down out on the lawn on a deck chair, I noticed some flower petals that had fallen off the rose bushes and landed on the lawn. I noticed how incredibly delicate and beautiful they were—not at all the kind of thing I would have noticed had I been in a hurry to accomplish something.
I admire yogis and monks for their balance. For their solitude and willing to Be rather than to Do. I’m not saying that I’m there yet, but travelling slowly in that direction feels right, feels good.
I’ve been working on a project with two pieces of redwood I found at a local logging conference. The project involves a lot of slow stuff, like sanding and varnishing and spending a lot of time just looking to see if I got it right.
Somehow doing these slow things, being slow, is okay. It’s just fine and allows me to see that I don’t need to be so caught up in the electronic speed of life. Life, in its essence has its own speed, which can be no speed at all. Slowness.
After all, what is the speed of Being?
I am a realist. I can’t pretend everything’s fine when it’s not. As much as I try not to keep up with all the major events in the world, somehow I still feel bombarded by them. I can’t walk down the street with my eyes closed, so even when I don’t want to, my eye catches the headlines on the newspapers. It seems, especially for the last few months, that things—events—in the world have gone from bad to worse.
It seems that every day, people on both sides of the war are killed in Iraq—and in Afghanistan, and Israel. I’m sure there are wars going on in Africa and South America and little neighborhood gang wars in big cities that I don’t even know about. All this, when I think about it, depresses me.
When I was younger, I wanted to participate. I wanted to fight. I went to Vietnam, for God’s sake, and in the infantry. Even though I didn’t believe in the cause really, but mostly because I was young and out to prove in any venue offered to me, that I was just as much a baddass as the next guy, I agreed to go to Vietnam to shoot at people. After all, that was my job! That was what I was trained for.
But in the end, I was just part of the bad news that people at home saw on television and read about in the newspaper. After a time in Vietnam, I was offered a job as a Combat Correspondent, so then I became responsible for writing the bad news!
The same thing is going on today. Looking back in time it seems like it’s gone on forever. There’s always been bad news.
Throughout history, those few people who have stood up and tried to make peace were the real heroes, come to think of it. Buddha, Christ, Gandhi all tried to tell us where to find peace within ourselves.
I am starting to believe that living alone—being a monk—is the answer for all of us.
When we participate, even in peace marches, we are taking a stand, taking a side, which irritates others and creates more discord. Then there is more bad news to write about.
Is the world going to hell? It seems to me that it is. Is the only way out, just to drop out?
I am lying on my back in the sun staring straight up into a pure Tiepolo Blue sky. It must be nearly 12:00 noon because the sun is directly overhead.
When I lift my cap up off my head and cover the sun with it, suddenly I see an amazing sight. The sky is filled with white cotton-like particles—fluffy bits of pollen carried on the wind. each one sparkling like a star against a white-blue background. The sun’s rays spill over the edge of the brim of the hat giving me a view as if I’m inside a funnel made of pure light, growing narrower and brighter closer to the sun.
The light pours down to Earth in a swirl.
The white particles fly around randomly. "This is extraordinary. "The thought is so strong, I think it almost out loud. "It’s some sort of Godlike vision—something like I’ve heard people say they’ve seen when they die and come back to life. Or something Aldous Huxley might have described after eating psychedelic mushrooms.
But I’m seeing this right in front of me, right above me and I don’t drink or take drugs. The vision transports me towards infinity—almost frightening in its beauty.
Then I see a line—a single, flowing, floating white line, moving across the light blue canvas from right to left. I recognize the line as a piece of a spiders web—light enough to fly with the pollen—a fitting stroke in God’s painting.
Then, as if to ground myself, to be able to make certain what I am seeing is no vision, I turn to look at a rose on the bush beside me. Strangely—or maybe not so strangely—this earth-bound beauty is equally striking.