Finding Beauty in a Broken World . Terry Tempest Williams. Pantheon Books: New York, 2008.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         “A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.” Mosaic as Metaphor Terry Tempest Williams, in this piercing book, weaves the metaphors of brokenness and beauty into a work of astonishing power. After 911, Terry Tempest Williams, whose subject is usually the natural world, sought for a word to anchor her sense of fragmentation. The word that came to her was “mosaic” and this led to a study of mosaics.

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Stop Violence without Causing More Violence                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           How do we stop people who are hurting other people? Is it possible to stop them while at the same time preventing violence that may happen as a result of the stopping process itself?  Last week the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of waging genocide and rape in Darfur.  This is the first time prosecutors have ever issued charges against a sitting head of state, a very high risk strategy indeed.  The international community is still ashamed of its inability to stop the genocide in Rwanda and its intervention in Bosnia came much too late.  These glaring failures led to the creation of the International Criminal Court as a permanent war crimes tribunal.  The Responsibility to Protect The responsibility to protect doctrine, worked out with incredible care and thought by diplomats at the United Nations, includes circumstances under which military intervention would be necessary in the event of genocide.  In Sudan, over the past several years the government has made war on its own people, employing the murderous janjaweed milita.  Two and a half million people are now living in refugee camps. Part of what makes this conflict so complex is the fact China buys oil from the Sudanese government and would likely block any action by the UN the Security Council to arrest Bashir.  Do No Harm–Borrowing a Lesson from the World of Psychiatry  Can violent people be stopped safely? I am a psychiatric nurse and I work with violent people all the time. On psychiatric inpatient units we use a process to contain people who are out of control that we call a show of support.  The purpose is to keep everyone safe and to treat the violent person with dignity and respect.  Staff go through rigorous training to insure they can contain a patient safely without hurting the patient or themselves.

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There is a universal longing for peace and yet we never seem to achieve it despite our longings and good intentions. We are pervaded with cynicism and a deep-seated belief that war will always be with us because, well, “that’s just how humans are.” The intention of this blog is to start a new and very different conversation: that peace is possible if we say we want it, and if we are committed to creating it so it thrives on the planet. We can design and live into the kind of world we want to inhabit. This blog is about inquiring deeply into all our conversations from the past, exploring what keeps us in a violence-filled world, the costs of living in such a world and what it would take for us to deliberately create a world which works for every one, not just for a select few. A second intention of this blog is to create a community of readers who see the possibility in the ideas presented here and who will take hold of this new idea about creating peace intentionally on the planet. Toward that end, I am strongly encouraging readers to comment on posts and to interact with me, guest bloggers and with each other.

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