The Unfulfilled Longing for Peace I invite you to take a journey with me today.  I want to explore the experience of completion and how this phenomenon could be applied to war. The longing for peace is so deep in human beings and yet, despite ourselves, we revert to armed conflict again and again to try to solve problems with others.  Our cherished visions of peace recede and never seem to come to pass.   Why is peace so seemingly impossible to achieve? What gets in the way?  The Experience of Completion Recently I was reviewing relationships in my life that have healed after long discord.  I call this state of being at peace with someone being complete.  When I am complete a quiet space opens.   After a time I find myself creating a new way of being with that person I disliked before.  It amazes me.  I use the word complete in a special way here.  When I look at a particular relationship or conflict,  I ask myself if there is anything left to say.  Do I still want to argue, defend, criticize, mourn, condemn?  If I feel at peace, I know I am complete. I once heard this described as having “no wood left to burn.” Fascination with the Holocaust is Never Over Over the holidays many new movies appeared with Holocaust themes.  Filmmakers apparently love to mine the Holocaust, especially when Oscar season is coming.  It is as if this last good war and its horrors is still alive, even though it ended sixty years ago.  Many people also see echoes of that war in the endless cycling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What if We Chose to Get Complete with the WWII?

keep reading...

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.

keep reading...