Blessed Be the Peacemakers

http://unbelievableyou.com/allowing-others-to-be-themselves/

My colleague Dan wished me a good Martin Luther King Holiday,

 and I replied,

Blessed Be the Peacemakers.

We don't often take the time collectively to celebrate the rebels, the agitators, who supported the troops by trying to bring them home and send then back to real work with the rest of us. I've been a Conscientious Objector to War since I was 10 or 11, I'd guess. I knew that the draft was looming, and that I was not eligible for a religious exemption, and that being ethically opposed to war was not considered legitimate, and I began preparing my CO Packet in junior high school.

I've never struck another person. I hope I never will. My friend Damaru taught me, as Native American Earth Wisdom, never to sweep a child off its feet without permission from the child, out of respect for each person's foot connection to the earth, and the gravity of severing it without warning.

Peacemaker is a much better word than Pacifist. All those -ist words seem to have a stridency, a belligerence, that especially for this topic connotes its opposite. Peace is not passive, it is a greater struggle than war, since it requires that we continue with the other in dialog, rather than battle.

Thanks to all of us who struggle together towards a more peaceful and just planet. The justice part is an even bigger struggle, and I do think it's true that "No justice, no peace." So we're in this for a long haul, a real Maker's Collaboration.

A couple of months ago I finished a piece of sculpture that I had been working on over a period of more than two years. A long and fraught process, and worth all the effort. Many thanks to my teacher Tom Wolver for guidance and inspiration and a whole lot of expertise about so much of the process I knew so little about.

Her name came to me as she cooled from the pit fire, in Spanish, all at once:

El Grito de mi Amante la Madre Tierra

I had just read in our local weekly about the work of Annie Sprinkle and her partner's ecosexual movement, wanting to transform the Mother/supplicant relationship into an egalitarian lover exchange.