Officially--I began Walk In Peace on New Year's Day at the stroke of noon. January 1, 2013.
Unofficially--I have been walking the walk for years.
What have I learned?
That I am in battle.
That I am no different than everyone else.
Yes, I give thought to peace.
Yes, I give pause to peace.
Yes, I give action--steps & laps, minutes & hours, aches & cramps--to peace.
And yet, when I walk in peace, the moment I step on the soil of this walking, what greets me is: WAR.
My head wages war with my heart. My ethics fight the 'good fight'
against my instincts. My faith wrestles my fear. My love faces off
against my hate. My beliefs step into the ring with your beliefs. My
world bumps up against The World. My hopes dreams visions take shots at reality. I take offense at life.
I walk many steps in the one hour (5850, the first time I counted), looping twice around the Lakeside circuit. And if anything is arrived at--any peace at all--it comes only at a price. Walking in step with what is not peaceful, letting it be. Discomfort, discontent, dislike, distrust, disgust. Despair. They are as real a part of (my) life as this walking in peace with (my) life. And anyway, can life walk in peace by divorcing & discarding the pieces we don't like, pretending they don't exist? So finally--at the end of the hour--step after sob after sigh--perhaps I do walk in peace. But it is a different peace than I ever envisioned, a landscape, no--a truth I could not imagine: peace with the piece I would never own: peace with war.
The second step.
