Peace and Presence

“Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden.“

Ian Maclaren

It’s 5:00 am. I’ve been awake for a few hours, so instead of tossing, got up to tend to a personal matter weighing heavy. Some preliminary thinking and writing. Enough to settle so that I can turn towards this new week with more peace and presence. For it’s a week that weighs heavy with many things, with tomorrow’s presidential election and all that’s been activated in its anticipation, near and far. It’s a week that needs my peace and presence. Because truthfully, it’s the only thing I have that might be of some influence, or good.

“Through our commitment to developing our inner monks we might remember our deep and profound connection to one another in the midst of daily life.“

Christine Valters Paintner, Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist

Attentive these days to how much media I take in, but still the anxiety, tension, uncertainty and fear are out there in the social field and seep in. During my closing reflections to this past week’s Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist course, I was struck by Christine’s words on connection and community. Among a group mostly from the USA, I wrote that I’ve lived in Canada all my life, though was born in the USA, and until recently had US citizenship. I shared that my only sibling recently moved there, right on the border which, closed since March, means she’s heart achingly close yet so far from her children, grandchildren and our elderly parents living in Canada. I have dear friends and other family there. So I pay attention – in broad strokes – to the last four years and now with the presidential election a few days away.

I admitted that regularly I have cursed and raged at the man called POTUS, but that quite suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt a deep shift as I let sink in that truly we are all of God. Too, that what I see, is only a miniscule moment in the long arc. I came to realize that he is as I am. I stopped raging and ridiculing and instead, using the power of prayer and imagination – the wedding of contemplative and creative – chose to envision a different outcome, in a kind way. I made the connection to “metta” (loving kindness) meditation, whereby I wish those with whom I have animosity and bitter feelings well-being and happiness, or in this case, a peaceful transition of leadership.

I was hesitant posting so political a reflection. Yet this is what I am so present to, and what speaks to me of the truth of the invitations offered by this Abbey of the Arts program. I am helped to remember I have a quiet capacity to be and bring change, a peace and presence to the personal and the political.

“This is not just a referendum on US democracy; it feels like a referendum on our aspirations as human beings.”

Otto Scharmer, “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn,”
Medium, October 31, 2020

And then there’s this, a good and necessary poem making the rounds, and later today, a walk in the neighbourhood with Annie.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry