August 14, 2009...early morning
Sometimes I wonder how I believe in nonviolence. Lately, there is a loneliness creeping its way, like a shadowy figure following me in the cool back alley fog. This loneliness is trying to separate me from everything. From belief in basic fundamental goodness in others and myself. It is tailing me questioning me through people, in conversation, in the most innocuous places. The challenges within the rhetoric are strong and almost lethal. Statements are made that only inhabit the ultimate realm of the realist. Sad, sad, sad statements of the unknown soldier left alone on the battlefield to die. What are these utterances? They are the giving up. They are the pernicious coma. They are the apathetic malaise.
Do I internalize these struggles? Why yes, of course. Because for me, that is the integral part of the struggle. It is my own conflict, my own battle. The “others” I have fought for so long have gone and I am left with me and me. It was easier before…when I could use anger and hurt to blame others. I could remain in my own place of victimization and perpetrate on myself.
And then the freedom came.
Or at least I accepted it…what was always there.
And now the responsibility of living a life dedicated to peace through nonviolence is everything to me. I know nothing else.
I am raw and ready.
Hungry and Bloated.
Exhausted and Alive.
I am not the same since Israel/Palestine. There are moments where I feel like I have mainlined into the main artery of all the suffering on this earth. Laying me out for hours, I wonder what is happening to me? Upon recovery, I am neither embittered nor contemptuous. I feel a robust, swelling of compassion rise and visualize the mighty chest of a baboon making way for the still beating heart.
Let us all allow our hearts to emerge and grow so gigantically that our bodies need to adjust with them. Let us be so willing to grow in love that we will be difficult to recognize in six months. Let us love and live with each other in a way only the innocence of a child knows. Let us love, love, love and remember there is no other, there is only yourself. Be still and know that God is in the midst of you.
I used to wonder how anyone could believe in nonviolence. Now, I wonder how anyone could not. This is not about waking in dreaming, this is about our lives, our children’s lives, and their children’s lives. Our world is depending on us.
