What is Peace to you and how does it feel? Do you really know what Peace is? How do you create Peace? I’d like to hear back from you on these questions so please email me at walkingtopeace@gmail.com I’ll go through them here and see if we are on the same page.
The first question is two in one “what is Peace to you and how does it feel” because you wouldn’t know what it was unless you know what it felt like. Over the years working in violence prevention I’ve heard of many ways people experience Peace. I met with a photographer in NYC some years ago and he was once a cocaine addict and said that while in rehab he found his Peace. During a therapy group session they were given all throw-away cameras and asked to take pictures of what they saw. He said that there was a tree in the yard and as he approached it and lifted the camera to his eye the tree looked different to him through the lens. He pulled the camera away wondering if he was just having some effects of withdrawal from the cocaine but when he took the picture he was able to see the tree in a completely different way. When I met him he was a successful photographer with a home in NYC and one in Switzerland but the most important thing was that he had found his Peace and it felt right. Feeling Peace can be translated into different ways I’ve heard everything from tears to laughter to feeling right to silence. Whatever the feeling is you’ll know if it’s Peace or not because it’ll be that feeling you haven’t had before or haven’t felt in a very long time. Someone out there might say that they are in constant Peace and that’s great but then I would ask if that’s the case how are they helping others get there.
Do you really know Peace? That’s a tough one because I have met many people that have said NO to this question. There is a man I know that is in his mid-40’s and went to prison when he was younger during the late 1970’s and paroled out in mid-1990’s. His family has a history of prison time and always on the poverty line. One day we were walking and it was a beautiful summer day and I said ‘wow it’s peaceful out here’ and he looked at me like I was crazy and said “what’s so peaceful?!” He started to run down all the problems he had in his life at the moment and wanted me to help him figure out how the hell it was a peaceful day…I know he’s still in that same place today. How do we help people that have never seen or felt Peace? I know what Peace is and have felt it many times before but it has been a while since we have crossed paths because I’m looking for the next level of that Peace…I’ll expand on that in a moment.
So how do you create Peace? I was driving down Chicago Ave. and Central Park in Chicago the other day and noticed a group of people walking down the street all with bright red t-shirts on. As I got closer I saw the words Cease Fire and the outline of a body printed on the t-shirts. Cease Fire is a group that does gang intervention work and has recently had a documentary film made of them as well. Their slogans are “stop killing people” “don’t shoot I want to grow up” and others. Carlos Mencia, a comedian, was in Chicago a few months back and saw the sticker on a window for Cease Fire that read “stop killing people” and he posted a picture of the sticker on his face book page saying ‘what’s going on in Chicago that people have to tell each other not to kill!?’ What Cease Fire is trying to do is place a band aid over a larger issue of poverty and that will not work and all they are doing is creating a false sense of Peace in the community. Some say that at least they are trying and I would agree if some of that $30million+ in funding was going into something other than basketball night.
Creating Peace is a difficult thing to do because you have to start with yourself and your issues. You have to be able to allow yourself to be held accountable in society for your actions and be able to truthfully seek forgiveness for anything you might have done. I’m not saying you have to be perfect but you have to be willing to try to do things differently.
What I’m trying to do this year is just that to try something different. I know that if a gang war starts in Chicago I would have an idea on how to address it to hopefully make it stop. What I don’t know is how to help the farmer in Kansas find Peace or the police officer in New Mexico or the Preacher in Texas. I want to know the people of this land better so that I can help create Peace in different forms for people. I want to learn from others across the country that are doing Peace work and see how we can connect what they are doing with everyone else. I’m willing to do the leg work and I hoping that you can support me in that work because this isn’t about traveling across the country this is about all of us creating Peace.
May 1st 2012 I will be leaving from Los Angeles on a 4 month cross country trip to find out what Peace means to America and find ways that we can have a Peaceful society. There are many avenues we can take and new opportunities we can give each other to help bring about a Peaceful society we just have to be willing.
I humbly ask for your support on this journey, you can go to www.walkingtopeace.com and go to the donation tab and there you’ll find a link where you can submit your donation. Also, at the top right hand side of this Blog you’ll see a donation button that you can click on as well.
I want to THANK everyone that has already donated to this project and hope that you will be able to help this project as well!
Peace/AMOR
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