Wage Peace - a poetic take on breath prayers in an unjust world

I am unfinished.

At 64, I feel it now more than ever before.

I am learning to harvest lupine seeds and grow green onions from discards. I am learning to make overnight oats and juicy margaritas. I am learning to walk through this mean old world with the language, posture, and prayers of tenderness and welcome, intentionally a little less guarded. I am learning to weep my salty tears openly if not easily. I am learning to listen, deeply listen. I am learning to let quiet linger. I am learning to plant peace in a world of war. In all of these awakenings, I have a long way to go.

When I feel unsettled, reading a poem can bring calm and clarity. Here is one I read yesterday.

Wage Peace by Judyth Hill

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea… and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

As I read her lines again and again, I started to breath in and out in a rhythm as the lines suggest. Judyth’s idea of waging peace with my breath when the injustices of the world assault my senses gave me hope. I wondered what could happen if I breathed out something more kind and beautiful than what I breathed in? I wanted to write my own version of what are essentially breath prayers doing good work in this world.

Make soup.

Making soup always brings me back to myself and feeds everyone at our table. I savor the smells on my hands: fresh garlic, onion, maybe rosemary or chives. But there are many ways to come home to yourself. Here are a few I have discovered.

Plant Peace by Terri Conlin inspired by Judyth Hill

Plant peace with the rhythm of our breathing.

Breathe in midnight drone strikes,
Breathe out people with faces, names, and light in their eyes.

Breathe in masked domestic terrorists,
Breathe out flowers in gun barrels and clergy in courthouses.

Breathe in chaos,
Breathe out poetry.

Breathe in the disappeared and breathe out whole families around the dinner table.

Wage peace with your tenderness: hold hands, pick flowers, read a book to the child in your lap.

Remember your tools: a garden trowel, scraps, tears and honest prayers.

Bake bread. Cut thick and add butter.

Practice saying “mercy” in three languages.

Learn shashiko and mend a tear with beauty.

Grieve with hand-picked blueberries
in those turquoise pressed-board pints,
imagine our laughter together in blue breaths.

Walk between the garden furrows.

Plant peace.

The world is terrible and beautiful, wild and wonderful:

Make toast with jam in the morning light and sing with birds to our enemies.
Even the ones inside us.

Call a truce and mean it. Come together as if brotherhood and sisterhood are true.
Selah!

I realize the world seems just the same kind of mean as this morning when I wrote this. But I am learning it is not. For though I am still unfinished at the end of this day and always, I am not the same kind of unfinished. I have planted a rope of roots in sweat and hope and naiveté. The dirt has been disturbed and grounded, now quiet again. That must mean the world isn’t the same either . . . at least for a little while. Maybe longer.

Consider this your invitation to write your own version of a breath prayer for peace and, if you like, root and plant your green onion discards now for an autumn soup.