What does peace really mean?
Cultivating joy, hope, and healing during yet another war.
In the shamanic healing I’ve studied, there’s a deep understanding that nature abhors a vacuum. Whatever space we create by letting something go is going to be filled with something else. So it’s good to be intentional about that. For instance, if you’re quitting smoking, it’s good to consider what you’ll do with that money, time, and energy instead. What possibilities might exist to fill the space? In other words, how will you know you’re healed?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this in terms of war. We know it’s senseless. We know it never really works (not without catastrophic damage to somebody somewhere). On and on it goes, and generations later we have another war over the same things. We want an end to war, but if we got it, then I wonder what would fill that space? “Obviously, Mikki,” you might say with an eye roll, “it’s peace.” But how will we know what peace looks and feels like? How will we know we’ve all healed from the damage war has caused? It can’t just be that things are “back to normal,” because normal has always included the threat or reality of war. So what does it mean to create peace in the spaces where war and trauma have happened?
It’s a stretch for me to imagine a world of lasting peace, of systems that benefit huge numbers of people and the planet instead of…
