Where Does Our Peace Lay?

Words, As Fruit. #44

In the course of this year that has been 2024, there has been no shortage of questions, no shortage of anger and rage, sadness, mourning, and heartache. There has also been no shortage of beauty, love and the exploration of individual and collective meanings of liberation.

Love, as according to bell hook’s Love ethic, is care, affection, recognition, respect commitment, trust, honest and open communication.

Liberation, according to me in these moments is an ongoing process of expanding one’s imagination and the practice of being fully aware of one’s self in relation to others, and the practice of being in communion with ourselves and each other.

Love and liberation are actions of creation, creating, keeping and holding space; the actions of inviting, welcoming and embracing difference, and seeing that even in the difference there is likeness, and there are teachings, and there are lessons.

This sharing of words is a collection of thoughts and Meditative Contemplations.

Take what moves you. Share what resonates.

“Liberation has less to do with who’s oppressing me and more to do with [asking the question] where am I looking.”

— Sydney Reece

In 2023 a question came to me. “What can I give myself that no one else can take away?” This question prompted me to go deep into thinking about how I cultivate softness, peace¹ and grace. How am I a soft, peaceful and gracious space?

As I continue to watch and witness the worlds around me, and the worlds within me, ebb and flow, change, transform, break down, regenerate and re-grow, I am becoming more aware of where I am looking.

The questions I am sitting with are plenty:

• What and whose gazes am I allowing to direct my own?

• What energies am I consuming, and what energies are these energies creating?

• Whose language am I allowing to direct, infect and impact my own, my perspective and perception?

• Who and what am I inviting and allowing in that influences what flows out?

• Of what I am observing, what am I absorbing?

And so I arrive back to the question that came to me in 2023 and the question that sits at top of mind today,

what can I give myself that no one else can take away?

and where does our peace lay?

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Meditative Contemplations

Where does our peace lay?

Where does it pause, rest refill and stay?

In what time, what place, and what space does our peace generate?

In whose presence does it spring and overflow?

Where does peace linger, even when we have gone away?

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As the events of the present continue to magnify and unfold, informing and impacting us, collectively and individually, I am reminded that in times of transition and uncertainty, it is necessary to remain soft and nimble.

Hard things are easily broken.

Collective growth and liberation challenges the pieces and parts of us that are rigid in ways that oppose wholeness and union.

Growth asks us to seek and see.

Seeking requires that we wisen and expand. And sight, depending on what we are looking to see, requires discernment.

Disruptions to our peace can be an opportunity to reassess where our focus lies; an opportunity to reconsider power, and how we choose to position ourselves within environments and structures that seek to use power in destructive ways.

Disruptions to our peace are pulls forward and pushes back.

We get to choose how we move, forward or back.

Choose to move forward and lean deeper into the practices that help to maintain our peace, and we do the walk and work of weakening destructive powers.

- ẹniafẹ isis, Words, As Fruit #44

1. In Buddhism, "peace" is primarily understood as a state of inner tranquility and mental well-being, achieved through the elimination of greed, hatred, and ignorance, which can then radiate outwards to create harmony in relationships and society; it is essentially about cultivating inner peace through practices like meditation and mindfulness, rather than just the absence of external conflict.” (source: IJRP.com, The Buddhist Concept and Culture of Peace)