Our Journey Home: Finding Peace Through Creativity

A few years ago I set myself a challenge. I had once taught a class called “Writing Peace into the World” and I decided that I would not teach this class again until I felt hope for peace in the world.

Anyone can find evidence for despair. I won’t enumerate here all the reasons we can become cynical about the future. It could be a long list.

So where do we look to make a different kind of list, the evidence of good will and harmonious future?

I found the answers I sought in a book. This particular book was a treasure trove, The Future of Peace: On the Front Lines with the World’s Great Peacemakers by Scott Hunt. This is a collection of interviews with the big names in peacemaking including the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, and even Jane Goodall.

What fascinated me was how all the great peacemakers clearly defined peace as more than the absence of violence. Suu Kyi talked about how peace is the freedom from fear. Not surprisingly the Dalai Lama said that “Peace is actually, I believe, an expression of compassion, a sense of caring.”

More importantly the overwhelming theme throughout the interviews was how we should endeavor to develop a peaceful mind, that doing so is more important than anything else we can do. We should not seek to change the world, but do our inner work. The great Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peacemaker Thich Quang Do said,

“The human heart contains a good seed. It is concealed deep within the heart. It is always there. When this concealed seed is realized, the whole world will be better. When you have peace in your mind, there will be peace in the world.”

Inspired by the powerful words and stories I read, I felt I could teach my workshop that uses writing to learn more about peace. It was not so much that I found the answer to world peace, but my heart had been opened to the possibility for hope.

An interesting sequence of events then followed. After teaching this workshop students asked that they continue to meet. This led to the formation of the Loft’s Peace and Social Justice Open Group and we continue to meet monthly to share our writing and discuss works by inspiring writers so that we can use our creative craft to promote peace and sustainable justice.

The philosopher Epictetus once said that one can immediately become a better person by finding and emulating worthy role models. Initially my role models began with people like the Dalai Lama. That has changed these last years thanks to the people I’ve met in the writing group and through our festival we organize called The Art of Peace. My new role models are every day people who, through their actions, give evidence for a hopeful future and include:

• Karla Gergen, a writing group member who has now left the US to teach young girls in Honduras for the next couple years.
• Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi-American from Minneapolis who is right now in Iraq promoting peace through his organization Muslim Peacemaker Teams.
• The people who form Nonviolent Peaceforce—headquartered in Minneapolis—which is an unarmed, international peacekeeping force composed of trained civilians who are saving lives in violent conflict areas around the world every day.
• Local writer Carol Pearce Bjorlie who through her writing, music, and teaching inspires students and writers to, as she exhorted in the May-June issue of A View from the Loft, “remove the mute” in behalf of peace.

You can find similar inspiration at the Loft on September 21, the International Day of Peace, when the Peace and Social Justice group presents its second Art of Peace festival. This year’s theme is “Our Journey Home: Finding Peace through Creativity.” The festival will present speakers Sami Rasouli and Carol Pearce Bjorlie, many workshops including one on nonviolent peacekeeping by members of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, a labyrinth you can walk on, performances and readings including The Voices for Peace chorus,Pangea World Theater, poet Todd Boss, and a rare art show bringing together American and Iraqi artists, all of which will demonstrate how to use your creativity in the service of peace.

Regularly updated information can be found at http://www.michaelkiesowmoore.com/artofpeace.html.

This article was printed in the September-October, 2008 issue of A View from the Loft.

A Country of Flaming Love

I don’t know if the timing is fitting or ironic that I begin this Peace Blog in the midst of the occupation of the Republican National Convention in my backyard of downtown Saint Paul. As I write these words helicopters are flying over head and I hear sirens nonstop. The streets are filling with National Guard troops and riot-clad police. The club and machine gun totting police outnumber the residents of my city.

I could fill this blog with reportage of the MANY incidents in which the police have arrested and brutalized innocent people. I even witnessed tear gas and flash bombs set off by police to move a befuddled and confused crowd of people who did nothing illegal. Others have been doing a great job documenting how Saint Paul has been turned into a brutal police state and I recommend looking at this reporting at http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/.

I instead focus this first blog on the image here – a peace pole sitting before rows of rusted fence that the RNC erected. To me nothing symbolizes the America that Bush/Cheney have created in their image than this – the lonely call that peace prevail on the earth surrounded by barricades of wire. The America our government wants is one of fences, an America that keeps people out, an America that deploys the show of force rather than the tools of diplomacy.

In the course of this week I have watched police fill my streets, harass anyone they deem a potential criminal (and they use an arithmetic of their own making), and use tear gas as their main method of crowd control. Sure, there were break away demonstrators who sought to create havoc. Some broke a Macy's window and others threatened even worse, thus stealing the message of peace that so many others expressed. But of the thousands of protesters who marched for peace, these splinter groups only represented a handful of what had been a generally well meaning, peace centered presence of people of good will.

One of the most chilling stories I heard was of a 17-year-old pacifist who because he set a backpack on the ground to look for a lighter for someone who asked for a light was wrestled to the ground by five officers, and according to his mother, were “repeatedly kicking, beating, dragging and hitting him.” The boy was left bloody and his back covered with the imprints of police boots. The full story can be found at Minnesota Independent.

The many images of long phalanxes of club wielding police and stories of them overreacting and hurting innocent people beg the question, if we do not want a police state (ostensibly the free wheeling police and the curtailment of our once protected rights are all for the purpose of “keeping us safe from terrorists”), then what kind of country is it that we yearn for and what would it look like? I see this peace blog as an ongoing meditation that will seek an answer to that question. And so I begin with a radical vision.

A.J. Muste in “Getting Rid of War” makes an argument for unilateral disarmament, saying that “the enemy is not the other nation, but war.” A unilaterally disarmed America is a bold image. It is an idea that says we will take shelter in the conviction that a national commitment to peace will protect us and not arms.

Muste anticipates what questions will arise with this idea, namely, What will stop any country from running over us? One answer he gives is that, “It is our contention that, whatever the provocation or the danger, there is no justification in heaven or on earth for our arms indiscriminately wiping out any other people, men, women, the aged and the babies. If we have no words harsh enough for those who would do such a thing to us, what are we if we do it to others?”

Muste proposes a United States which dares to “risk sanity” and establish a “true, racially integrated democracy here at home.” Such a country would be an example to others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “War” echoes a similar answer to the fate of a nation that chooses not to declare war or carry arms - a “nation of lovers” whose motivation is that of “flaming love”: “Whenever we see the doctrine of peace embraced by a nation, we may be assured it will not be one that invites injury; but one, on the contrary, which has a friend in the bottom of the heart of every man, even of the violent and the base; one against which no weapon can prosper; one which is looked upon as the asylum of the human race and has the tears and the blessings of mankind.”

What country do you want? To quote Emerson one more time, Shall it be war, or shall it be peace?