Therein lies peace

For the last couple of months I have been living in a construction zone, so much of my time has been spent coping, planning, organizing, cleaning, and waiting. I had known it was coming, so I prepared myself as best I could for the challenges -- and the loss of control of my time and my life -- so it hasn't been as stressful as it might have been.

But of course you can't prepare for or anticipate everything, and there have been a few surprises along the way, some less pleasant than others. And while I knew that there would be blessings at the end of the journey, it hadn't occurred to me that there might be blessings along the way.

Perhaps the most significant of those blessings has been the opportunity to connect with my younger self, and to discover in so doing that, for all the external changes and complexities of aging, the core self and the path it seems to travel have stayed very much constant. As letters to and from old friends emerge, along with notes from workshops taken, test results from a variety of circumstances, and a treasure trove of poems written in my twenties, I see that who I am has remained very much the same.

Take, for example, this poem, written for a college poetry class:

I beg the treatise of this hallowed day

The peace I seek is not of man,
of man's decision not to war,
It is of God, when wandering
beyond the trees the silence grows
into a forest of unanswered questions.

I seek the subtle life wherein
the smile is treasured. Barefoot men
and women walk the beach alone,
together -- how very little difference there...

Intruding on the silence of a fallen tear
Life should be heard and seen and felt
in mud between the toes, and sand,
and hummings as the earth goes round.

Softly cultured,
the wind bows gracefully
and goes.

Clearly then, as now, I was engaged in exploration: what does peace look like? What happens when we strip away attachments, consider the moment; allow the vicissitudes of life and value to pass through like a breeze?

And if I am still on that exploratory path, what has changed? With the advent of the digital camera and Photoshop, I see that more often than not the path takes me into an image, and that my words, which I have always carried with me like a suitcase of tools, now have a visual counterpart to help dissect the mysteries.

What does peace look like? It differs from moment to moment, but the essence, always shifting, lies hidden like a treasured pearl beneath the surface of each moment -- in the planning, in the organizing, in the coping and the waiting, in the cleaning, in the hoping, in the faces of the workers, in the water overflowing, in the dust and in the drawers. All it needs is our attention. Notice the now; therein lies peace.