A Dream of Peace by Laura H

On Saturday I was tasked with writing a story about myself and peace. But I was anything but peaceful so I wrote about that and upon reflection thought that it was worth sharing on here:

As I am writing this, I am sitting outside.  The sky is a nice blue with few clouds. It was a warm day today, but is now getting cooler as the sun is going down.  I had a giant spoonful of chocolate chip cookie dough to help me start this blog. This all sounds peaceful, but I don’t feel at peace currently.

It has been a rough day. Last night, my bike was stolen while I was in the grocery store buying things for dinner with my housemates.  I came outside after being gone for less than 20 minutes and my bike was gone. Only the front tire remained. That’s not very helpful.  It was a long evening of stress and police reports.

Today, I was planning on accomplishing a lot, including writing a blog post, but that proved difficult.  I am anything but peaceful right now, so how can I write about anything on the topic of peace? 

I have been feeling lots of things throughout the day: anger, sadness, loss, hope, tiredness. But peace is so far from that list.  Come to think of it, I don’t know precisely when I last felt fully at peace. There are peaceful moments where I can sit and talk with a friend, or drink some tea, or cook food, but I am rarely at peace fully.  

Feeling at peace is hard for me right now because I want to constantly be doing something.  I see brokenness in the world around me. A world where my bike was stolen. I assume the motivation in the theft was to sell it for a profit.  I am also assuming that this is necessary because the capitalist world we live in has made it so that person cannot care for themselves well by other means.  Even if those assumptions aren’t true in this case, they apply to many other situations so well.

There is so little peace to be seen in the world.  There is so much pain for so many people. Peace is hard for me to find, but easy to dream about, so that is where I am starting.  Dreaming of a world of peace and if I can dream it, then I can take steps to make that happen. Right?

That is what I am choosing to believe and I want a community to help me achieve it.  So that maybe one day, even if it is generations from now, there can exist a world where we can all find peace inside us and around us. A world where bikes, food, land, people, or anything else won’t have to be stolen in order to survive.