Peace and Love

I've been thinking a lot lately about processes of peace. I've always seen peace more as this process and less as the noun to which we so typically associate the term. Peace, the noun, can't possibly be achieved without peace, the verb. This seems like pretty basic knowledge to me.

Our society teaches us to love our egotistical selves--the self which we portray to the world in our experiences with other people. For many of us, this self manifests itself at work, in school, at the pub, at parties, at family gatherings. Perhaps we have so many "selves" that we are a different one each time we enter the world. This isn't too hard of a suggestion.

Perhaps we ought not to be concerned with people loving these "selves" too much (though we might want to think about this), perhaps we ought to be concerned with loving our true self, our internal self, our personal nature, our Inner Light (call it anything you want to have this make sense).

No process of healing can begin if the self is neglected. No process of peace can begin with conflicted souls. Or maybe it can, but it cannot be sustained without a constant devotion to loving your self. Only in loving our self can we even hope to begin to learn to love others and their self.

And what a hard process love is! Would you die for your self? I can't answer--I don't feel like I even KNOW my self. How do you know your self? I am more a novice than you, readers, and I struggle to find this truth.

Resoundingly yours.

Documentation.

What is my hunger?

I just want every experience to be full, but it's not.

I realize that as soon as I accept this, those very experiences will become fuller and more meaningful... but it's hard.

It almost makes it worse that every so often, an incredibly filling conversation or moment or sunset or rainbow or sound or sight or taste occurs.

There are times I struggle with words. But it is those times I feel the most at home, when I am the least bit me.

I was in class on Tuesday and I couldn't speak.

I was actually unable to do so

And it was, incredibly so, exactly the same feeling I have when I am in Quaker Meeting and must speak.

I am deeply immersed in an intense struggle.

I would not attribute a beginning to this, nor do I forsee an end. Neither are there.

It just is.

It is, I suppose, as if I am standing on the edge of a vast, inconquerable precipice.

There it is in front of me. And I must chose to trek, because not choosing is equivalent to being washed away in a great avalanche.

But there are many paths; there are many pitfalls. Stringent danger lurks in every foothold and every chasm.

I know that somewhere far beyond the treeline, my body will fail me.

Yet I began to climb knowing this fact and knowing my own death.

That is how I feel right now.