It’s Sunday night here - a time that always feels like an ending, but is actually a beginning. It’s late in this twilight space. I should be tidying and settling down to sleep, but it’s the last night I’ll ever be 48 and I want to write a little.

I made signs this week and I’ve tacked one up on my office wall: “Power to the Peaceful”, where I can see it while I work. I have been reminded these past days how quickly I can lose my inner equilibrium, how easily righteous anger can spill over into just plain old ugly, demeaning anger. What a balance this is, to be appropriately angry at injustice and yet not dehumanize those who refuse to (or can’t) see it. To destroy immoral systems and yet somehow care for the redemption of the people who perpetrate them, including yourself.

So the sign is up where I will see it daily, a reminder that peacefulness is difficult work, that the power that comes from it is not the kind that follows in the wake of guns and rigged systems, but the kind that flows inside vines and seeds, rivers and bloodstreams. At the end of this year of living I feel such a call to go deeper with the practice of peace, to move it out of an intellectual space into a lived space. The upheaval around us, the upheaval inside myself, only makes it more clear to me that this is important work.

~ My favorite part about birthdays is the freshness, the whole new year lying ahead, full of potential. I have written out some intentions, thought about how to maintain my attention on those things in the long term. I’m sure I will be writing about them over the next months. Right now they are so fresh and tender, small buds just emerging from under the dark of leaves; I want to keep them close and quiet.

For now, as darkness falls and I can feel sleep calling to me, I’ll share this section of one of Kyce Bello’s poems that I have put in the footer of my blog. I keep it as a prayer, a dream for going forward:

Make me a figure with a womb

And relict heart.   Make me

the seam that holds the tattered land together

and let me be the speaker that sings

rise, rise

all across the shapely ground.

Kyce Bello || Refugia

Love to you, friends.

tonia