But for reconciliation to take place..........

 

.....................................there must first be truth.

Goodness.......................

Human goodness is widely distributed, and I have no respect for religious people who cannot see this. . . . Religion, as I explain it there, is a principled opposition to the will to power.  Faith is about the forms of gracious coexistence that abjure the use of power. 

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

harboring...........................

 Despite the fact that it had been around for most of my adult life, I harbored a deep distrust for social media of any kind.  The idea of voluntarily revealing all that personal info to strangers had always struck me as dumber than dumb—and I'd seen far too many cases of Internet stalking, fraud, catfishing, and worse to change my mind about it.  Ever since my early twenties, when I'd shut down my meager Facebook account after some jerk tried to blackmail me for nudes via private message, I've used the Internet only for work and for the purchasing of shoes—an approach I believe could lead to world peace if more people shared it.

-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Bad Influence: A Sunny Randall Novel

as revolutions go........................

      As a permanent structure, the Articles of Confederation did not work.  But as a means of transition, a bridge into the future, it served a purpose, and, arguably, succeeded brilliantly.  Edmund Morgan, another giant of the field, writes: "If the American Revolution was in any sense a civil war"—which in part it was—"the Confederation did a much faster and better job of reconstruction than the United States did after Appomattox."  That is, the American Revolution did not turn on itself, with the victors shattering into warring factions and a government that maintains power only by the exercise of violence against citizens, as has happened so often with other successful rebellions, as in France in the eighteenth century and Russia in the twentieth.

     A peaceful outcome was not a given.  The Revolutionary generation would have had in mind Montesquieu's warning that the great first hurdle of nationhood was surviving the shift from war to peace.

Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

need......................Part 1

      We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust.  We have need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat.  We need peace with our neighbors and the procedures for securing it.  And we need the love and protection afforded by family life.  To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

Peace.............................

In my own personal experience, the place I end up the most is wanting to be at peace.

Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.  You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want.  But peace us what you want most of the time.  If you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems.  But there are unlimited external problems.  

The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. 

-The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

the course of history....................

 CHANGES IN THE TECHNIQUE OF WAR HAVE HAD more influence upon the course of history than is supposed by those whose attention is mainly centred upon economic causation. There has been, since the beginning of organized fighting, an oscillation between superiority of the defensive and superiority of the offensive. Broadly speaking, when the defensive is strong civilization makes progress, and when the offensive is strong men revert towards barbarism. Another oscillation has been between the importance of mere numbers and the importance of skill and elaborate equipment. In the Middle Ages, the knight in armour was an expensive unit, and the world was aristocratic; gunpowder abolished chivalry, and led by slow stages to citizen armies and democracy.

-Bertrand Russell, as extracted from this 1936 essay

First.............................

 I've learned that nothing is worth doing if it cannot be done from a place of deep peace.  If we want to restore the planet, we must first restore ourselves.  I believe that you find your way to your right life, your mission, the same way you find an animal.  First quiet your heart and be still.  Then find the fresh track and be willing to follow it.  You don't need to see the whole picture; you only need to see where to take the next step.  Life isn't about staying on track; it's about constantly rediscovering the track.

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild:  An African Journey Home

A prayer......................................

 Can we please lay down our swords of vitriol and venom? Might we pray for peace and it begin with me, each of us? We pray for a peace that surpasses party, personal preferences, and tightly held prejudices.

-as culled from this post

About seeking............................

 You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace.  Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable?  Try the other way:  indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present.  Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs.  Avoid the disturbance, that is all.  To seek there is no need; you would not seek what you already have.

-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,  I Am That

Peace...............................

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful. . . . Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well."

-Alain de Botton, as quoted here

a lovely phrase.....................

     So, wars:  what does it mean to win, what does it mean to lose?  And the wars, of course, against yourself.  I certainly am always at war one way or another with myself, and some of them are wars I must fight to try to slay the demons, to kill the dragon, to lay the ghost to rest.  But there are other wars you fight with yourself that are really not worth fighting at all.  The war to make yourself be more, do more than you have it in you really to do or to be.  I think of that wonderful line from one of the poems of my beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins where he says, "My own heart let me have more pity on."  My own heart let me more have pity on.  That's a lovely phrase.  Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much.  Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing.  So. think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in.  How are they going?

-Frederick Buechner,  The Remarkable Ordinary

the grace needed...................

Value is, at bottom, simple.  The balance of values is complex, and how to trade them, to choose the worthiest course, is the problem of how to live.  Life has its absurdities, which we might expect and find humor in.  As for the meaning of life itself, in human history, we have yet to formulate an answer.  But we have found good enough reasons to potentially find meaning in our own situation, enough so as to find personal peace.  We needn't resign from life or withdraw, but can instead ready ourselves for being ever more attuned, in faithful practice.  For the basic joy in the surfer's kind of relational connection, even in an ordinary surf, is a real basis for peace in the sublime mix of the beautiful and the grotesque, of the fortunate and the unfortunate, of the just and the unjust.   One can relax the perfectionist scruples, ease up on the angst, and be less anxious.  One can get stoked and simple engage in worthy activities that give one the grace needed to call the present good enough within a life that's being well lived.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Verse..........................

19.  When a man becomes steadfast in his abstention from harming others, then all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in his presence.

-Patanjali, How To Know God:  The Yoga Aphorisms Of Patanjali

Fifty years ago....................

Plastic Ono Band.........................................Give Peace A Chance

The private world.................

Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?

-Dag Hammarskjold

Peace.......................

Trifecta..............................

via

A little better...........................

The preservation of peace and the improvement of the lot of all people require us to have faith in the rationality of humans. If we have this faith and if we pursue understanding, we have not the promise but at least the possibility of success. We should not be misled by promises. Humanity in all its history has repeatedly escaped disaster by a hair's breadth. Total security has never been available to anyone. To expect it is unrealistic; to imagine that it can exist is to invite disaster. What we do have in our technological capacities is an opportunity to use our inventiveness, our creativity, our wisdom and our understanding of our fellow beings to create a future world that is a little better than the one in which we live today.

-Edward Teller,  The Pursuit of Simplicity

On the importance of a culture............

     The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace - of cities is not kept primarily by police, as necessary as police are.  It is primarily kept by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.  In some city areas - older public housing projects and streets with very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples - the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards.  Such places are jungles.  No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.

-Jane Jacobs,  The Death And Life Of Great American Cities,  1961