by Laura Parker Roerden
It was 9 degrees out when I woke up and stars were on the lawn, crackling like the opposite of fire. It looked so incredibly inhospitable. Like a moon landing.
The first thing I notice over the long expanse of the lawn to the pasture is a red leaf hanging on to a tree. Autumn reluctant to go. It was still SO red. Like decay had forgotten it.
I only noticed the red leaf was alive when it took off winged in flight.
Turns out the last of autumn was an impossibly large male cardinal. So big that it didn’t look like it could fly. Like it might be two cardinals connected as one.
And time just stood still. It completely stopped.
I don’t know if it’s something about aging and these things are just my heart’s craving it to happen—time being at such a premium now—but I see time stretch out more often like that now. Like as if in a strobe. Single moments can be elongated as eternity. And when they do they bulge with some sense of carrying the promise of peace.
Which is such a juxtoposition to what’s happening out in the human world, where so many words compete, louder and louder, so often in fists of hate. As if hate ever solved anything. Or gave us anymore than more of the same. Despite our belief to the contrary.
I didn’t say any of this is rational. But it is what the frost made me notice this morning. Peace is a force, too. It’s available to us and can fatten moments and enrich us in ways we don’t fully understand and who would want to? These moments are grace unearned. Maybe just to remind us that we each and every one of us are worthy.
Peace finds purchase in strange places and can invite us to do the same. It’s a discipline to try to honor it. Peace is not simply the absence of violence. No, peace is something tangible the world shows us how to create. I didn’t say that would be easy.
So I am asked to imagine this morning what would the work of a Department of Peace be? Who and what would we be sure to protect? And how?
I don’t know the answers, but I saw hints in this morning’s light. And we might as well get on with the work of creating it, because sometimes that’s when the real answers come.
(Addendum: As I post this, that very same impossibly large cardinal flies by the window.)
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.