Peace is

community is

conflict done well.

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20120513+BW+Recommendations

Lisa's Mother's Day card:

Rainbow pooping, virgin schlepping, singularly horny white chargers..not so much

For you, sparkling in flight, with darkness to glitter before, wingéd, enwrapped with gold...

Rosie ran her fingers over the card front, looked up at me, and said with a smile "Mmmmmamama."

"You said it," I said.

Smart kid.

http://www.bugart.co.uk/index.php?main_page=popup_image&pID=310&zenid=c502df34b1de1ce3c0612b9e7725282e

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20120510+BW+Recommendations

 

At the beginning of May 2010, Epworth UMC Berkeley's most excellent Pastor, Odette Lockwood-Stewart wrote

"I have only just begun to reflect on rather than react to General Conference and the amazing ways the Spirit is at work in this global human connection. On May 20th Epworth's adult study will be dedicated to our reflections and responses. This is a paradoxically powerful time to baptize and to receive new members at Epworth. Resistance is the secret of joy. Grace and peace. Odette"

It is "Resistance is the secret of joy" that caught my eye. What could she mean?

 

Linda Haverty Rugg responded on Facebook:

I knew an elderly lady in Germany who had lived through two World Wars and imprisonment of her sons in concentration camps for refusal to serve in the military. She had herself been a resister under Nazism and later under Soviet Bloc rule in East Germany. She said, "We have been lucky! We have always been able to afford resistance." That is "Wir haben uns Widerstand immer leisten können." I've always thought that this was one of the most profound things anyone ever said to me.

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20120508+BW+Recommendations

To Violent encounters with random strangers…

http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blog/show?id=780588%3ABlogPost%3A730205&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_post

I responded:

 

I was once on a BART train on my way from San Francisco back to Berkeley when two young men began a shouting/shoving match right over the seat of a tiny older woman dressed head-to-toe in the all-black of the archetypal Eastern European Grandmother. I'd have ignored them like everyone else, as best I could, if she hadn't looked so panicked and horrified. Not knowing what to do precisely, but sure I didn't want her to get squashed, I stood up and stepped just out of arm's length. I began nodding to each in turn, as though I were listening to them carefully and watching with great interest. One turned and said "What are YOU looking at?" To which I replied that I didn't know, which was true, and kept giving them my full attention. The speaker yelled an expletive at me and broke away to storm into an adjacent car. I looked at the other guy, who shrugged and went back to what apparently had been his seat. Could I have been attacked? I suppose so, but not without witnesses and potential legal consequences. If that had been my grandmother sitting there, now with a look of profound gratitude on her face, I would have wanted somebody to do something.

When you ask the questions above (What would you do/say? How would you respond?  How can we step in to de-escalate violent confrontations with strangers in our lives?  Is avoidance the best policy?), the one that remains unaddressed by my story is the question of avoidance being best, which seems to me only possible to answer in retrospect. In advance, all we can do is prepare ourselves to be ready to make the decision to engage or not. For me, that preparation has involved practicing what I now call Martial Nonviolence. As we see frequently on PCDN (Peace and Collaborative Development Network), peace has more to do with "conflict done well" than avoided, which is why I use that phrase on my invitations to students and colleagues to learn martial arts (my choice is aikido) to begin dealing with the fear associated with physical conflict, and improvisation to bring imaginative options into verbal conflict, and some process art (group process design and facilitation) to bring that imagination into groups. In short, peace requires practice. If we don't practice some specific basics, then we can't expect to have tools at hand when the opportunity to call for peace or for justice presents itself.

 

Original post here with comments: http://apeaceofconflict.com/2012/05/08/violent-encounters-with-random-strangers-14/

 

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20120503+BW+Recommendations

A spouse who calls
reaching out to both suffer with and love you
A child who smiles
lighting up the shadowy depths of history with the promise of a future with beauty in
A dog who watches
his mind on welcoming trees nearby, his body curled on the feet of your soul
A life worth living

 

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The Renaissance School - Peace Practices staff training 20120223 video introduction

This is an introduction to Peace Practices, which takes my Martial Nonviolence method and puts it into a curriculum for a specific organization, in this case The Renaissance School, a particularly well regarded Montessori community in Oakland, California. Martial Nonviolence, or MNv, begins with aikido movement and themes, which lead to non-destructive self-defense in physical conflict, and then takes the student through theater improvisation techniques, so that they are more comfortable with non-violent verbal interactions while under pressure and can deal with bullying and other forms of hostility. More advanced practitioners are invited to learn the third phase, which involves facilitating groups such that responsible citizenship is possible, which is to say that everybody involved gets what they need and a chance at what they really want.

 

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