The Nature of Peace: The Peace of Nature

One is the other

Photo by Philipp Torres on Unsplash

In the winter of 2021, I was invited to share some poetry as part of the series, Poems for Peace, organized by the Subud International Cultural Association. You can watch the video here. At that time, the subject of peace wasn’t much on the political radar. The human world seemed relatively peaceful, and I took the opportunity to speak of peace in a broad sense, as an aspect of the natural world. My premise was simple: the nature of peace is the peace of nature. That is, the feeling we attach to peace, what we mean when we say it, is ultimately an expression of nature. Nature and peace, like water and life, are almost the same thing.

I say that being completely aware of the necessary violence of predation. But “violence” is probably the wrong word. I remember watching an eagle take a teal on a local beach. The tide had drained and a teal had let itself become detached from the flock, floating alone in water that had become too shallow to dive in for escape. An eagle in the trees was watching, and soon swooped down. When the teal tried to dive the eagle had it in its talons, and using its weight, held the teal under water for a couple minutes, then lifted its lifeless body, streaming with water, into the trees. Immediately, peace covered the scene. The water smoothed over. The flock continued their dabbling. The tragedy for the teal became fortune for the eagle’s chicks. And through it all, the peace was hardly broken.

I suggested further that, in a living landscape at least, peace is an active thing, something in a sense created. If one could sit on the surface of the moon or mars, assuming they’re temporarily protected from the extreme temperatures and radiation, they might, surrounded by all that stone and silence, feel a certain peace. Maybe an awe looking into the stars at night. But I suspect it would be nothing like the peace we feel in an ancient forest, or in a field of multi-colored wildflowers, or a prairie of tall, windblown grasses, or by a living shoreline. That deep, bone-confirming “rightness” must, to a certain degree, be created by the place itself. Indeed, that may be the landscape’s fundamental drive, to attain dynamic balance, to maintain the conditions in which to simply dwell, which we call peace.

Does it follow then, that as we damage nature we damage peace? When we drain and fill wetlands, log forests, pave fields, are we also draining, logging and paving peace? Is the loss in some sense physical? What if you could measure it? What sort of sum are we building towards? How many square miles of peace on earth did we destroy today?

Of course, we aren’t only destroying peace in a physical sense, what we might call the living infrastructure of peace. Through our many interventions of technology we’re also destroying our connection to it. We’re abandoning the teachers and dismantling the school building.

And if you haven’t noticed, we’re not getting any more peaceful.

I remember once painting the outdoor kitchen of a wealthy client. I could see her pre-teen son inside, laying on the couch, lazily playing a video game in which the player moves behind gun sights through the narrow alleys of a village in the Middle East somewhere. Occasionally, a wild eyed “Muslim” jumps out of a doorway, which the boy would blast to pieces, confirmed by the screen being briefly saturated in blood. Then, the screen would clear and the game continue. His mother, seeing he was in shorts, came over and put a blanket over his legs.

Why did the mother’s instincts not extend to the technology which was actively, and quite clearly, sculpting her son’s developing brain to casually enjoy racial violence? Why are we so trustful of such technology? If it isn’t making us more violent, it certainly seems to have rendered us more tolerant of violence. How else do we account for humankind’s first livestreamed genocide, still unfolding in Gaza as the world goes blithely on?

I’ve noticed that after a rocket attack on a refugee camp, or shooting spree at the “relief” center, as the burned and shattered are rushed into the overcrowded remains of Gaza’s health system, there are always a few Palestinians with their phones aloft, recording the horror. They hope that if the world is shown what is happening, it will be moved to react. It will stop it. But what if the world simply clicks around it?

An unspoken assumption of modernity is that it makes us better people, more civilized, removed from the “red in tooth and claw” brutality of the natural world. But I’m convinced it’s the opposite. Our possession of empathy is not a human achievement, but an inheritance of the living world out of which we emerged. Watch this video clip of an elephant rescuing a drowning gazelle and consider again if empathy is a human creation. Note also the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a techno-optimist supreme, declaring that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy…”

This exploration of the nature of peace is not meant to be a substitute for political engagement. The horrors being committed against the Palestinian people, and elsewhere, demand it of us. And if asked to offer poems for peace today, my response would be different. It’s interesting that the people of SICA made the call when they did. In that they were prescient. And there is value in thinking of peace in broader terms. Peace can seem like something that just naturally happens, and in a sense it does, as an emergent property of nature. But it also requires work and effort, remembrance and protection. If there is usefulness in this reflection, it is to put some ground beneath our feet for that work. And that ground is the living earth.

Lastly, it was an honor to be introduced by Paul Nelson, a living force for poetry and bioregionalism in this part of the world we call Cascadia. One of the things I learned from Paul, whose poetry workshops I highly recommend, is a poem form called the serial poem. This is a long form poem in which one let’s go of linear logic to let the poem speak for itself, following its path and energy until it seems to have expended itself, at which point the poem is finished. I wrote such a poem for the occasion, which I read during the interview and also print here. If you listen to the interview you will notice the written version is slightly different, as I’ve made some revisions. Couldn’t help myself. But I’m at peace with it.

---

The Nature of Peace: The Peace of Nature 

1.

Peace of nature.
Nature of peace.

And at the center 
  of each

the same silent 
    diamond.

At the center of the diamond?
Time, perhaps. Or maybe merely
the peace at the center
of all origination
    the cloud dissolving under the sun
    the mushroom rising up from the ground 
the ritual integration
and disintegration

out of which 
each thing 
and moment 
blooms.

Somehow we all know:
the invisible world
is at peace.

*

Meaning, attraction, language, beauty—
that which speaks 
from a shell  
held in the hand
to the sea brine eyes
floating in the skull.
Where outside meets inside.
The slow trading of places.

*

Peace of words on a page.
Peace of laying words on a page.
Peace of their meaning
    enlarging though time.

Peace of the broom leaning in the corner.
Peace of the light dimming 
    then brightening through the curtain.

The Heron's peace:
	the level gaze of time.
Peace of a Cooper’s Hawk
    	    banking circles against the sky
looking down
    through its wind-threaded wings.

Peaceful the fields below.
    Peaceful even the eyes 
of the spied-upon mice.

2.

All falls toward level
    and that falling is peace.
Movement seeks rest.
Rest seeds movement.
Together they make a music.
Peace is the mountain
inside the major chord.

It is creeks flowing downhill
brook trout holding against the current
with the grace and detachment
of geologic strata.

Peace is always the wish.
Where light shines
on the aluminum water bottle
peace is in the gleam.

*

In the winter morning light
vertical trails slide down  
the window skinned in mist.
Bonds of water
like hands reaching and releasing.
each drop.
The way for the drop 
is made by other drops.

Peace of falling 
into those hands.

The cream-colored coffee mug on the counter
rings its ascent.
	Over its vessel curve a drop
	has slid and dried into a slender
	snake of glaze, darker at its edges
lighter in the middle, like cellophane.
Somewhere in the fade 
peace is sleeping.
Or roaring.

Maybe a ceramic mug
IS INTENSELY a ceramic mug
wholly devoted to its atoms,
a storm of presence

at peace.

3.

What did you do?
What didn’t you do?
What jagged branch
	sticks out of the sack
	you drag behind you.

Can a poem give permission to release it?
Can the wind?
Can a leaf held in the hand?
Can birdsong coming in from indeterminate directions?
Can a salmon scaling a waterfall?
Can a mothering cedar?
Can a whispering creek?

The eagle crowning a snag
	demands it.
	The sharpened gaze, talons and beak
		cut the ego's tethers
		and say 
    fiercely
		
Now. 

This.

*

womb of peace.


*

In any case only shamans
    can change the speed
and direction of time

	    and like a hawk
	time hunts in peace.
	    We move through its sights
	neither forward or backward
	    but deeper in
       to the present.

4.	

The runner is at peace.
The bluesman, high up the neck
string-bending cries from a Stratocaster
    is at peace.
The weaver, the potter, the piano tuner
the carpenter, the window washer, the tailor
the gardener, anyone
with a simple, manual task 
finds the pace 
that is peace
and there deepens the track.

Unless pulled into production
by the violence of efficiency.
The capitalist with his hook.
"Come along now, were heading to the cutting edge"
like it was a war front.

The economy is a war front. 

And everything is losing.

*

Peace is a very, very, old sprawl 
     of roots, 
and the feeling gained
			sitting upon them.
				Look up into the branches
				      The pattern is there
				        branching fractals
				           pure utterance.
	
				Photosynthesis, the drinking
					of light
				by a leaf. Peace on peace.
			Uncountable enactments.
		Growth, the flow
	    of sugars down the sap tunnels,
		mineral laden water rising.
	All directions expanding
	becoming 
a constellation, a city
	at peace:
	growing it
	   giving it.
	Inhaling and
    exhaling it.

The holy round.
Home into home.

*

Horizon to horizon, the rain falls.
The ocean is above us now
and the waters of the body
    listen.
Peace is the emptying cloud,
the fallen and falling water.

Later the fields 
will be lensed in sky mirrors

indeterminate depths 
    shining.

---

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