Peace as Balance, and happy birthday Dad!

I love this time of September! In Minnesota, where I live, it is the time of year for holding on and letting go of The Lake. This means both the experience – swimming, boating, beaching – and the idea itself, that is, the idea of vacation, la vida facil, a perpetual summer.

When I was a kid, we would wait for my Dad to get home from teaching high school, probably around 4 in the afternoon, and then assess the situation: Can we go the lake another day? This was the holding on.

On those days when the answer was yes, we would all get on our bikes and pedal to a 10’x 20’ pile of sand on the shore of Lake Skogman, one of those way-over-10,000 little Lakes in Minnesota with a dying dairy farm at one end and a Hi-way with unmarked curves on the other.

We would swim until the water was warmer than the air, wrap our towels around our heads to keep our ears warm, and bike home, joining the other animals in settling down to dinners and beds.

Then one evening, after swimming and before showering, we would need to put big blue and green plastic tarps over the garden to keep the frost from killing all the peppers and tomatoes. We would need to put on sweat pants over our bathing suits, and wish for tennis shoes instead of flip flops to keep the wetness of dusk off our toes as we tucked our veggies in for the night. Honey, come in now, its cold out there! And eventually everything was harvested, or left for another animal to harvest. This was the letting go.

Usually this happened sometime right about… Now. Today, my Dad’s birthday, September 21st, and the fall equinox, and in recent years the UN’s International Day of Peace, as well.

Even with the extremes of 80 degree days and 30 degree nights, we still find a pattern of balance around this time in Minnesota, as in the rest of the world. I did a search about the autumn equinox, which falls this year on September 23, and found that “Everywhere on earth experiences close to 12 hours of daylight, and 12 hours of nighttime. It is time of the year when the sun rises exactly in the east, travels through the sky for 12 hours, and sets exactly in the west.”http://www.religioustolerance.org/fall_equinox

“Everywhere on earth” is a pretty big claim, and somehow makes me feel like the world is wonderfully small and inter-connected. To honor this inter-connection, my family today will celebrate my Dad’s birthday 59th birthday by participating in the UN’s International Day of Peace through a small circle ritual. We will reflect together on the ways we have been peacemakers in the last year, and then make commitments to center our relationships, work, and consumption around justice and peace and in the next year.

Are any other families gathering to recognize the UN’s International Day of Peace together? One possibility is to join in a 24 hour vigil, or to offer your own commitment to pause and vigil for peace today. To see what’s taking place around you, one site to check out is: www.idpvigil.com

This site also discusses the UN’s intention in designating 9/21 as a day of peace: “The International Day of Peace has a very tangible goal of a day-long peaceful world. The cessation of conflict for that day is one form of peace. The resolution also states, however, that the day should be focused on strengthening the ideals of peace and alleviating tensions and causes of conflict among peoples and governments. In its broadest sense, it is more than just alleviating violence, peace is community building with an internal state of concord and tranquility.”

Wherever you are, please take a minute to search for the place in you that KNOWS we can build that community with one another, and then think about how you might step up your Peace game in the next year. And may you, in the next few days of autumn equinox, pause to find your own sense of peaceful and universal balance.