FINDING POWER IN OUR PEACE AND PEACE’S INNER POWER
By Rev Charla Hermann

Was there ever a day in September of any year that wasn’t as memorable as 9-11-01? It is a day that has been empowered to shake every fiber of our Being. It shakes the questions of trust and safety and all of the bug things we have grown up to think that we can count on. It is a response to a world condition that shakes us into questions, opinions, and belief systems. Most of us are not really sure what is certain in our world now, except the constant systems of change. It is three years later, and we still use that day as a point of reference and, in many ways, the excuse for the incredible number of things that are changing all around us each and every day.

Soon after that renowned day, I found myself sitting on a mountain top with Bo Clark. I had looked to her as my elder and “wiser” sister for advice as to how to calm my inner jitters and pull up my power to do my healing work in a meaningful manner. I asked her what she was going to do, as if there was a single task or pathway to knowing of what would instantly shift the world into a consciousness of loving and living in perfect harmony. She told me she was going to sit there and be in peace. Period. She offered nothing more or less as advice for my pressing question. “You see”, she reminded me, “when I sit here and hold calm and loving thoughts, that is at least one place on the planet that is covered for this moment in space and time.” It was too simple for and made too much sense. So, while someone on the other side of the world was running for their life, this woman was choosing the alchemy of simply sitting and holding good thoughts!!

Being the seeker that I am, I knew I needed to feel more; I needed to feel a discernable action towards peace. The stillness seemed too quiet for me to feel, as if my own sitting in peace was not helping a world in turmoil. I kept feeling l like the only way to be empowered against my own fears of what was to come was to DO SOMETHING. I could understand the concept enough to crochet a series of shawls. With each stitch, I chanted ‘I AM IN PEACE AS PEACE IS WITHIN ME’ a mantra to quiet my fertile mind that was dancing through the endless prophetic scenarios of the world’s potential shifts and changes. Hearing old messages of Elders now gone, that were rocking my daily process of living. Each time I thought I got a hold on the fullest feeling of inner peace, someone around me would stir the cauldron of conflict and challenge, OR, someone would get sick or simply leave this earth plane before I had come to terms with my peaceful relationship with them. How darn rude of folks not to put my need for peace before their own? Many did not even know that their personal shift was affecting mine. Certainly I was feeling more attached to the out come than they, or at least that was my perception. Like a tornado, life kept spinning faster and faster and picking up little scenarios to add to the last episode and add to the challenge of simply holding peace. I felt like I had to chase the drama, to get a hold of it in order to personally transform it into something better. Not that I needed another drama, mind you, but I kept finding this thread that wove from situation to situation that simply needed attention before I could sit in that moment of Inner Peace!

It was the place of inner alchemy found in a summer of rituals and ceremonies that led me to a place of sincere calm. Within the Scared Rituals, I found myself going into my own DNA and reminding it what calm looked and felt like. I found myself singing the DNA a song of deepm inner healing. I asked my body to taste and smell the essence of peace. I wanted to know the wholeness that lives within peace. Finding my Inner Peace was and has always been a guide to my real source of power and strength. It was quite clear that, before I could guide others through the feelings of peace and wholeness, I had to feel them for myself. Pulling up that source in myself is the work of this time, it is the action that creates peace.

What became the bigger challenge was to recognize that same need and source in the other powerful healers and facilitators around me. Yes, there you have it. I could flip out and wonder what the world leaders were going to do to bring forth world peace, to fix a broken medical, educational, and environmental system. I could question it in a hundred ways, the rationale that was connected to the actions that I watched on the nightly news. I could then walk back into my office and move on to my daily list of things to do. I could find a place for the world conflict in a file in my head. I could label it, VISUALZE PEACE, and close the file drawer and get busy.

What I could not do with nearly the same ease, was to take the single relationships of Spiritual power brokers of our time and find peace in what appeared to be a competition of who is going to be the biggest and best healer/diva/medicine person/speaker/journeyer of our time. I looked around me and in the mirror of myself, and gasped at the responsibility of coming into our wisdom years (when so much wisdom is needed) and feeling as if I might have missed a few important classes on Spiritual survival of the new millennium. I could remember an old warrior who once reminded me that you cannot fight for peace. It simply is not possible.

Here we are, surrounded with what we, in the cosmic alternative world, would like to believe is the answer of the great quest of our time. We would like to believe that each of us is a piece of the puzzle to the solution that will shift us and transform this planet from a place of such massive conflict to the place of the promised “Golden Age”. Yet, when we have honestly traveled from circle to circle, we may have experienced the politics of whose answer is the best or who’s on first as though there was a competition to become the next savior of the planet. Some have acted as though they were hiding the super hero costume in the closet, and that they and they alone have had the single vision of knowing. While others have hidden their potential solutions feeling intimidated and out-ranked by cosmic resume to come forward and present the simply answer. For instance, today, I am going to sit and hold this place of peace!!! It is a silly place in which some have gotten trapped, while others have been empowered to move on into mindful action, always set forward with a prayer of intention for the highest good.

The real honor in all of this is seeing the ones who are not competing for the right to have the biggest and best solution. It has been a wondrous place of incredible peace to see the sincere peace keepers and healers of our time. To watch and join the Sacred Dancers from the East to the West coast, to watch the incredible keepers of the fire, and those who have blessed the waters at Niagara Falls; all has been an action of peace, We have seen the children accepting bundles for the old ones and dancing forward into the next generations; there was peace. As the songs are still sung from circle to circle as hands are joined in equality and harmony; here we have felt peace in action. It is a place where we have seen the next generation of Elders model peace for the young ones. And in that quiet place of sitting, as if they are the peaceful mountain, there HAS BEEN and CONTINUES TO BE PEACE.

Today I reach to each of you for that place that lives deep in your soul to bring up peace for at least five minutes and accept the peace that is being offered to you from the ancient places that live in the souls and works of the Sacred friends around you.

Stepping into a place of power and peace is also stepping up to honor the others around us that create peace in their healing work as drummers, dancers, singers, and clowns. It seemed that everywhere I look, from circle to circle, village to village, and heart to heart, I see a planet filled with hopeful folks reaching to each other to generate the action of peace. My realization to acknowledging my own Inner Peace was when I could acknowledge the vast variety of expressions of power and peace in others. May I be a solid hand to grasp as I sit here today feeling, singing and being my own form of world peace.