Category: Poetic PEACE Pilgrimage

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 342- 11/23/2023

Jo Beall

in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and Mother Earth, we join in spirit with the Native Americans, the first people of Turtle Island on the 54th commemoration of a National Day of mourning real-eye-sing Thanksgiving framed as the Wampanoag people welcoming hapless English refugees at Plymouth—a fictive account promulgated two centuries later during the American Civil War—is extremely problematic… during those two centuries, European settlers invaded Native lands, slaughtered Native families, and destroyed resources needed for survival of the Indigenous inhabitants of what became the Colonies, and then the United States of America… once the Civil War ended, Union generals took their battle-hardened troops westward wreaking destruction on Native populations and herding people onto so-called reservations, internment camps…

it’s a bloody and shameful series of chapters in American history that we have not dealt with nor reconciled… so, the question becomes, should we end the Thanksgiving holiday because of the fictitious overlay of pseudo-harmony and subsequent white-washing of history that it conveys? do we replace it, as the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) have done since 1970, with a National Day of Mourning honoring Native ancestors and their struggles to survive today and educate Americans about the actual history of the holiday? can we reframe this American holiday to include Indigenous Peoples, European “settlers” (itself a problematic term), and the continuing waves of immigrants from around the world seeking a better life on these shores?

as the sun shines on truth truth, let us recommit ourselves to building that “more perfect union” and making a future where all people are respected, appreciated, and provided with the tools for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” we must repair the breach with reparations which are the ultimate way to build power in exploited communities… as we build bridges from the ashes of the racist and genocidal colonial past and present and begin to relate to each other with the understanding we belong to each other, we come into the sacred space of true gratitude for all our relations…

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Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 341- 11/22/2023

Jo Beall

“… And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?” President John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963

today is a special day of re-membering and entering the deep silence of the inner ground and gathering seeds for the almost new moon in sag……

as i till this organic field of consciousness, i am transported to that friday sixty years ago and into my 12 year old self sitting in my 7th grade classroom in a sleepy, backwater town… the world took a dramatic turn when the principal appeared at the door of our classroom with a newsflash: the president has been shot and is dead… i re-member my outrage now as if those words were just pronounced and how i could not believe how cavalierly he uttered them and with a smile… we were shooed out to recess where all of my classmates circled around me knowing JFK was like a member of our family… three years earlier, I had traipsed around the state with my father to his speeches and to his senate office in DC and i can still feel my heart almost beating out of my chest every time i’d get to greet him and shake his hand… and then the inauguration and his address that stirred a nation and now, 1000 days later, we’d be heading back to DC for the state funeral… today, i’m both a 9 year old living in Camelot on the brink of a new world and a 12 year old taking comfort in hearing strains of “We Shall Overcome” rising from the somber and dignified crowds of people gathered to say goodby to our fallen leader…

may we take this moment, this beautiful moment, to salute all poetic peace pilgrims with JFK’s invocation of peace in the quotations above and the video below of the whole speech that is magnificent…   these quotations come from this greatest speech of his ever, a commencement address given at American University some four and a half months before he was gunned down in Dallas… these words live on eternally as a clarion call for a peace for all time…

may we all awaken to the wisdom of this radical (rooted) vision of peace…

“Oh Great Spirit who dwells in the sky,
lead us to the path of peace and understanding,
let all of us live together as brothers and sisters.
Our lives are so short here, walking upon Mother Earth’s surface,
let our eyes be opened to all the blessings you have given us.
Please hear our prayers, Oh Great Spirit.”

~Native American Prayer~

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“PEACE IS A DAILY, A WEEKLY, A MONTHLY PROCESS, GRADUALLY CHANGING OPINIONS, SLOWLY ERODING OLD BARRIERS, QUIETLY BUILDING NEW STRUCTURES. AND HOWEVER UNDRAMATIC THE PURSUIT OF PEACE, THAT PURSUIT MUST GO ON.”

~JFK~

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in this creation moment of eternity bathed in the waters of gaia’s womb, may we wage peace…

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Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 340- 11/21/2023

Jo Beall

looking all around, we are filled with gratitude

looking above, we are filled with wisdom

looking below, we are filled with compassion

looking within, we are filled  with true nature

living as one  in peace and harmony

always walking in beauty

~

Song of Peace

“We pray to the great Spiritual Power in which
we live and move and have our being.
We pray that we may at all times
keep our minds open to new ideas and shun dogma;
that we may grow in our understanding of the nature of all living beings
and our connectedness with the natural world;
that we may become ever more filled with
generosity of spirit and true compassion and love for all life;
that we may strive to heal the hurts that we have inflicted on nature
and control our greed for material things, knowing that
our actions are harming our natural world and the future of our children;
that we may value each and every human being
for who he is, for who she is,
reaching to the spirit that is within,
knowing the power of each individual to change the world.”

~ Jane Goodall ~

may it be so…

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Named-Jo-Thousand-Fold-Peace-Rainbow-Dream-Girl-643x1024.jpg

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Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 339- 11/20/2023

Jo Beall

“If we wish to create a lasting peace, we must begin with children.“

 ~ Mahatma Gandhi ~

today is universal children’s day, a day established in 1954 and celebrated on November 20th each year to promote international togetherness, awareness among children worldwide, and improving children’s welfare… this year, with our hearts across the globe being broken with the deaths of thousands of children may our hearts be broken wide open to a wellspring of compassion and may we all hold and work ceaselessly with the following intention:

 “To every child – I dream of a world where you can laugh, dance, sing, learn, live in peace and be happy.“

~ Malala Yousafzai~

isn’t this dream shared by us all? surely we have it in us to create  such a world for the seven generations… to strengthen this intention, feel into this letter written by Chris Hedges:


Dear child,

It is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I am traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza at Rafah. I go because of you.

You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels.  You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.   

The stench of death. Rotting corpses under broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are.

You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can’t anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born?  Was it for something good? Or was it for this? Will you grow up?  Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters?  Someone you know will be injured. Soon. Someone you know will die. Soon.  

At night you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut. The internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop.  

When your father or mother hunts for food or water you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on earth?  

You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day. Pasta. A cucumber. Soon this will seem like a feast. 

You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite made from old newspapers.      

You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flak jackets with the word PRESS written on it. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive jeeps. We appear after a bombing or a shooting. We sit over coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us. Laughing. Pointing. Asking us to take your picture. 

I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza these wars return to me with the force of thunder and lightning. I think of you. 

All of us who have been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children.

I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, years after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this. 

There are very brave Palestinian journalists. Thirty-nine of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the U.N. workers. Eighty-nine of whom have died. So are the ambulance drivers and the medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs. 

But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out. 

Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including 160 children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children. Like you. Precious. Innocent. Loved. We are going because we want you to live. 

I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy.  No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer.

We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah.  Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. 

Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.  

~

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 338- 11/19/2023

Jo Beall

breathing in and out, standing in the center, may we all be true peace…

breathing in and out like waves in the pacific, grandmother’s ocean of love, may we all come together in this moment of serenity…

breathing in and out, may we be an unbroken circle of peace ignited by love…

breathing in and out, may our being peace take flight around the cosmos…

breathing in and out, standing in the center, may we all be true peace…

namaste

~

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 337- 11/18/2023

Jo Beall

are you feeling the rhythmic pull to hollow/hallow in as we near the closing of this turn around the circling of the sun, this cycle of life? here in the northern hemisphere, the darkening also inspires burrowing, hibernating…  bear nature is pulling me into the dream cave to still every cell, to dance without moving, to commune in silence, to open the heart so widely as to take in all the suffering transmuting it into blessing for all in pain, for all suffering loss with my recent sojourn in the shadowlands of physically feeling so uncomfortable bringing it all home so viscerally…

let us take this moment to ring the bell and enter the crystalline garden grove of peace…

“I offer you peace.
I offer you love.
I offer you friendship.
I see your beauty.
I hear your need.
I feel your feelings.
My wisdom flows from the highest Source.
I salute that Source in you.
Let us work together. For unity and peace.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~

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may we be at peace

may our one heart remain open

may we all realize the beauty of our true nature

may we all know the astonishing light of our interbeing

may we all be whole and a source of healing for all our relations

~

breathing infinite gratitude deeply through our one heart,
may we all be safe. may we all be loved. may we all be held. may all be well.
may we feel the support encircling us with a thousand angel wings.
may we rest gracefully in the beauty of this moment…

~

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Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 336- 11/17/2023

Jo Beall

i turn again today to the prophetic imagination of MLK who inspires a vivid dream so clearly of the even more beautiful world we are creating in this moment as we come together in the field out beyond visioning a life-sustaining world that wages peace and harmony and liberation for all our relatives, where we sing the soul song of our birth rite aligning us in perfect synchrony with the conductors of this symphony amplified throughout every car of the peace train as we caravan in the promised land where we stand with our soles kissing the earth as our one heart breathes in the gold from the sun that never rises and never sets, that nourishes us with the most powerful cosmic elixir – love… from this love, we create a world of ever expanding and unending beauty re-membering that how we get there is where we get which is why it is critical for our critical mass of imaginal cells to come together and speak truth with the powerless to the powerful few as we stand resolute in peace and love, the way of all successful movements effecting lasting change… thanks be to all who real-eyes that a life devoted to serving is joy where we live each moment in the river below the river, the river of joy, the water of life… blessed bee…

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Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 335- 11/16/2023

Jo Beall

in this moment of eternity after a momentous move to a metaphorical unknown planet where still the reverberations of a collapsing planet are felt, i find myself once again with grandmother spider in the cave of wisdom gestating in earthmother’s womb as she weaves the web of our wandering star creating another even more beautiful tapestry of the sacred hoop of the shamanic journey of life…

as the old first peoples’ story goes, grandmother leaves the weaving for a moment to go and stir the pot of nature seeds and in the interlude, her beloved dog comes over and starts pulling a thread unraveling the beautiful web… ah yes, the great unraveling, coming apart at the seams, chaos and collapse…

we each have so much to learn from grandmother in the cave of wisdom during these potent times of betwixt and between, of overwhelm… what does grandmother do in response to the crisis of unraveling? throw up her hands and rail at the gods? reactively act from fear? numb herself into unfeeling? our ever creative spider woman picks up a thread and begins weaving an even more beautiful world inviting us to do the same – to sojourn in the cave of inner knowing connecting with our deep self, our soul who knows from a wisdom sacred space what is called for in such times…

and so we are called as well, in this crisis, in this moment of danger and great opportunity to pick up our thread, what is ours to weave for the good of the whole… out of chaos comes creation, yes, it takes chaos to give birth to dancing stars…

take heart, beloveds and follow your thread becoming one with it, one with the cosmic flow being a rainbow thread of luminosity in the web of great mystery enfolded in the embrace of our radically regenerating cosmic mother…

let us close our circle with Kabir:

“The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out further and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.”

~

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 308- 10/20/2023

Jo Beall

thousand fold thanks for the weird/wyrd people, creative rebels, imaginal cells of real-eye-sing… those astonishing lights of being who rekindle our flame by setting their lives on fire and fanning the flames of and for all relatives in the field… it has been said that when living in a dark time such as we are living in, it is the creatives, those with the courage, the heart to follow their weird/wyrd, their genius, their sacred call, to devotedly give themselves to the soul song that inspirits, these are the ones, the ones awakened to the mystical level who thrive in the dark times; the good news is that we all have the potential to real-eyes our true self and dwell in true reality, yes we can all break free from the matrix of domination, conquest consciousness and come home to the consciousness of humility and wisdom and wonder and beauty and love and peace and joy and harmony of great mystery… as i take a gr8 leap tomorrow, may this song sing me home…

i love that this quest ion of following your weird/wyrd that showed up so emphatically as i began my seventh decade this go around is resurrecting even more emphatically as i take flight into the eighth decade with the energy of infinity as the melody… two turn around the sun ago i vowed to begin a podcast: follow your weird/ wyrd which hasn’t ripened into fruit yet though i have been lovingly cultivating the soil the last many moons… in this sacred moment of eternity, let’s come together now and conspire, breathe together deeply as we visual-eyes ourselves in the most sacred of spaces, the crystal we are and embody the energies of this blessingway:

~ Beatitudes for the Weird ~
by Jacob Nordby

“Blessed are the weird people
—poets, misfits, writers, mystics
heretics, painters & troubadours—
for they teach us to see the world through different eyes

Blessed are those who embrace the intensity of life’s pain and pleasure,
for they shall be rewarded with uncommon ecstasy.

Blessed are ye who see beauty in ugliness,
for you shall transform our vision of how the world might be.

Blessed are the bold and whimsical,
for their imagination shatters ancient boundaries of fear for us all.

Blessed are ye who are mocked for unbridled expression of love in all its forms, because your kind of crazy is exactly that freedom for which the world is unconsciously begging.

Blessed are those who have endured breaking by life,
for they are the resplendent cracks through which the light shines.”

may we all be blessed to be weird/wyrd devoting ourselves to embodying this manifesto for mystics as we wander in wonder throughout and within the crystalline clear light of the boundless skysea of love energy…

and, may we be weirdness/wyrdness, daimons for each other giving strength and consolation fully real-eye-sing that the cup of life is a cup of sorrow that opens the compassionate cup of joy warming the cup of sorrow that opens our one heart ever wider to the compassionate cup of joy endlessly…

~

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 10 – Day 307- 10/19/2023

Jo Beall

these words perfectly reflect feeling echoes that have been arising the last couple of days on the pathless path as i dance suspended, out of rhythm, out of sorts… to come back into rhythm, i connect with source breathing in prana from the earth mother and up through the extended root system into every wild cell and radiating out this golden light breath into father sky and beyond while whispering thank you with every breath to great mystery for providing just what is needed trusting in divine orchestration and my intention of being open and present to whatever is…

always coming home to the heart, to the sacred gaiatree grove of peace deep within, being present in the moment, in the presence of the beloved… resting in the stillpoint, the unchanging, taking a pregnant pause in a moment of feeling so stretched and uncomfortable right before birth… in this moment of presence, i open more fully to birthing the new… surrendering to true nature, to love and co-creating from this sacred space… YES! to full blooming lotushood in a muddy pond…

and, YES! to gathering with you in this burgeoning flowering field to witness the wonder of the great turning in the midst of a difficult passage thru the birth canal and re-turning into the miracle of interbeing here now in more and more loving presence, trust, surrender and devocean…

~