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Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Friday, January 20, 2017

Create, The Texture of Peace

In Monday’s post this week I wrote, “Recognize how your creativity is effortlessly rooted in you already.”

And then it occurred to me yesterday, “Peace is effortlessly rooted in you, too.”

Yes, it’s already there.
Within us.
It is not conditional.
It requires us to get vulnerable.
Sometimes this means being afraid, but not drowning in that fear.
Sometimes this means being anguished, but allowing the tears to flow until they
            naturally ebb (like the tide).
Sometimes this means feeling angry, but doing nothing…until the small glimpse
of a start at an action comes to us, unbidden, and we suddenly know how to take
that one, next, small step in non-aggression.

Peace is not always tidy. It does not have to entail agreement with all things and beings.
Peace might ask of us acceptance of things that we’d prefer were not, though: that cold, sharp rock that lodges in our solar plexus. (Nor is acceptance synonymous with agreement, satisfaction, defenselessness, powerlessness, on-the-fence-ness, or a mandate to do nothing in the face of injustice.)

The journey of peace, toward the growing of peace, asks us to look deeply within. And to do so with a creative, open heart. It asks us to not pin a feeling of serenity on what is outside of us but, rather, what is waiting for us there already.

What does peace feel like within you…the brand of peace that naturally resides without external circumstances to grow or diminish it?

What texture does it have?

Being a creator of peace is not unlike the creative process: making something of beauty, by hand, out of the upwelling of your imagination.





All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2017 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."