being peace? sigh....

i was thinking about hate and anger this weekend.

yeah.
maybe not such fun topics.
but seemed important.....and memorial day seemed like a good day
to talk about them - seein' as conflicts and war are filled with them.

i started thinking about them because i felt something close to hate the other day.
it probably wasn't that close when you really looked at it. but close enough.

and seein' as i'm wantin' to live a certain way, and hate isn't on that agenda,
i've been thinking about it.

how it's fueled, where it starts, what it really means...that kinda stuff.

i also felt frustration this weekend.
and yeah, anger.

oh! how perfect! i can gather all this for memorial day, i thought.

and before i could even sit down to write this, i had an incredibly uncomfortable
phone conversation with my elderly neighbor.

there's prolly a thousand reasons for the agitation she was feeling -
side affects of many many different medicines, constant chronic pain,
being alone way too long, disease - all kindsa things -

but whatever the reasons, she was pretty darn agitated.

i had tried to do something thoughtful and it hadn't quite worked out how
i had planned. instead, she was upset, frustrated, angry, and pretty much hung
up on me.

wow.
i hung up the phone.
wow.

i had tried to be gentle and kind in the conversation. tried to be clear
and let her know just what was going on. the whole intent was loving.
i had tried to include her in on something and brighten her life.

um...didn't work so well.

i hung up the phone amazed.

so all this stuff is whirling around in my head.........
all the miscommunications in life that lead to some pretty rough places.

even when love is so obviously there.

i thought of my own small examples....and then i thought of the world.

honest to pete how can there ever be peace in the world?
i have no idea if that's even possible.

but i do know that our own little worlds are where we gotta start.

and on memorial day when we're honoring those we have lost to conflicts...
it seemed like the thing to remember. it seems to me like the best possible
way to honor them - by trying to be peaceful in our own lives.

sounds so easy, doesn't it?
and yet.......