Peace

Peace

Samuel Bird

A half mile from my house is a cafe adjacent to a bookstore. Though the philosophy book selection is minuscule, I check it each time I come. The walk here allows me enough time to be reminded that we live by the weather that wills what rain or shine it does. In today’s outing, there was an unobstructed sun that I closed my eyes and faced myself to bask in. Upon entering I hear the quiet chatter of people ordering their coffee or bread. Today, there is only one other person besides the employees. While my imagination can think of places more aligned with my preferences for me to be, this place is a place of peace. I have learned that I can’t spend too long reading in my house or in the woods. Nor can I write too long in the same room I sleep and eat in before my world becomes too small to occupy. Here, I can slow down and let the words drip from my mind more gently, though it is still likely a crashing waterfall. My words don’t become more organized, but the chaos becomes just that much more simpler to me as I release it out onto the page. When I was in college, there was a park near campus with a landscape feature of a fake waterfall fed into a pool of water filled with lily pads and the occasional ducks. Those short years were filled with my resigning myself to the fact that I could never exist in a social world that I wished so much to be a part of. I would go to that pool of water and climb up by the point where the pumps released the water to sit. The rushing water was loud, consistent, and soothing. It seems to rinse my mind of those thoughts I had no use for but they were stubborn to leave. I would practice some meditation, but was reminded it is dangerous bravery to be mindful of a mind too full. That small pond was not the wilderness carved by God that I desired, but the palm branches and clear water became a place where I could come to myself. The strain of my early years seems absurd to me now that I have reaped the results of healing from it. However, there was one bright and wondrous part of my early years that shines even compared to the secure life I have built since. My four times, or so, great-grandfather came from Denmark and settled a tract of rocky ground that no one else wanted to. Over the course of his life, his children’s, and theirs all the way to mind, that acreage has been worked to move the rocks, work waterways, and build up a topsoil. By the time I was born, it was open fields of green grass. There are thoughts and scenes that have significance to a person such that they seem to be the center point that one experiences life. This is a thought they go back to. Often and still, I am a child with long blonde hair and freckled cheeks looking out of the field with its tall grass dancing in the wind. Behind me, the small ditch carried my tadpole friends and the life giving water of my little heaven. Above me, tall cottonwood trees swayed gently allowing flickers of light to dance across my face. My feet were bare in the grass, in my hand was my trusty slingshot, and in my mind was a feeling. As I always did, my young mind philosophized, but in this tranquil environment I learned I didn’t just do so out of desperation, but love of doing so. As my father worked the ditches on the other side of the farm, I would enjoy this place that was the closest I would ever feel to home. When I got older,  I would beg my mother to let me take my rifle and live up at that farm. For years I was obsessed with that land and saving this feeling that it caused. Now, that family farm has been split up by greedy and contentious family members who didn’t even end up receiving wealth for selling out their heritage. I have dreams of coming up with the capital and acquiring this place, but it is less of a concern now. I have removed myself from the cause of my experience and instead began to privilege the experience. These are not just places I go, but places I take with me. And why do I? Because I need peace. 

There are two halves of my life that makes there nearly be two lives. The first is before July twenty-seventh two thousand and seventeen, and the second is after. Initially, my life was about trying to continue it and wondering if I desired to do so. The next half was a deep purview into my being and what I could be. With the start of this stage of my life, was an initial emphasis on peace. The word isn’t as close on my tongue, but it is ever present in my heart. What do I mean by this peace? I will later explore the concepts of not being at odds with oneself by punishment as well as the opposite of becoming whole and harmonious. One looks at peace as the negation of its detractors, and the other is a positing of the building of peace. However, what else is peace? I can attempt to explain it via words, but as I learned with friends that don’t speak my language, we build representation via gesturing. So, I will do that. I will gesture to that experience within you of your being, being what it is, not what it is not, and not thinking otherwise. When you are only what you are, belong in the place you made, and net will for nothing but what you have. You are yourself and you are where you are in the world. There is no great series of facts you ignore to have your conceptual system. You allow the world to be the wild mystery it is, and even hold you in its surprisingly habitable chaos. Our kingdom of peace is not without its defense. We look at those beasts that bare their teeth at us long enough that within our mind that fangs fall out. The only threats are those that lower the quality of our lives or end it. To the first, we have built peace, within reason, not in spite of but along with those difficult qualities of our lives. To the second, we are at peace with the inevitable cessation of our being. If it hurts us, we are strong. If it kills us, we have looked death in the face before. We now get to this being “unthreatened” that I have spoken of before. We have experienced this peace, defended it, and now must go back to that experiencing. The depth of experience is the contingent causation of that thing experienced in action. Can a man think angry thoughts and never show anger? Can a man build peace and never have some that spills out of his soul to others? It is peace when we experience and it is grace when we share it. We exemplify peace, share it with them, and leave a little bit for them to carry on. How did we learn this peace? The same way we taught it. We beheld a character and extracted their character out for our emulation. Peace is also not a gift but an acquisition from being, so we need to know the efforts that obtain. Let us consider such a character. 

You and I do not have a shared social sphere we can gesture to persons to refer to qualities. For this reason, I will make up a character for us to look at. This is not a person we share, and instead is just a list we personify. You may note, why would I share the character when I can just share the list? I find that when we can build a character in our mind, they are more accessible for our relationship and discovery. Let us remark that peace is not order. That field of grass has grass going every way. This great man is chaos. His mind and world are already so, and in becoming so he joins them in what they are, losing being incongruent. He lets his mind rest against the world as both have come into precision of each other to him. Of all the places this man’s mind could wander, he leaves it relegated to where he finds himself to be. Where his mind occupies, there he believes he belongs. What if there is no essence that ties him to a place in the world? He carries his belongings with him. He is nestled solely in that place and person he is and finds himself. Within his arms are might to acquire the resources he needs. Within his heart is strength to forgo those resources at the denial of fate. He can both find more food than he could eat, and eat less than a poor hunter. In this, he finds the opportunity for excess that is ripe for his deliverance. This man has a clear, though humble, view of his life. His simple vision is one he is open to its wrongness, yet fights for his faith in it. When he follows  his values down into his soul, he identifies those values that make all other values valuable. To those, he places them as the wanting that his whole being participates in. To every subsequent want he allows it in his mind as either something achieved or not. His wanting is not found here on the earth, and from that no failing in it can fail him. He seeks a few well thought out things from this world still, but even then with tact and never at the expense of fate. He is ready to accept horrors, deceit, and failings. His objective for his being is tied up in a thought intangible. Finally, our great man can see his thoughts. They want the viewing, and nothing more. He doesn’t betray his mind to only see the world. In his deep perception, everything rests in a position that it makes sense to him that it is there. There is more that could be said of this man, but he is being described by someone who is not yet him. This character of contentedness, what attributes would you find him with? You likely had many thoughts similar to this. When we find ourselves having a step toward peace and not taking it, it is because we are scared. Peace is the stillness that we sit with nothingness. If all the noise and clutter goes away, we can be scared to find what is left. Though it will be the greatest seeming thing you will ever experience, do not fret meeting it. 

I see this pattern among philosophers, especially among the moderns. The more that they delve into the world of thoughts and what necessitates being at its core, they are horrified. Below everything is a nothing that somehow brought about its opposite. There is no answer, just a complication of the question at hand. This is at odds with the mind of man which is to believe and exist in a world he doesn’t know. His mind collapses as it looks for the conceptual bedrock left by no one. This experience brings emotional states that are pained and detached as the philosopher is isolated from the believing beings around him as he realizes there is nothing that must be believed. His mind breaks into factions until like my hero, he slips into a mental fissure that he will never escape from. In my meditation today, I realized something that made my peace turn into tears of joy. I am the only philosopher I know of that has acquired greater degrees of peace the more that I have philosophized. I started my life in that mental position they were in where I followed thought all the way down and found myself grasping at shadows left by nothing. Something of a man’s estimation of his life is found in the trajectory of it. Even if I came to neutrality, my life would have a trajectory from the horrors to the lack of horrors. However, I am touched and honored to find myself passed the horrors and to the divine. I still carry the horrors with me as my standard and if I am not careful it can taint what I see now, but what I see is the divine and it shines every brighter against those shadows. I never thought my life meant something and moved toward this position of finding that I could build what it meant both in terms of what it inferred and what it resulted in. I am incredibly blessed to have been so. My faculties are strained and weary, but this philosophy as the initial means to soothe my soul ended up obtaining what I asked of it. I know they would have likely not listened and even found me a fool, but for the man attached to the mind, I wish I could go back through the ages and offer Esse Maxim. Not out of my superiority, but out of it’s qualities. Nietzsche looked at what was and saw it correctly. However, I worry my brother I never met forgot that he is the other half of being. I have a few peripheral things I want to conquer. I want a wife, children, and means to care for them. However, when it comes to asking things of my life, I have ran out of things to ask for. I have spent years begging philosophy to give me a thought, and now I have built a dictionary of ideas that make my being magnificent. The next few things ahead of me are easy to obtain compared to the work I did in my mind and soul first. For this reason, I ask what I want. Why do I write and philosophize? What in this transaction do I seek to receive. If I can be honest, I think I have already received. My life and existence is made deeper by the black brushstrokes, and more vibrant by the colorful dashes. The totality of my life is a blessing that I look on. My life is becoming less and less the achieving and more the question of “now what” after my achievement. If I ever do well for you in all my writings, now that I was compensated for my labors. My imagination couldn’t come up with a life better than that which I have. This is not because of facts outside of my mind, although that helps. I am at peace with myself and the world around me. I have built up space in my heart to give grace as I feel it. The past is something I honor and the future is something I am prepared for. I go back to why I feel so strongly to write this. I feel peace, and I want this for you, my friend. I wish I could better package it and share it with you, but I can point out where you can find it. For today, I am honored. You joined me in that beautiful thought of that field that was touched by God. As you build peace and its aesthetic image in your mind, please borrow that place I used to escape to peace. I not only don’t mind sharing that place with you, it is the most wonderful of thoughts to think of you joining me there.