This past Mother's Day the women of Birthways Midwifery Service invited me to serve as the mistress of ceremonies at their Mother's Day Peace Pole planting celebration. (The custom and significance of Peace Poles is doubtless familiar to Synapse readers. Carol Spalding, who with her husband Joe, manufactures all the peace poles for the western hemisphere, say one way to think of peace pole planting is as a healing acupuncture of the Earth.)

Although I don't do peace (like some housecleaners don't do windows), and motherhood is definitely not my bag, I was honored to be thought of in connection with those issues, and by individuals for whom I have great respect. Naturally, I accepted.

Besides, it amounted to being asked an interesting question -- what is peace, anyway? -- and a question is ever an opportunity to learn.

I had to ask myself why isn't peace my issue? I think that it's because peace is already addressed with a zeal that radical ecology, which is my issue, doesn't quite seem to engender. (A good argument can be made that the issues underlying these are identical, but we don't yet seem to work on them that way.) Peace, if it may be defined simplemindedly as the absence of war, is in the obvious self-interest of just about all human beings except perhaps the operators of the military-industrial complex. (And radical ecology, while in the interest of the human species, could inconvenience a lot of us human individuals.) There are a few human beings whose greed may be satisfied by manufacturing engines of war, and people whose personality structures may be fulfilled by regimentation, and the giving, or following of orders, however absurd, destructive, or suicidal. Although some people will admit a preference for war if the choice is between that and a threat to some abstraction like democracy, communism, freedom, order, or national security, virtually no one will admit to desiring war.

So peace, I thought to myself, is a motherhood issue. Very popular these days. But what is it, in a personal sense? And is it a natural part of the human behavioral repertoire?

The Book of Common Prayer has the priest give this blessing: "May the peace of God that passeth all understanding be among you and remain with you always." That peace should pass all understanding suggests that it is a rarity, and a mystery, something inward, perhaps even irrational. We talk about peace of mind and experience it seldom but one school of wisdom proposes that peace on Earth will stem from a flourishing of peaceful minds. "Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me," goes the song, with quite a ring of truth.

The image of a baby at the breast, of a mother and child reunited as one body by the nature of nurture is transcendently peaceful, an image that hints at the fundamental justice which is prerequisite to social peace, the justice of support and sustenance provided as a simple birthright. So at both the symbolic and literal levels, it is very apt that a Mother's Day celebration should refer to peace. Indeed the Brithways invitation rightly credited Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and social reformer, with having instituted the holiday. Back before the greeting-card and candy mongers seized upon it as a sentimental occasion just perfect for a marketing orgy, it was a called Mother's Peace Day, and it was launched with serious intent. JuliaWard Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation read in part:

Arise, then women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the scared impress, not of Caesar, but God.

Julia Ward Howe's tone in that writing is hardly peaceful. Rather there is a sense of outrage at the very existence of war (this was the lady who wrote about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored). She is, among other things, calling for a withdrawal of complicity with murder. She makes common cause with other givers and nurturers of life. She will not concede any legitimacy to war, and the dynamic is her indignation at the brute stupidity of it.

The poet Allen Ginsberg writes, in a tiny little book called Your Reason and Blake's System:

"The prophetic books are actually reflections of [William] Blake's personal conflicts of the time. In Jerusalem, there is a theme which is useful now: the argument between political anger &emdash; say over the nuclear bomb &emdash; and a sense of compassion and mercy; and a realization that the World doesn't matter, or that if it does matter, there's no way of approaching it with anger. Blake was struggling with some of the same emotions we struggle with, which, I assume are more or less commmon, for his revolutionary times -- post French Revolution -- and the destruction of idealism, radical disillusionment.

"There are similar revolutionary conditions now as in Blake's time, similar social and emotional problems. Blake's books are useful now as explorations of the same problems we have, somewhat related to the revolutionary fervor of the sixties in America and a subsequent so-called 'disillusionment'. So actually Blake is up to date in the psychology of wrath vs. pity, compassion vs. anger, that runs though all of his work and is visible for our own decades as well as his."

This tension, which Ginsberg identifies, between wrath and pity, between compassion and anger, is very familiar to me although it is provoked less by the thought of the bomb than by the sight of tree stumps. The war that I am really concerned about abolishing and which is, in my opinion, the model for all other war, is the war against the Earth. World War III, ecologist Raymond Dasmann calls it, and declares that we are winning. It seems to me that to end this war on the biosphere, and to secure evolutionary justice not only for the human species, but for everything that lives ("everything that lives is holy," wrote Blake) will require of us choices and changes which will make the attainment of social peace seem easy by comparison. Because of the evidence all around of our endless, witless war against everything that is not human, or to human taste, I find myself shuttling constantly between wrath and compassion. I am wrathful that we seem at times to be so stupid about our fundamental inseparability from the biosphere -- the fate of the Earth is the fate of humanity -- and I ache with compassion for the woundedness and delusion that make us that way.

Ire is, in the short term anyway, a strangely gratifying emotion. It is hard not to feel wrathful. And it is even more difficult to bear the feeling of compassion: It takes sustained energy, and it softens up the borders. Identification with the Other, or with the All is a very scary proposition. It entails a loss of the separate self. We have those for good reason, and time spent without them is naked eternity.

Consciousness, however, seems often to lead in that direction. Part of why I was so honored to participate in anything that midwives do is because of their closeness at birth, the most commonplace and at once miraculous experience of the unity and separation of selves; and because of the tough compassion that midwives must practice. Conscious childbearing is part of restoring to sacredness love, sex, gestation, birth and nurture, aging and dying. Witnessing these unbinds the heart and startles the mind. The greatest gift anyone has ever agiven me was the privilege of attending the birth of her child. The friend bestowing this gave birth to her boy with grace and serenity and real hard labor. Being present with her and her husband and her first son at that birth, I glimpsed something eternal -- the major Earth-magic. First there's just the mother and the father and the onlookers and then a second later there's another whole person present -- slippery and squally, to be sure, but another being has swum into life, just like that. The beginning of life is a great mystery, great as the ending.

During the great cycle of the year, from solstice to solstice, in the garden or in the woods, we can witness Gaia, the Earth Mother, busily engaged in sex, gestation, birth and nurture,resting, aging and dying. If we pay attention to all of this, the Earth can teach us what is involved in establishing peace and creating beauty; what is invovled in achieving balance, abundance, aned continuity. The information we need, the wisdom to accomplish these things, to cultivate these qualities in our own beings, is everywhere in nature, if we will but read the lesson. There we can even learn about conflict and competition and the taking and ending of life, all of which must and may go on, and which only becomes devastation when one species pits itself against all others, and against itself, and the balance is disrupted.

"All flesh is grass, proclaimed the prophet Isaiah, "and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." It is the order of nature that flesh, like grass, is eaten. Isaiah was no vegetarian and neither is the hawk owl that swoops out of the spruce hungrily to reduce a grouse to fluff, shins, and tailfeathers. Such is not war. It is part of a larger peace.

On every peace pole, written in four languages, is the wish that peace may prevail on Earth. I would suggest that peace with Earth is essential to peace on Earth and would add my voice to a chorus calling for an end to the battle to dominate our Mother Earth and to exalt mind over matter. Let us of course wish the peace that passeth all understanding to one another, recognizing that that means not just to every human, but to all our relations, to every being on the planet, and the planet itself. Let us find each day an eternal moment of the peace that dwells in the mystery of life.

So mote it be.

Return to the Index of Synapse 40, Summer 1997