A week for which I still have few words lies behind us.
On March 19, we brought the peace bell to our heart mountain and struck it for the first time. It is a moving, deeply resonant sound that resonates deep within the earth.
That was the prelude to the peace meditation on March 20. I went into the waking night with a moved heart – and I still have no words for what I experienced. A vision discreetly came to me, but it will have to wait in silence until it is ready to be spoken. It was a wonderful feeling to know that people in different places were connected with us. And again and again it is so obvious that there is a peace matrix that is just waiting to be discovered by us humans so that it can have a field-building effect.
At the same time, I had to go through deep grief once again. With a trembling and loving heart, many tears also flowed. On one occasion, the situation of innocent people being murdered was so close to me that it almost burst my heart. In the morning after sunrise, I had the urge to switch on my phone to see if anything special had happened. I found out that two people from La Esperanza had been murdered, the wife Nallely Sepúlveda from the coordinator of the San José de Apartado peace community, who had already been our guest, and a 14-year-old boy Edinson David.This information had a great impact on my coming hours. The voice of life on earth with everything that lives there was so powerful and overwhelming and at the same time this human pain and the absurdity of our social system, which tacitly tolerates this violence and continues to promote it.
In parallel, a completely different system – so powerful, beautiful, true and real, but which is not being called upon.
The subsequent World Water Day with the concert and the first release of the film “Water is love”, made visible the possible love and the perspective where people develop the intelligence to really get out of the spiral of violence.
The next day, our event focused on the emergence of decentralized peace communities.
We shared in the pain of the peace community in Colombia and at the same time celebrated their perseverance over so many years of non-violent resistance. We watched a short movie in which their vision becomes visible. What we had hoped for and envisioned back then under President Santos, and were bitterly disappointed by, has now come a lot closer to reality under Gustavo Petro. True humanity is being given a political voice.
The hopeless situation in Gaza was also very present in the room. The pain of the countless senseless deaths that are currently taking place was palpable. When Hanneen from Gaza formulated her words and brought the power of her home country into the room with a song and Kareen from Gaza described how his entire family was killed in Gaza, it felt as if there was a powerful other presence in the room. At the same time, when he described how much hope places like Tamera give him and that he doesn’t hate, not even those who throw the bombs, the other dimension of a force for peace was palpable in the room. I felt as if all the murdered souls were in the room with us, weaving a powerful force of transformation with us.
The next day we learned that the Pope had given a public speech in which he mentioned the peace community in San José in sympathy. We had used this as an image in our meditation two years ago – now it has come true.
Does it have any meaning? How much longer do we have to persevere before the real system change becomes tangible?