Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem by Maya Angelou

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem was first read by Dr. Angelou at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree in Washington D.C. in 2005. Although written in the spirit of Christmas, the poem is intended to be a gift for people of all faiths and encourages us to celebrate and embrace the promise of hope, peace and unity during the holiday season. The poem offers a beautiful message of acceptance and love that seems to be as current today as ever.

 

  Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem by Maya Angelou

"Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.

Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.

Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.

We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortal’s, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul."

May Peace fill all of our hearts during this blessed season where our ancients roots -- the original not often recognized pagan celebration by the Celts/Druids which was the very basis for the timing of the Christian adaptation into our holy Christmas and the strength into glory of the Jewish Peoples during Chanukah/

Hanukkah now overlap in one season and even over one day..a special and rare event of great significance.

Holy of Holies in all ways filled with Blessings for All - all colors, all races, all religions, all belief systems. A time for peace and acceptance and joy in all that makes us alike, and not different.

The light casts out the darkness of all of the projected shadows that seem to overwhelm our world right now. We must always keep in mind - that is what projections are. The deepest and darkest parts of each of our collective selves being brought forward for acknowledgement, transformation and atonement or at its truest "at-one-ment".

The light casts them out and ushers in glory and goodness and love. For whatsoever you do to one you do to all of our brothers, our sisters, you do to your self/ourselves.

💜🙏💜

 

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting - from my heart and with my hands.

The Clearing

Do not try to save

the whole world

or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create

a clearing

in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there

patiently,

until the song

that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know

how to give yourself

to this world

so worthy of rescue. 

~Martha Postlewaite

Still praying for Ukraine and our troubled world

And I am blessed that I can simply walk into our own shaded nook with a small gathering of trees we planted shortly after building our home here in 1978 and hug a tree and say a prayer for our troubled world or when needed for my own troubled or aching heart from man's inhumanity to man.

Definitely time for a forest clearing!

Working on myself first before doing for others. Bring in my early practices of a medical qigong as taught to a small group of us in Salem each summer that the wonderful Dr. Anita Cignolini of Florence and Milan, Italy. 

Dr. Anita came to Salem to teach our small group outside of Dr. Louisa Silva's Salem Acupuncture Clinic in the mid-nineties for 2 weeks each of 3 years. What a gift she was!

Simple qigong (chi gong) routine.

Combined with my innate natural healing gifts of my own healing energies and decades of reading and learned the 90s Healing Touch/Reki/ and many other energy techniques and understandings it all became a beautiful exploration through many sunlit clearings in my life. 

I meditate with this simple  loving kindness mediation with a lovely meditation facilitator on a vimeo app and I move my energies for clearance and grounding. As well on being my own symbol of change in all of the ways that I can for the greater good.

A day of rest and endless heartfelt gratitude and beautiful enery clearing and rejuvenation with gratitude and blessings to all. 

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting, from my heart and with my hands

Light, Love, and Healing for Our World

The writer and activist Joanna Macy says: "Work with your passion. Work with your pain. Work with what is at hand." And to that, my own heart responds.

For now, more than ever, spiritual warriors are needed to feel the light and love within them and radiate that love to the darkest corners of hearts and souls everywhere.

There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

Lao-Tse
Chinese philosopher
6th century bce



Still your hearts from anger, fear, or hatred. Fill them up with love and peace. Our spirits know who we are, why we chose to be here during these incredibly challenging times.

With life's many challenges ever increasing, how do we find peace in this horribly troubled world, this universal psyche that chooses the negative over the positive, the masculine over the feminine, the warring over the peace making and bridge building? 

It must be personal as well as national, universal as well as international. We must care, and care deeply about one another in any and all life forms and we must use our hearts, our energies, and our time to do good, say good, and be good to the best of each moment's ability.



"There are those who give little of the much which they have and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.

And there are those who have little and give it all. These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

~On Giving by Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet~



The fires, the floods, the earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and tornadoes are not only the change and transition that Mother Earth, herself is expressing--as hard for us as it might be to understand.

They can be seen as our planet's release buttons for survival. If there is too much pressure within the Earth, it erupts in volcanoes or crack opens in earthquakes.



If there is too much pressure within us, we may erupt as well. And the damage we may do to others may be just as great emotionally as volcanoes and earthquakes are physically.



If we see Mother Earth as Gaia--a living breathing entity with her trees and plants as her lungs, her incredible beauty as her heart--then Gaia is losing her breath, her natural sustainable growth and energetic flow from decay just as so many of us are losing ours.



Natural connections of mind, body, and spirit through the destructive energies of anxiety, fear, anger, hatred and dis-ease have caused cracks and many of us are stuck in the unhealthy patterns of those cracks. Everything makes us fearful or angry or hating the other.

We are all connected and when we hate the other we increase our own weaknesses of self judgment, low self esteem or low energies of illness, pain, or depression.



But in this process of death and destruction there is still an opening up in our world and our world view. The chance to learn and grow and to transition our world and our hearts and spirits into unity once again.



We are all connected. We are all part of one another. My microscopic atoms are merged with yours like stars in the cosmos. The pain that i feel is my pain, your pain, all pain. The fouled air that I am breathing will become the fouled air and the foul breathing of yours.



When we set off a bomb in one country, its repercussions and loss of awareness and love are felt by all of ours. We are perpetrators and we are victims. The winds of time and change merge into
one and so do we.



There is a purpose onto heaven for all of this. It doesn't have to be ours to understand but there it is. And part of that is the destruction of the old to make space for the new. As challenging and as awful even unbelievable as this may seem.



As someone who is old, this gives me pause. But, I am more than willing to go through whatever I have to in hopes that someday, a heaven on earth can become possible and a newer kinder, more caring and loving world might exist.





"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. 

Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. 

The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

L. R. Knost

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it,a little more poetry to it,a little more dance to it.

~Osho

How do we choose to feel peace, make peace, be peace in our own hearts? It starts with each of us as individuals, each moment of every single day.





Life is truly challenging for many, many people in this world now.
My own beloved oldest daughter was diagnosed with an already advanced, very aggressive, and unusually challenging form of cancer.



She is a remarkable and fierce spiritual warrior and she has withstood non-stop treatments without respite for a year and a half since diagnosis. She fills up my heart with her steadfast determination and fortitude amidst unbelievably challenging conditions.





I hold her always in my highest heart and spirit and I pray for deep inner and outer healing and strength, with all the love and light and healing powers of all of the highest angels of the most divine powers of God by any holy name.

"Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
the blueprint of your life would begin to glow on earth,
illuminating all the faces and voices
that would arrive to invite your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,who loved you before you were,
and trusted to call you here with no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you into becoming who you were meant to be,
blessed be those who have crossed your life
with dark gifts of hurt and loss that have helped to school your mind in the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,
blessed be those who looked for you
and found you, their kind hands urgent to open a blue window
in the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
your health, eyes to behold the world,
thoughts to counte-nance the unknown,
memory to harvest vanished days, your heart to feel the world’s waves,your breath to breathe the nourishment of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,
may you open the gift of solitude in order to receive your soul;
enter the generosity of silence to hear your hidden heart; know the serenity of  still-ness to be enfolded anew by the miracle of your being.'

John O'Donohue,

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings



I am active in my own unique ways of trying to work with this incredibly challenging time in our lives, our changing country, nation, and world.

I focus on doing all I can to make it through them with spiritual thoughts, prayers, and deeds to create a place where we can not only survive turbulent times but prepare ourselves for the many challenging days and years ahead.

I focus on staying centered, filling my heart with gratitude for the gift of every day with my family--my three children, their partners, and my five beloved grandchildren.





I know in my heart of hearts that I have been waiting for this time to come.



We Were Made For These Times

By Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.

If you cannot refuse to stay down
lift your heart toward heaven
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.

You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven —
only you.

It is in the midst of misery
that so much becomes clear.

 
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.
refuse to fall down"

~Clarissa Pinkola Estés~
Excerpted from The Faithful Gardener: A
Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die















Peace in our hearts creates peace in our world. And that is our soul's purpose..to create this peace by doing and being what we are called to do, and to be.





"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about."

Rumi

 

Prayers for Freedom

"We Shall Be Known"

'It is time now, and what a time to be alive, in this great turning we shall learn to lead in love'.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6NbvYXImLXPgacMZ9ffizn?si=x4d-HYpxSdqohiz4C6amNQ&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A2SvD3wk04cEDMGJLujCWAR

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting from my heart and with my hands.