With prayers and ghosts I stepped out the door, on pilgrimage to the sleeping goddess of fire, the slumbering giant known in modern times as Mt. Tabor.

Street by street I made my way from the high plateau of Northeast Portland, down, across the long East-West throat, formerly named “Sullivan’s Gulch”, but now christened by circular rubber feet “I-84″. Through back ways and sheltered alleys I walked, and the ancestors whispers went with me, past the two young raccoons playing hookey in the midday sun, past the starling with the enormous red berry in its beak, held above a circle of straining babies’ necks. Past averted eyes, past smiles, until at last I reached her feet.

Mounting her sides step by step, across mown grass, up stair, through ivy and underneath Douglas Fir, around churning lakes of drinking water, bent over in caution against a slippery slope of slick earth between the blackberry thorns, until I crested her upon her shoulder and heard her children calling in the voices of woodpeckers and restive crows.

There I met the Urban Scout, and together we did what we could to redeem the years of thoughtlessness, speaking beautiful words, shooting arrows of delight, making holy wounds in her and in ourselves. Looking west, we saw the greening spine of the hills beyond the river, the sun amongst the trees, the clouds grazing across the blue of the sky.

We left our small gifts there upon her shoulder, and made our way back, back, knowing we had only just begun to sing songs, tell stories, and walk roads.

Under what color of sky shall we pretend
that all that for which our hearts are grieving
is lost to us
held in the keeping of other hands

On which day will we decide
that yesterday was the lie
but having no words for such a sentiment
will simply be born to a life which lives it
without speaking it

During which Moon will we surrendur
and stop pretending
to never-ending
lust for things that we never wanted
and cannot own
but burden us nevertheless
dragging us down
with the inevitable
gravity of the grave

Only naked will we meet the sunrise
when at last it comes
we have only tonight
to make up our minds

You know, for a long time, I’ve had this little scar on my left hand. I got it at a Tracker school class in a fishing spear construction accident. I’ll leave the back story at that. Suffice to say, the little damn scar is the perfect replica of a broken arrow!

I’ve had people remark on it, as if I purposely went to a piercing parlor to get it done. It’s always kinda confused me - one of those messages from beyond that hits you with a repeating dull thud, without providing insight or clarity, until you get used to it. Like the time my Dad was in a transitional period of life, and out of the blue, was constantly bashing one of his elbows into things until it started to get quite swollen. I don’t know that he ever figured out why that was happening, but one day it just stopped. If you’re not a believer in messages from beyond, that’s fine; even us believers end up ignoring them.

I mean, what do you do? There it is. A little broken arrow.

I’ve been slowly bringing together several different areas of passion and interest, trying to turn them into some kind of mosaic picture. What do they have in common? There’s the Mythmap, of course (if it needs explaining, I came up with a good one sentence jobber: “The Mythmap - Community, Nature, and Landscape as a whole mythic being, like a sleeping Giantess, kept alive and healthy by Story, Song, Riddles, Secrets, Quests, and most of all - Celebration.”). There’s Nonviolent and needs-based communication. There’s the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace. There’s connection to Nature. There’s martial-arts. Then, most recently, I was reading about something I’ve been interested in for a while, yet never really experienced: a revolutionary social technology for human gatherings called Open Space.

Open Space is a way of meeting and taking action that replaces old-guard paradigms like conferences and such. Basically, a bunch of people come together over a theme they feel energy for. Then, a leader introduces them to the idea, and says “Whoever has an issue or opportunity relating to our theme that they feel passionate about and will take responsibility for running a meeting on, please write it down and put it up on the wall.” Then, after scores of topics go up, they all get organized into meeting times and places, and then Bam! Everybody goes to the topics that interest them. It’s really quite simple, and ruled by the Law of Two Feet: If you don’t feel you’re learning or contributing where you are, only you have the mobility to put yourself where you are learning and contributing. Following this law creates “bees” who cross-pollinate from one meeting to another. It may or may not sound revolutionary, but believe me, people wet their pants at these Open Spaces. It transforms workplaces and communities (at least during the Open Space, but sometimes longer!). Great stuff.

So, I was reading more about this, and the “inventor” of Open Space, Harrison Owen, mentioned that really what it was all about was Peace. Open Space, in his experience, created Peace. Not lack of chaos or confusion, but room for chaos and confusion. People weren’t any smarter or less selfish or “better”, but there was just more room for everybody to be who they were, and it created what he felt was Peace.

He gives credit where credit is due, and sources his inspiration for this technology in his Peace Corps experience in the tiny rural indigenous villages of West Africa, where this is how meetings ran, with no flipcharts or leaders.

Peace. I don’t know, but there might be something here - and it makes me wonder, if Open Space creates Peace (the classic example Owen gives is of a meeting of Palestinians and Israelis in Italy that started very tense and ended up quite different), then what might the Mythmap create? Most of us humans are busy warring against something most of the time - each other, Nature, what have you. Maybe Peace is what connects that list of things together.

I think what did it for me, was when Owen, in explaining all this, unconsciously (I assume) paraphrased an Iroquois author I had just read. Owen said “Peace is infinitely more than just the cessation of hostilities.”

If the opposite of War is not Peace, then what is Peace? Owen’s opinion: “Peace without chaos, confusion and conflict is no Peace, not because we would not prefer it that way, but because each member of this unholy trinity makes a positive contribution to the process of living. Equally, Peace without ending and death is productive of an idealized, static life, stuck in its ways ? precluding the possibility of any sort of evolution.”

I like the sound of this exciting version of Peace! If Peace is a process, not a goal, if Peace is a journey, not a destination…isn’t that what most of us are doing, Questing for Peace? I never though of myself as a peaceful “age of aquarius” type of person, but I’m starting to see how that doesn’t describe Peace anyway. The most Peaceful community is the natural world itself. The Law of Life is a peace-keeping law. Being someone else’s food was not something to take personally, until one culture amongst thousands of cultures made it so: ours. About 10,000 years ago. So, I guess, of course it’s all about Peace.

Never thought of it that way before. Maybe that’s what the little scar is saying. I wonder where this’ll all go next?

(By the way, if you’d rather hear quaint barnyard stories about meat chickens that are unable to walk, sheep with gigantic nutsacks, or the barehanded squishing of engorged potato beetle larvae one-by-one to protect crops, I can provide. I’m just finding this Peace thinking much more interesting.)