International Day of Peace, Monday Sept. 21

Monday, September 21 is International Day of Peace which is celebrated and honored throughout the world. A few years ago, my students and I put on an event at Ventura College which included European spoken word performer and dj Emil Brikha (who mixed a spoken word piece of mine text, mp3 here “I Want to Be That Man”) plus poet and translator Jen Hofer from Los Angeles. We had copies of a drawing of a dove which students colored, cut out and “flew” while the music and spoken words flowed in the quad, thanks to funding support from Poets and Writers.

Events large and small are going on around the world; you can view a live broadcast of events at cultureofpeace.org or internationaldayofpeace.org!  The broadcast was produced through the efforts of Unity Foundation and their partners at PeacePortal.mobi, GetZooks.biz and Pathways to Peace.   To add it to your Facebook profile, go here and add the Livestream application, and the Peace Broadcast will play directly on your profile!  You can EMBED the broadcast anywhere… on your own website, blog, myspace, etc!  By doing so, you will help make this broadcast viral and create more awareness about the International Day of Peace!

Waging Peace Now Available

Here’s another way to commemorate International Peace Day: check out this online book, Waging Peace with poems, narrative and artwork. Go see Waging Peace online or  to Lulu.com and purchase a hard copy of the book. As noted in the introduction of Waging Peace, contributors are amateur and professional, young and older, representing multiple religions, ethnicities and geographic origins.

In closing today, a poem: Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” which I found in Robert Bly’s News of the Universe—

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.