The War Within and Without

War is real. It happens in every moment. You can feel it in the tension you’re sensing now, that was also there many moments ago.

It begins with a seed of discontent. Festering, it opens a wound in us. That wound pleads for a remedy.

What we can only witness from a far in Eastern Europe is the expression of an injury long ago experienced, unnoticed, unattended to that has festered into the further reaches of the wound-ings of war.?

It’s stomach churning. Sickening in the injury it causes and uneasy-ing in how it makes us aware of the wounds we have yet to heal. You are feeling what you are feeling not just out of empathy, but also in the recognition that in each of us there are seeds of discontent and anger. That dis-ease that is coursing through you as you watch in horror the tides of war washing over a part of the world trace back to something very old, very primal, and very present.

In its armoring, war is so very disarming - What can I do? How can I show up in this moment of awkward witnessing? I don’t have the answer to those questions. Those are choices every person makes for themselves. For the people of Ukraine, that choice was pulled out from under them. ??

In the witnessing, we can also turn our gaze inward. How am I showing up in my life and in the world? Where am I attending to my wounds in such a way that does not make a war out of them for myself or others?

While we mourn and grieve and struggle to understand the war over there, we can be showing up to the war over here. You can pay homage to those brave souls who stand up to tyranny through the courage to attend to your own soul and the wounds that scab over it – injuries and all. Make peace with yourself and you bring peace into the world. Attend to the tyrant within and you democratize the world without.

You are my brothers and my sisters, and no injury can ever make that not so. We can restore the world one conscious moment at a time. War is now. And so is peace.?