peace moves

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If we allow it, our world can shrink to the size of a small screen. It can fixate our attention and increase our stress, thus reducing our capacity as humans to cope with our genuine tasks and cares.

I rarely discuss politics because I know all of you are inundated with notifications, alerts swapped on a dozen WhatsApp chats, and alarming headlines on YouTube channels, TikTok, or your Broadcaster of choice.

I won’t change my policy, partly because it’s not the beat of my newsletter, and I expect you are keeping up-to-date with information at the rate that suits you best. I want to acknowledge, however, that everyone is carrying burdens. I hope you have spaces where you can ease them off your minds.

Solace begins in our hearts, and enters via love, compassion and connection. I’m reminded of ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry.

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.

I’m going to scamper down a rabbit hole, and I expect most of my regular readers won’t mind. I’m like Alice. If I spy a rabbit with a pocket watch bounding past me I’m off after him with fast steps. I recently mentioned to newsletter pal, James Stewart, that ‘I’m a big believer in encouraging a free-range imagination.’

While searching for a public domain painting to accompany Berry’s evocative poem, I spent a merry period peering at magnificent symbolic images of Peace, mostly dressed as a pretty lady, often without sufficient clothing. Sadly, she’s sometimes pleading with burly warriors to change their ways.

Those images did not match the tone of Berry’s discovery of calm in the natural world.

Then I happened upon the above painting by Carolus Tremerie and it arrested me. I was convinced this had to be an Irish scene, but as I clicked through I discovered that Carolus was born in Ghent, Belgium on 31 July 1858 and died there in 8 June 1945. The latter feels like a significant date, but that put him at eighty-six when he passed away which was a fine age for any era.

I do what I always do, and looked up his other paintings and checked for his biography. Sadly, there is almost nothing available about his life and career.

There is a quiet beauty in both these paintings, but for me they evoke a heart-rending poignancy. Moments of peace are fragile, but they may unfurl into brave display in ordinary places: when the moon loiters in the sky, or the sun dips towards the horizon, and you are the lone observer.

The stance of the character in the second painting is so utterly familiar to me: this is an older farmer. I’ve seen so many men like him in rural Ireland: his flat cap, his hands in his pockets, his solid frame, and his stance.

He stands before his door as if poised to settle the weight of the world upon his shoulders again, but for a moment he remains bolstered by the beauty of dusk.

I imagine the birds are singing.

In the first painting, the character is a blob in a deeper twilight, almost at the door, but the green gate remains open — this is a terrible sin in the countryside. Gates are never left open, so we are invited to enter the space, or a visitor remains at ‘our’ vantage point. I like to think this is Peace.

I love that sheen upon the gate. It is a marvel of artistry.

I suspect both of these images were painted by a person in the latter stages of their creative life. The strokes are expressive, confident, and able to conjure up scenes with expert, loose efficiency.

One of his other paintings, ‘Farm at Dusk’, is dated at 1922 by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent; Tremerie was sixty-four years old.

The Great War had ended four years previously. This evening scene features a woman in a shawl, and the small open portal is more informal. There is a lot of sky, with a feeling of movement that comes from his Neo-Impressionist style. Is a misty rain falling? It seems like the woman is hurrying to a well — she is carrying a bucket.

There is a freedom here. The weight of the past lingers on the muted horizon, but the sky implies opportunity.

Observe one of his earlier paintings:

This is brighter, cleaner, more realistic, yet the subject conveys a sombre tone. The wet slush of a thaw reveals the mud. The mourners are monitored by a sister, and a woman holds back, as if unable to face the viewing and requiring time to bolster her nerves. The women before her are close together, whispering.

Diffuse morning light warms the red brick buildings. I love that slash of crimson on a single chimney.

This is the Het Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Hoye Begijnhof, also known as the Small Beguinage of Our-Lady Ter Hooyen, and is a historic religious walled community in Ghent.

Beguines were laywomen in medieval Europe who formed independent religious communities and adopted pious lives without formal monastic vows. The movement began in the 1200s in the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the Netherlands). It was inspired by figures like Mary of Oignies (1177–1213), a mystic and visionary who was born to a wealthy family but rejected the traditional path determined by her birth.

She wished to enter a religious order, but her parents refused. She was married against her wishes at the age of fourteen, but she convinced her husband Jean to live an ‘apostolic life’ in poverty and service, and to live chastely as brother and sister. Freed from family control they joined a community of like-minded devout people, and helped care for the ill and poor, including lepers at a colony in Willambroux.

At the age of thirty, with Jean’s consent, she moved to Oignies to become an anchoress (from the Ancient Greek ‘I withdraw, retire’) in a cell next to the choir of the priory of St Nicolas. She was famous for her extreme asceticism, including extended fasts, which certainly hastened her death, but also reportedly induced visions and acts of healing.

This drive to create communities of pious lay people continued to grow in the 12th-13th centuries. Beguines lived in enclosed Beguinages — a walled area with houses clustered around a church or meadow — and supported themselves through crafts like lace-making, weaving, teaching, brewing, and copying books. Each Beguinage had different rules, but generally the Beguines (and their male equivalents, known as Beghards) vowed chastity and obedience, but not poverty or enclosure.

In a world with few opportunities for women, these communal spaces which encouraged literacy, enterprise and a direct connection to divinity were increasingly popular. These bastions of female sovereignty were eventually undermined, and beguines were persecuted during various heretical purges, plagues, wars and during the Reformation.

Yet, many Beguinages have survived, including thirteen in Belgium which have been listed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. There has been a small resurgence in interest in this way of living in service and in community.1

Peace is not easy to maintain, either personally or with other people. So many groups seem to consider it dangerous. The still, self-governed person is difficult to agitate and control.

It’s no surprise that peace has connotations of freedom and independence.

Recently, nineteen Theravada Buddhist monks (and Aloka the Peace Dog) ended a Walk for Peace after undertaking a 2,300-mile pilgrimage (often barefoot) over 108 days from the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. Their dedication and endurance inspired thousands of people across America to show up and cheer them on, and the monks became a hit across various media.

Yet, such a feat came with a cost. During their walk through Houston, a pickup truck collided with their escort vehicle and injured two of the monks, one of them — Venerable Maha Ajarn Dam Phommasan — was faced with a choice between years of surgeries on his badly shattered leg or to have his leg amputated. He chose amputation.

‘He didn’t want anyone to feel bad for him, he said, because he was happy to be where he is and that he accepts everything that happened.’2

Their escort car, containing all the pilgrims’ supplies was wrecked, but a local businessman, was determined to help.

“I saw that and I was like, ‘No, they need some help. We gotta help them. They’re walking for us — why can we not put something for them?’” said Osbaldo Durán.

Durán outfitted a fully-insured Toyota Rav4 with new tires and extra safety lights, while also going the extra mile to change the oil and fill up the tank before offering it to the monks in an act that he himself might not have known is called “Dana” in the Buddhist tradition.

Dana, meaning “charity” in Pali, the ancient Indian language the Buddha’s teachings were written in, is the act of laymen and laywomen going out of their way to offer food, clothing, shelter, or medicine to those living the holy life.3

And since the accident Phommasan has returned to his work as an Abbot at the Wat Buddha Khanti in Snelville, Georgia.

He sits in meditation, one leg folded beneath him, the other absent. To him, nothing essential has been lost. The walk for peace continues, not with steps now, but with every breath, every teaching, every moment of mindfulness shared with students seeking their own inner calm.4