Inner Space and Inner Peace for Outward Peace

“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked.

The silence on the other end of the phone was too long.

And then a prolonged and carefully measured response, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

He was calling from an undisclosed location in the world — My First Love, who I met when I was a young woman, who had gone on to join the military. He had always envisioned us together at the end of his service after he transitioned back into civilian life.

In my heart, in those tender years all the way into my mid-20s, I had felt it was impossible to reconcile our views and choices. I was back in California, near where I grew up. I was nestled in the security of love, home, and hearth, by four generations of family.

I was living a life dedicated to peace, where I was conscientious with my every decision to bring more of the peace frequencies to the world. I was vegan, creating art, doing my natural landscape and wilderness photography, starting to have exhibits, and meditating and doing yoga. But, for a span, I was also deeply studying and practicing the Jain principles of Ahimsa peace and nonviolence, even to the point of not killing insects. And instead, I would capture them alive and release them outside.

Those incongruous phone dates of outbound phone calls I‘d receive, inevitably dispatches from warfronts were a disharmony I couldn’t reconcile.

“The only thing that brings me happiness is knowing you’re safe. It sustains me until we talk again.” He would say this in every conversation and every letter.

It couldn’t change our fundamental underlying differences: of my saying, Peace ends War. And of his saying War ends War.

I was born at the end of 1975 and was in utero when Saigon fell. As of many Americans’ at that time, my childhood was filled with the carnage of a country unprepared to welcome back veterans with the grace and the full support they needed and deserved. It was confusing to me as a child. I knew they were a special group, Vietnam Veterans, and my mother always taught me to be gentle and respectful to them. She said they had been through things I couldn’t understand.

Related posts:

Let me take a guess about you: You want to live a happy and carefree life that satisfies you on a physical, mental, and emotional level. Even though you sometimes might struggle and feel like you are…

Eerie photos from Disney World show the park is practically a ghost town following its closure on September 3. The park closed due to fears that Hurricane Dorian would pass over it and bring…

We all know that WordPress is a great tool for creating a blog. WordPress has many optimization plugin to get most out of it and speed up WordPress blog. Unfortunately those plugins can speed up to…