The final task for each Journey is to take some time and space after the daily writing has ended and reflect on the Journey, on your process, and on yourself. Here is Lita’s reflection (Mary’s reflection will be posted tomorrow, and Steve’s the day after that, and my reflection the day after that):
Reflection
Lita
Journey of Peace – Reflection
This is my second round of Journey writing. At this juncture, I can say that the process of reflection and writing is that of un-layering: the sorting and removal of thoughts, memories, and emotions which no longer serve my way of thinking and being in the world. It is core work for sure. And then comes the re-layering: new thoughts and practices for living.
This Journey of Peace has been but another opportunity for un-layering and re-layering. In some respects, it has been more challenging, I think because the longer and deeper my commitment to this process becomes, the more I am faced with my own edges.
The daily writing and posting keeps me honest and accountable. My commitment to the exploration of consciousness and to the greater good has certainly helped me to find/create ways to stay big. This forum holds my feet to the fire, so to speak, but in a kind and nudging way.
In this period of rest and reflection, I experience Peace as a gentle mist or soft sun – available to me, to all – settling into the marrow of my being. This is the re-layering bit, informing how I move and interact with the world around me. I can stay big while staying kind.
I return again and again to Wendell Berry’s, The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair 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 for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
SusanWithPearls 
Thank you, Anna. Beautiful. Keep on! I’ll make sure Lita sees this.
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Thank you, Lita! I appreciate you sharing Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild things. The place that peace has been working within me is right where he says, ‘I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. After my dad’s death last year, I have been swimming in obsessive thoughts regarding that very place; the forethought of grief. It comes upon me, like a prophecy; sometimes spontaneously and most times as a cover or visible mantle of things to come which I cannot hide from. I want to be in the present more than the future in this matter. Wild things also do not worry about what becomes of their young. That thought too is amazingly awesome for my spirit to take in 🙂
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