Peace

I’ve been feeling shameful when I have feelings of sadness lately.

I feel shame for not feeling gratitude

because I’ve given myself so much.

I tell myself I should be grateful

because I have so much more peace

than I’ve ever had before.

But shame doesn’t get me back to gratefulness.

It actually makes me feel worse in the end.

It makes me feel more sad, more unworthy, more inadequate,

and then I feel I need to go get more peace.

Not a very efficient cycle.

Maybe the idea that peace is something we have or not

is the problem itself.

That mindset makes me feel like it’s something that could be taken.

Like us humans are inherently without peace

and we need to go out and get it.

Like we need to find it and protect it at all costs

and build a big wall around it so no one can touch it.

Like I should feel shame for having it

when others don’t.

But that way of looking at it has never made me actually feel deeply safe

and truly peaceful

deep in my bones.

The idea that peace is scarce

and not self-abundant

has never felt right to me.

What if peace is not found by building walls and barriers around these joyful momentos,

like it’s a fine jewel you’ve been searching for your whole life

and have finally just found

and need to protect,

but like a cloud that floats overhead

and in between our skin?

What if there was no sacred inner peace or state within us

that needed to be protected,

but just lightness?

Infinite lightness?

Like the air

we all share?

Air is the only thing that hasn’t been commodified in our world

and yet it is the most important thing we all need.

It’s what we all share – humans, animals, plants, water –

and no one never owns it.

It’s simply all ours.

Self-abundant.

Something we all share.

Something we never have to worry about losing.

What if the act of building “protection” around something

destroys the thing itself?

There is peace in nothingness.

Emptiness.

Lightness.

And we all have the right

to breathe it in.