What are your words for peace?

Where are you as you are reading this? What is the light outside your window? What are the sounds and the smells?

H and I are trained in professional fields that look at the role of the environment (physical, social, political and economic) in shaping us—what we think and feel and do—and in understanding the reciprocal process of how we shape the environment. But there is something of a personality quirk that makes this more than a professional endeavor. I am hard wired to look at “place”—the way we remember smells from childhood-- the tastes of Fish Friday or the 100 day celebration; the way we found a place to hide or to spend with friends when we were children; the part of the house or the landscape that was our friend or teacher or our muse (the basement, the banister, the backyard, the bush), and yes, the places that frightened us. I am hard wired to try to understand how those places we remember, and the ones we experience every day are linked to what we love (and fear) about the places in our lives, and how we share them with others with different remembered patterns.

And so as I sit at the west facing window, and watch squirrels at the feeder to the north, I am submerged in other worlds-- the world that we have created here, a world of 87 countries and many languages, and the world of the empty streets and empty homes where people who should have been working on their own blogs, or surfing the web, or sitting at a desk at work, or stretching after a return to running, are not.

In my professional world, we concentrate on the enduring memories, the enduring patterns, but we look too infrequently at the things that mark us that are transitory, traumatic. We look all too infrequently at how we carry images of environments used as weapons to traumatize.

Today I am realizing that many of us are subsumed in Boston’s tragedy, our tragedy, the tragedy of wars both official and unofficial, the wars waged by government or a tyrant’s declaration, and those waged by personal rage.

I wonder who you are. And I wonder where you are as you are reading these words—on an urban street in Delhi where the sound of traffic drowns the sound of the computer fans? Having a beer at Teresa Scara in Targu Mures, Romania? At the fish market in Hoi An, Vietnam?

I google the maps of these places that seem so distant and different—Qatar and Uruguay, Zimbabwe and Moldova and the Isle of Man—and I wonder what shaped you and what we must seem like to you. I wonder whether you came here by chance or because someone referred you. I wonder what you are having for breakfast or lunch as you read these words, and what the sounds are from the next room or across the street. I wonder what it is that you understand of the place that has shaped us, and how it seems precious or idyllic or naïve. 

And I wonder how you are making sense of the Boston bombings…if they even are part of your consciousness.

Many years ago, I decided that it would be valuable to create a dictionary of the words that relate to place, a dictionary that took simple words like “home” and “community” and translated them into other languages; a dictionary that would explain the nuances in those words in more complex ways than merely a word substitution. My Korean students told me that there was no word for “home” in their language that didn’t imply family; my Israeli student told me that the word for home was one that implied physical structure. So as I sit here writing (once again about home and community) I wonder what it is that you are imagining, seeing, smelling, and what it is that makes this a different kind of community.

I have been told that most of those who read us are “bots” just surfing through for something that can translate into spam, but I want to believe that those who have come here are also part of a community that mourns those who are gone in Boston and elsewhere, a community that will gather to help those who are maimed to move on.

I am not so naïve that I think that this tragedy is your tragedy…there are too many to go around. But we must act where we can, to nurture and to heal what we share—the sadness as well as the laughter.

I hope that you will consider using the comment field here, to weigh in on your thoughts. I hope that you will find a way to help someone else temper the rage. Martin Richard, an 8 year old boy died on April 15. He is shown on the media holding a sign that reads: “No more hurting people.  Peace.”

Maybe we begin there. What are your words for peace?