Peace

(Valerie wrote this item on Peace a couple of months ago.)

Do you know what it’s like to be at peace with yourself? To really, honestly know peace? It’s what we’re about every…making peace with ourselves, trying to get our current demons to get along with our old demons and play nice. We wrongly think that peace is the moment that the demons place nice, and there is quiet. This is the painful quiet of held breaths, not the soft quiet of the pre-dawn, full of life and energy and expectancy. This is not the certainty that though there are many things wrong with this world, they are not wrong with me today.

To be at real peace is not the same as to have called a truce. A truce is merely some agreement we come to with our demons to satiate them temporarily, but peace is the remove them fully and entirely from the battle.

When I was younger, I would listen to others talk about having peace, and I would think I wished could have that, but that could never be me; there’s way too much battle in me.

One day I looked into my own face and I was no longer a stranger to my own eyes. I know who I was: saint and sinner, hero and villain, and I gnosko peace.