An Imagination of Peace | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, March 9, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

March 7, 2021

‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace…can’t be imagined before it is made…
~Making Peace, Denise Levertov

Miraculously, I just had a completely normal conversation with an old friend. I’m still marveling. How did that happen?

Where’s my angst, my worry? I know she took the V awhile back, she and her 70-something spouse. Miraculously…that word again…I didn’t enquire how it went.

We talked gardening, and grandkids, and where to find a needlework kit since Michael’s stopped carrying them. The same kind of conversation she could have with any of a dozen friends.

After all, she has no hidden agenda (that I know of). She’s not desperately wanting the world to acknowledge “the truth” already, so we can move out of this purgatory. So we can move to our beckoning, golden future, golden Gaia, always just a glimmer over the horizon.



I hadn’t planned to call her, but was still pleased that she’d called me. The last Zoom we had, with another friend, was so fraught with silence and discomfort and three-way depression, I had no wish to repeat it.

If I’d thought about it, I would have said I would be wary of talking with her. I would have to be on guard to stay my nattering tongue from straying off into topics she has no interest or belief in.

Ten minutes went by, fifteen, and still no urge to tell her the truth (as I see it) so she’ll wake up already. The election was stolen! The authorities are lying about Covid! Not that I would ever actually say that; I’d just want to, which spoils the conversation, and on some level the entire relationship.

None of my dear old friends will believe anything unless and until their favorite media mouthpiece spouts it, at which time it becomes golden. “Oh my gosh! Did you see on CNN?! The 2020 election was STOLEN!”

Something in me has just given up. Should I make it sound more appealing by using an approved spiritual word like surrender? I could, but that doesn’t fit what I feel.

I have given up, not the wish that sleepers would wake up, but any sense that I, personally, have any responsibility for trying to make that happen.



It’s taken nearly a year of governmental and media obfuscation about Covid, and the even more egregious lies about the stolen election, to get me to this point. Okay, have it your way, Media Machine from Hell. Mesmerize my friends, my family, the obtuse physician at my appointment the other day who self-importantly announced, “I’ve made all my staff get vaccinated. We feel so much safer now.”

How liberating! I don’t care! Or I must hasten to say, of course I care. But I don’t have anything vested in when, or if, anyone comes to understand the non-mainstream truths I have chosen to believe over the truths which others have chosen to believe.

We’ve individually chosen our information sources, chosen what and whom to believe.

I must offer them the same freedom I want, which is to keep choosing my beliefs, and the sources I trust to direct me to information I perceive as truthful and factual.

When I hang up the phone after the most pleasant conversation with this friend in a year, I can’t help but smile. A heart with no desire to change another’s mind is the most peaceful state I can imagine.