Reaching Straight for Peace | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, August 12, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

August 11, 2021

I’m reviewing the situation…
All the trials and tribulations!…
I think I’d better think it out again!
~Lionel Bart, Reviewing the Situation (from Oliver!)

There are so many avenues available for me to scurry down, pursued by phantasms of fear and goblins of grief.

My mind, trained as it is to look for problems and seek solutions, is beside itself. It fills up with, “If this happens, then I should…”

Much as I value my mind, I’m finding that it is ill-equipped for the unusual circumstances that keep multiplying in my personal life and the world.



My mind does not care for peculiarities and things that are out of order. It wants to know what is happening and what I can do to fix what I don’t like.

Slipping in between the worries and the what if‘s, the thin thread of spiritual sanity whispers faintly but clearly: go into your heart.

And with one slow, conscious breath, that is where I can be.

*****

I was unable to get back to sleep this morning around 5 AM. Wakefulness at that early morning hour invites repetitive worry about all the things that are “wrong.”

Lately, the instant I wake up is the only time that I feel unburdened by the latest personal and global atrocities.



As soon as I remember that there are (bad) things that I believe I have to deal with, they trickle back in one by one. Sometimes they pop in en masse like a row of Jack-in-the-boxes on a cosmic timer.

Boing! Remember, your house is invaded by ants! The water heater had a gas leak and you have no hot water! The hospital now requires a Covid test or proof of vaccination for all visitors!

My mind leaps to the inevitable conclusion: vaccine passports are coming, vaccine passports are coming!

This potential assault is as unwelcome as an army crossing the border into a sovereign land.

Which is, indeed, a perfectly apt analogy. The enemy now comes from within in the guise of bureaucrats and the higher-ups who believe they are following “health and safety protocols“ as ordained by what is, to me, a completely corrupt governing structure.



Whatever the real purpose behind the “Covid response protocols,” I am as certain as can be that it has nothing to do with keeping people safe and healthy.

There is a great deal of awfulness for my mind to chew on. And it does so happily, a contented cow ruminating upon the poisoned grass it is cropping in the meadows of chaos and despair that seem to surround us.

*****

I don’t want to be chomping on that poisoned grass. I honor and I am appreciative of my mind and its calculating functions. If this, then that. Gas leak? Call the gas company, then call the plumber, and so on and so forth.

I deeply honor and am grateful for my cognitive and analytical abilities. For my mind.



But I deeply wish that sometimes it would just shut up.

I was having such a moment this morning at 5:30 or 6 AM. After morosely paging through the mental catalog of woes and worries, I had had enough.

I just wanted peace.

Without conscious deliberation, I lightly touched one finger to my heart. And at that very instant, I heard the hawk calling in the distance.

And I was instantly peaceful. Almost moved to tears, but peaceful.

The hawk reminds me: what was once lost and fearful becomes strong, independent, resilient. What once seemed lost has never strayed from its true path.

My true path is peace. All the boulders that rumble into my path are simply obstacles. And they’re only obstacles if that is how I choose to see them.



My mind can help me to be peaceful, because that is my strongest desire. But only if I request that state of being, and only that, from all the available options.

It’s like a hand of cards fanned out. Which do I choose?

I know that some day, when I look at that hand of cards, every single one will have writ upon it: Peace is ours.

Until that time, I go from mind to heart, because heart always reaches straight for the peace.



n.b., I watched Allison Coe’s video after I wrote this and it’s so relevant to my article, I’m posting the link here.