A Practitioner’s Perspective
Recently we took a drive through the southernmost states of our country. Having spent most of my life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, this was foreign territory for me. I had only ever known about it through books and news stories, so my knowledge was largely academic and probably somewhat skewed.
As travel tends to do, this journey opened my eyes as we visited several civil rights museums, a few religious sites, and walked the downtowns of some of the state capitols where history has been formed. But it was the morning spent at the Vicksburg National Military Park that struck me most deeply.
When I was growing up, I would wander out to the far reaches of our hillside home in New Hampshire and just as the sun slipped beneath the far hills, I would sound Taps on my trumpet. I did this night after night, and the men who lived in the valley, many of them WWII veterans like my dad, let me know that they would step out onto their porches each night at sunset and listen for me.
In the far reaches of the park at Vicksburg stands the monument to the soldiers from NH who had traveled far from home to a place that might as well have been the moon for all the familiarity it held, where they were asked to fire upon their fellow human beings for the crime of having a different ideology. For 51 days, these men were forced to focus on their differences to claim the soul of a unified nation.
All these years later, having studied and practiced the concept of Oneness, I looked across this battlefield and its lush greenery and wondered how we have managed to come so far yet still have so much farther to go. The voice inside of me that knows the answer, spoke:
“Oneness is not the absence of pain or conflict. It is not found in the washing away of blood or the burying of the cannonballs into the hillsides, or the removal of acknowledgements of war from public spaces. Oneness contains all of these things and more. Where the unity can be recognized is the greenery and flowers that show up in the aftermath, the resilience of life itself ever growing and expanding into new ways of thinking and expressing. Our history forms the soil on which we stand and it is there that we can choose to plant seeds of peace or we can cultivate discord. It is always our choice. The soil simply nurtures our decision.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to this choice when he wrote, ““Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
After 51 days of fighting over the “old nonsense,” the battle for Vicksburg came to an end, and though the Union ultimately prevailed, there were no real winners, for unity cannot be compelled. It must be chosen.
As I stood next to the NH monument and sounded Taps over a valley once fraught with violence, I felt an abiding peace flow through my body as my soul affirmed the truth that each day contains its own renewed opportunity to choose peace:
“Day is done, gone the sun, From the hills, from the lake, from the sky, All is well, safely rest, God is nigh."