My Fair Isle

Today is Remembrance Day. We will be spending it at an all-day chess tournament in Harlem - Finn and Lucy's first one. My sense of these events is that there is a lot of time to sit around between games of chess. So we will take a moment today to remember that we are involved in two wars in this country right now. And that people - soldiers and civilians - are dying in our name everyday as a result.

This weekend we had our second session of meditation training at yoga teacher training. The teacher described it differently from the Zen meditation that I am familiar with but the essentials were the same. At one point, the teacher said that if we could begin to bring an awareness of our thoughts into our being, to feel familiar with our mind, then we could start talking about peace as a society. Or that's how I understood it.

That's a high standard to start from - things being what they are, people being who they are. I would like to start talking about peace right now because things are too messy to wait any longer. And for the first time in a while, I feel like there is a small chance that this conversation might actually happen.

War is hard. Peace is harder.