Nine days until school begins. Not that I'm counting. I don't have any doubts that I really *want* to be in school again, 17 years after high school. But I'm a bit worried about the amount of work I'm supposed to accomplish. I've been trying to get ahead, at least for my Foundations in Peace & Justice class, because it's the one I'm most interested in and, knowing me, I'll put off all my other classes' assignments to focus on this one. One thing about being 35 years old -- I know what I'm most likely to do in a given situation.

My P&J professor is an amazing and wonderful man - Byron Plumley -- who has walked the talk, serving time for protesting at the School of the Americas, working in the soup kitchen of the Catholic Worker. I had always written off "religious" schools, figuring that they all were as right-wing nutjob as Boston College & Brigham Young Univeristy. So I must acknowledge my dear friend Patrice, a Colorado native, who urged me (actually, I think she made me promise) to look at the program of Regis Univeristy. I made an appointment with an admissions counselor, and then I met Byron through my counter-recruitment work. And I was sold. Apparently the Jesuit tradition is very much about dialogue (not dogma) and direct action (not armchair philosphy), two things that speak deeply to me as a Buddhist-Quaker.

The texts Byron chose for this class are all books I would have bought & read anyway:

Chris Hedges -- War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Ira Chernus - American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea
CODEPINK - Stop the Next War Now
Pietra Rivoli - The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade

If you want a really good primer on nonviolence thought in the U.S., the Chernus book is a great choice. It takes each leader in the movement chronologically, from the Anabaptists to Thich Nhat Hahn. In the chapter on Gandhi, the great Hindi is quoted:
Just as the sea accepts the water of all rivers within itself, purifies it and gives it back again, so you too, if you make yourselves as the sea, will be able to accept all people. ...

which sounds remarkably like the 8th verse of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching:
The best way to live
is to be like water
For water benefits all things
and goes against none of them
It provides for all people
and even cleanses those places
a man is loathe to go
In this way it is just like Tao ...

it's all about connections. as Thich Nhat Hanh says, There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

off to my Quaker mediatation :~)

walk with the spirits, my friends