Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

When considering a life of peace, attitude is everything. Where you are going is determined by the state of mind in which you take the first step. The Chinese say that a trip of a thousand miles begins with the first step and if you do not know where you are going any road will get you there. But the mindset behind  that first step is critical to the pleasure or pain of the quest. You can take a day at a time and be unhappy with every footfall or you can take joy as a companion and find peace came along too. In that sense, we are all mermaids in a world divided by giants and dwarfs.

A Day At A Time

I listened to the conversations as I left the workout room, down the long hall and into the outdoors on Lakeshore Drive. For four days it was the same. "Oh, what a gloomy day." "Isn't it nasty?" "The weather has really turned bad." With a shudder, "Dreary, isn't it?"

Silently, I answered, "No, it is raining. It is gray. It is mist-filled. It is soft to the eye. It is just a day!"

Weather is a part of living. It just is. A sun-filled day is sometimes "too hot" or "too bright" by the same critic of days. Days are to be enjoyed for their own wonder, their own individuality.

A Northern Sung Dynasty artist, I suspect, lived for the overcast, gray days where the mountains were wrapped in mists, only showing their powerful peaks and graceful slopes through the graying water-filled air. When I was in Colorado, the same mists filled some mornings with a grandeur and splendor that clear days never could match. Although the Impressionists loved the shining, sun-intense mid-day, Monet and Renoir painted on days where the mists filled the Seine. I am sure that they took out another good bottle of wine, a picnic basket filled with magic for their taste palettes and lovely female companions to enhance the time. I can hear them say, "The day is to be enjoyed, no matter what kind of day." They painted side by side, sipping wine and flirting, filling the canvas with sun- or mist-filled moments.

For those who think of days for what you wish them to be rather than what they are, here is a piece of advise that was sent to me when I learned that I had to have unexpected major surgery: "Life is what happens when you are sitting around planning what to do with your life." It made me laugh because it is so true.

I have another friend who only listens to her inner voice when it tells her what can possibly go wrong in life. She lives in fear of each moment. I have a third friend who sees going downtown as an adventure to be lived. Her children say she lies about the days she encounters. She says, "I only embellish reality." Her days are filled with joy and magic. I hope that her children learn that lesson.

There are ways to learn about the magic. Never grow up or have a teacher like my embellished friend or a grandchild who forces you to see through her new eyes.

Every artist is a newborn child. He or she takes out the blank canvas each day and sees it anew, then embellishes it with elements that are already there. Watch a child learn to walk. She sees the world as a classroom to practice each precious step. Each step is new and enjoyed. I watched my 18-month granddaughter Erin at the Kimball Museum. We started by looking at the paintings "From Renoir to Picasso" but she wanted to be outside. She practiced walking between the orderly-placed trees. I might not have seen the order in the trees or her joy in each step except that I was fascinated by her repeated journey around, through and between those natural forgers of wood. We are born artists. It is not something you have to learn on a gray, fun-filled day.

For every artist there are two elements which must work together to create a work of art: a spirit that hold a "willing suspension of disbelief' (also called "the wonder factor" or the surprise when you do not prejudge a day) and craftsmanship (a way to translate the wonder into some expression of communication). Some say, "I cannot be an artist. I can't do that." I say, "An artist is in the seeing what is there who then embellishes the sight." We all start out as artists. The secret is never losing the wonder of childhood.

I Am A Mermaid

Sometime when you write an article, it is like throwing a stone in a pool of water. The ripples widen and go places that you did not imagine. I was on the exercise bike, a captive machine, where a gentleman with a cane came up and said, "I read your article on being enslaved by all the stuff that we own and own us. You know what that is: the cancer of greed. We are on the way to being an endangered species." I tried to tell him my point was the humor of having things own us and once we realize it we are on the way to using our tools instead of visa versa. He said, "You are swimming upstream. Most people are driven by greed. Own more not less." It was this "upstream" comment that started me thinking in another direction. How do many of us learn to swim upstream? I know that I am not alone in this pursuit but how do you learn it?

Recently I journeyed again to Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Waco-born Robert Fulghum. He tells the story of running a Sunday school class where he was setting up a game of giants, wizards and dwarfs (a robust activity similar to the hand game of scissors, paper and rock). All the chattering children were to fmd a place in the room where they identified with one of the three groups. Quietly, a little girl touched Fulghum's hand and asked, "Where do the mermaids stand?" He told her again that the game was Giants, Wizards and Dwarfs. She replied in a soft, firm voice, "I am a mermaid." Being a man who goes with the ripples of life, he said: “Stand by me, I am the king of the sea.

The man at the gym had made me realize that "I am a mermaid". I do swim upstream. It all started in kindergarten when a red-haired, six-foot, ancient (to my small eyes) teacher brought me up to the front of the class and said, "Look, Joe draws Goldie Locks with curls in her hair." Later, the same teacher sent me to Carnegie Museum where I learned that others saw the world differently and we could enjoy our collective difference. One day coming home on the electric streetcar in Pittsburgh, I stopped by the downtown fish market where my lifetime-recovering-alcoholic grandfather worked. He took me in his strong arms, raised me atop a counter filled with fresh fish, and announced to the world, "Look here, my grandson is an artist." At Dartmouth College, it was one professor who believed that I had something to say and write about. It was Robert Frost (poet in residence there) who showed me the passion to say it. Now it is wife, friends and children.

It takes someone, sometime, to announce our individuality to the world and allow us to be who we are inside. A close friend works for a corporation where the norm is to hide behind the categorical suit and never allow the "mermaid" out of the box. It is a business where the humanity of the person is not supposed to appear at the workplace. The invisible employee is the unwritten law. Sadly, school can be a place where we learn that we are A, B, C, D or F (failure) people. The targets that we must shoot toward are drawn by others. We learn that we CAN'T read, draw, write poetry, think or be ourselves until someone comes up and says, "Stand by me." Everyone needs to know that there is some place to be a "mermaid". None of us is strong all the time. It is important to learn that sometimes: first you shoot the arrows, then you paint the targets. Ty Cobb only batted a little over 320 for his whole baseball career by playing other people's game. We all should have stories to tell about someone in our lives who allowed us to be "mermaids" and gave us the strength to stand alone by being always there in our minds as our "stand by" person. My friend B. Rapoport (who also is a "mermaid” and I had our parents. The man at the gym is mistaken. "People are no damn good" does not stand up to close scrutiny. The world is not galloping toward extinction. I know because there are too many mermaids and kings of the sea.