For all of us who love the gift of the Peace Bridge in our city …
I guess “Make Peace not War” is now a very old quote.
It made the headlines in the 60’s and 70’s when it seemed a lot of the world was feeling the reality of the pain, brutality and unconscionable consequences of a strategy that believed war to be the right choice of action. “Do the right thing” did not emerge to dominate our discourse for a decade or two later.
The fact that we have an installation of Peace at the center of our city has important impact on our philosophical approach to how we share space and our lives in community in our own city.
One of the delights of this image is the beautiful shape of the iron geometry of bars and spaces that define multiple ways to see what is beyond the bridge. The view through the space captured in this photo alone offers the life giving and nurturing freedom of the water that travels in a river of connection and possibility – to take us away and bring us back, to encounter new views at every turn, to give life to the shrubs and trees that we sit among as we navigate its banks in walks, meanders and blanketed picnics.
The Bridge offers a ‘way of seeing’ that moves as we move. In our troubled thoughts, we recognize the possibility of new perspectives from different angles. We know the steady flow will reliably continue and that it will be the same tomorrow and next Sunday too. It serves as an anchor to our lives that is physical and stationary. It offers beauty at every turn and connects our eyesight to our hearts and our guts. It inspires us to pause and reflect. It is the architecture of service and nurture.
Peace is our longing. The sun and the moon and the stars become events in the context of peace.
The noise of opinions and a discourse we no longer trust pushes us toward anxious. Perhaps at the end of the day the simplicity of ‘water under the bridge’can dispel our restless hearts. The pause at the ‘windows’ can give life to our heavy feet.
Beauty gives us a lightness of being, of knowing there is more than one window of insight. Let’s keep our feet and our minds moving. Somehow we know we are the agents of change. We just need to trust ourselves and each other.
M.D
