A Letter for Peace

Caitlin Thurrell  --  22 May 2019

I am a woman who lives now in a desert village made abundant by thousands of years of human hands' joined effort.  The work of peace is not an easy work -- heavy weight of water and soil, harvest, children bourne.  Heavier work to ask life, bowing, from one's own place, than to take it by force from somewhere else.

A village is a particular and living being, made of the lives that fill it, and their weaving. Made of the weaving of a people into a land, and the labors that offer the space to thrive.  From the vantage of this village it is easier to imagine the life of another village: where women also carry water, where men also climb into trees to cut wood.  Where children also pull down green apricots to gnaw their hard, sour bodies and then toss them to stray dogs.  A Syrian village, that has been destroyed.  An Iranian village that could cease to exist.

I am a white-skinned woman born in the occupied indigenous territory now called the United States of America.  I live now in this place of great, dry mountains mostly for love of its water and the many works that make its life.  I live here, also, because the fruits of the American imperial project are bitter to me.  I would free my life from them to the extent that I can, though I do not imagine myself for a moment to be uncomplicit.

It is late spring.  The fields are green now with young barley.  Columbines bloom in the rocks, and dry, wild roses.  Sometimes when I blink, in the dark moment of closed eyes I see bombs falling, here.  I see the places where houses stand above their fields becoming wreckage, see the walls and canals carefully repaired each year for fifty generations become rubble.  I see the grandmothers I love -- whose knees hurt, who miss their grandchildren in the city, who tend beautiful gardens -- looking up at the sound of plane flight to be made blind by explosions of fire.  These are not empty imaginings.  This has happened how many times?  On beautiful spring mornings in Vietnam, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen.  It could happen now, soon, in Iran.

In how many lands have American bombs visited catastrophe on powerless people?  In how many lands have villages been destroyed?  I know one village, in my body, with the intimacy of a lover.  I can imagine what its destruction would actually mean, in a way I believe the perpetrators of such destruction cannot.  I trust this much, at least, in their humanity.

Today I am peeling willow poles in the forest of the upper village, the shout of the glacial stream so complete that it becomes a silence.  Because it is late spring; because this is the necessary work of these days, between the first and second waterings of the fields.  Because this is the truest way that I know how to pray against the terror of bombs falling -- on this forest, or any forest -- on these precious orchards and fields, or on precious Iranian orchards and fields.

May it not come to pass.  May it not be, that Iranian mothers and grandmothers look up to planes carrying death pregnant in their bellies.  May those who hold power speak out.  May we who hold power speak out against this unthinkable horror.  May the villages and cities, the lands and waters and precious bodies of that land, and every land, live undestroyed.