This might be the wrong post today. Maybe it’s too political or potentially alienating. Maybe I should just post a picture of poppies. But when I think about war, the legacy of war, the men in my history and my husband’s who served as soldiers, who (as Daniel Foor said has happened time and time again throughout history to men through the ages) had a weapon put in their hands and were sent out to fight, I keep coming back to these two headlines I saw this week:

Maybe it’s because I have begun to learn Canadian history through the lens of Indigenous matriarchs, through a program offered by Deyen Transform, or maybe it’s from words shared in a few recent podcasts by Diné grandmotherPat McCabe, but it feels pretty clear to me that our systems have led us through troubled terrain, deeper and deeper into trouble, and those systems in the “modern world paradigm” have also been named “the industrial military complex”, and “the patriarchy”, and what seems to be absent in them is a genuine reverence for life and life-bearers.

And I wonder what would happen if we could bring it back into balance?

McCabe teaches that she learned that we think we know what the feminine is, and we think we know what the masculine is, but we don’t. We only know how they behave in a power-over paradigm, where might makes right and scarcity is baked into everything and you must dominate or be dominated. But we could opt for a power-with or partnership paradigm, where we all had sacred roles and responsibilities… and maybe, in that world, under that system, we wouldn’t have to militarize for peace.

I’m not a military historian and I’ve never fought in a conflict situation. There’s so much I don’t know. But any films I’ve watched about war have left me thinking one overriding feeling: what a lot of suffering.

I honour their suffering. I honour their service. And I stand, at every service and ceremony, sending those memories forward, as a dream, that we suffer no more. That we inflict no more suffering. That we cultivate peace and harmony and balance.