Okay. So now you're steeped in peace. Nothing can disturb your reverie, right?

Wanna bet?

No matter how much at peace you think you are, there's always more. There's always a deeper peace waiting.

Finding your state of inner calm is important. In fact, it's going to be essential for you to begin the next step of our journey together -- actually dealing with the things that steal your peace.

Perhaps nothing in your life does. You are like a saint, living with such equilibrium that it doesn't matter to you if your world is collapsing around you.

Traveling the way of peace doesn't mean withdrawing from the world and all of the situations that steal our peace. The deepest levels of peace are attained only by engaging the reality that life serves up and doing the best we can to find and keep it.

Too often, though, we don't, instead content to "work on ourselves" and pretend the rest of the world has nothing to do with us, much less the peace we seek. Wrapped in a protective blanket of denial, isolation, and avoidance, we find an uneasy peace that is all-too-easily disturbed.

While such actions may allow us a relative calm amidst the outer storms, sooner or later the search for lasting peace will demand we deal with them.

For rarely do these things go away on their own. Instead, they keep growing in number and volume until they become like the squeaky wheel that will give us no peace until we fix it.

We all know what happens by then. The problems often escalate in scope and complexity, and demand much more of our time, effort and resources to deal with.

That's where our world is today.

Situations that have been cooking for years are bubbling up all over, now getting to a point where we're forced to do something about it. Their threats are so great that many of us are throwing open our windows and screaming, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

So how are we to find peace in times like these, when the world around us is falling apart and screaming for our attention to fix it before it's too late?

2012 is finally here, and it's time to get to work building the kind of world we want to live in.

Thursday the South Florida group will meet over dinner to discuss plans on how we each intend to make a difference in 2012, both alone and how and where we will co-create that future with others.

It will be held at 7pm. Here's the location and address:


Lester's Diner
4701 Coconut Creek Pky,
Coconut Creek, FL


There is no charge to attend. You pay for your own dinner.

Please join us.

For a long time you've experienced the pain of dealing with a world that makes life hard, that requires conflict and struggle as the tools of daily existence.

You've had to make many difficult choices just to get by and carve out a life that has worked for you, albeit not always as you would have liked.

Along the way, it's exacted a heavy toll. Perhaps on your health. Or finances. Or relationships. Or maybe just on your peace and happiness.

Yet, something within you has changed. The pain is no longer the focus on your attention, though it demands it from time to time in an ever-constant reminder that world is still there, with all the challenges it brings just to survive within it.

Happy New Year. I think. Because it promises to be a real test for those of us who are seeking to create peace in our lives and world.

We're all familiar with the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the arrogance and abuse of power that infests our financial system, its incestuous relationship with government and their disregard for the needs of the many.

Well, it appears that disregard is endemic in a whole lot of other areas as well, not the least of which is the production of two of the energy resources that supply our nation's power – coal and natural gas. Two movies I saw over the holidays drove home that point: The Last Mountain and Gasland.

This is the season for bringing light into dark places. So why not shine it into your own innermost recesses, where the seeds of conflict sprout and grow?

What are those seeds? Fear and desire are big ones, but less in their own right than for how they affect how we live our lives and trigger responses to the world around us. Misperceptions. Misunderstandings. Confusion. False images. Faulty communication. Expectations. Judgment. Unclear or conflicting intentions. The list is long and far beyond our ability to cover in a few paragraphs.

Perhaps the most insidious, however, are the set of characteristics that make up our personalities and the awareness with which we direct our attention. For together they determine what we will focus upon and how we will interact with that aspect of reality presented for our consumption in any particular moment.

Transparency is probably a good thing, since it allows light to shine into dark places to bring needed change. But it sure makes living in these times a challenge.

For that light reveals aspects of our systems, institutions, practices, beliefs, attitudes, and human interactions that don't serve us very well.

Our world is rushing headlong toward a precipice.

Not only is the American economy struggling to recover from the shock of the recent banking crisis. That was simply the tip of a great iceberg that we've done little to address, where runaway debt and the pursuit of profit at all costs have revealed the cracks within a system that doesn't serve many very well.