Full circles and lightning bolt moments
On my recent voyage with Peace Boat
Dear beloved readers,
What have been the lightning bolt moments of your life? The moments when life struck you, sent a message that you could not ignore, that set you firmly on a path?
What have been the full circle moments of your life, times when you returned to a part of yourself, or a place, or a dream?
This past week, on the trip of a lifetime with Peace Boat from Jamaica through the Panama Canal to Costa Rica, was a big full circle moment- multiple circles, spirals. I got to reconnect with two past versions of myself, and two past lightning bolt moments that set me on my path to where I am now, that I could see so clearly in hindsight, standing on the deck of the ship. Lightning bolt moments, full circle moments, widening circle moments.
Peace Boat is a Japan-based international organization that sails around the world on a mission to promote peace, human rights, and sustainability. When Peace Boat docks in Costa Rica, we (UPEACE) have been organizing portside events, and this year, we were invited to join a segment of the trip to see what life on board is like and to envision future collaborations. Myself and a colleague (and Daphne!) joined as guest educators. We gave a talk on UPEACE, hosted a Q&A session, and I also gave a talk on my path to peace education and how this moment was a full circle moment for me, while also sharing Joanna Macy’s spiral from the Work that Reconnects as a framework participants might use to think about their life beyond the boat, as they approach the last month of their around-the-world voyage.
Our time on the boat was incredibly full and magical, with many synchronicities and full-circle moments. The talks themselves were translated into 3 languages (Japanese, Chinese and Korean) and required multiple preparation meetings. We spent lots of time sharing meals with Peace Boat staff, who hosted us so generously, and truly made us feel at home during our days on board the ship. Old friendships were reconnected and new lifelong ones were made.
Moments of awe and wonder
The spiral of the Work that Reconnects begins with gratitude, and in the open sentences partner exercise, in which participants share from the heart and complete a sentence while the other partner listents, a prompt that is often used is, “Something I love about being alive on the planet is…” The day I gave my keynote talk was bookended by frolicking dolphins in the morning and a double rainbow in the evening, so magical it barely even seems possible as I write this, that one day could have been filled with so much jaw-dropping beauty and so much purpose.
On the morning of my second talk, I woke up early. I don’t usually like leaving Daphne alone for too long while she’s still sleeping, afraid she’ll wake up and feel scared if she’s alone, but it was early and I knew I probably had a couple hours. I watched the sunrise on the ship deck, a magical experience in itself. I went back to check on her, and, still sound asleep, I returned to the seventh-floor deck promenade, where you could walk laps around the ship (the ship has 15 floors total, and 7th floor is just above sea level).
As I walked around the deck, I was thinking of my conversation with Peace Boat staff about future collaborations. I imagined offering a program for teachers on peace education, inviting teachers to join the boat for a week and take workshops and enjoy the other offerings on the boat.
As I rounded the corner of the back of the boat, a dolphin shot out of the water. It stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away. Then another. And another. They were cascading in the wake of the boat, jumping over the wave the ship was making. They were frolicking, playing, delighting. One after the other, they jumped out of the water and flew through the air, maybe 15 or so in total. I watched in utter jaw-dropping amazement, one of the most epically beautiful things I’ve seen in my life (I didn’t have my phone with me so there are no pictures, but it also meant I watched with my eyes and heart and not through my phone screen, for which I am grateful!).
After the jumping subsided I stayed a little longer to see if they would return but they didn’t. I stood in awe and gratitude that I had been able to witness this moment, grateful to be alive to experience our planet’s magnificent beauty.
In the evening after my talk and our Q&A session, I went to the top deck with two others to watch the sunset. We stood and watched the clouds, not sure if we would get much light. As we chatted, I gasped as I noticed a double rainbow behind us, bright amidst the dark clouds, refracting the sunset rays over the Pacific. A day bookended with frolicking dolphins and a double rainbow, in between a public talk on my path to peace education and the full circle moments I was experiencing through being on the boat.
Past selves and lightning bolt moments
In the course of the trip, I reconnected with past versions of myself and lightning bolt moments on my path- moments of life that struck me and sent me firmly in a particular direction. One past version was 21-year-old me, an undergraduate student studying abroad in Panama for my last semester of college. It was an incredible program through McGill’s School of Environment, an interdisciplinary field semester in which we studied tropical ecology, biology, history, sociology, and geography with Panama as our classroom.
This was January 2001, only about a year after the US had returned ownership of the canal zone to Panama, and we lived on a recuperated military base that Panama was turning into la Ciudad del Saber, the City of Knowledge, a hub for NGOs, research, and academic institutions of which we were one of the first to join. It was a beautiful reclamation of buildings that had represented occupation and violence (especially after the US’s invasion in 1989). The base was virtually empty, and we had the run of these abandoned and not-yet-converted military installations as 20-something college students.
The semester was beautiful and intense, with many highs and lows. At the end of the semester abroad, I would be graduating, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next. After four years of studying climate change, I felt deeply jaded and filled with despair, losing hope in our ability to repair the mess we've created. While my program at the School of Environment was ahead of its time in so many ways, it lacked an emotional dimension - it did not provide students with space for processing the strong emotions that come with confronting the climate crisis, nor did it provide tools of empowerment or agency that made us feel like there was much we could do about it. At the end of four years of studying the climate crisis, I felt pretty hopeless, and was numbing out with partying and alcohol, which I can now see was deeply related to these feelings of pain, despair, and disempowerment.
The lightning bolt moment itself is a longer story, but to give you the short version: while traveling in the last two weeks before returning home, two friends and I rather foolishly got stuck on a remote, sparsely inhabited island (when locals ask you, “Are you sure you want to go there?” heed their warning; we were supposed to meet someone there who did not show up), not sure if or how we’d make it back. We were eventually able to find two young men who, through the grace of their kindness and generosity, took the time (a full day’s hike) and effort to walk us back through dense forest, teak plantations, and tropical late summer heat to the fishing village where we were able to get back to the mainland. On the boat ride back, so grateful to be alive after what felt like a near-death experience, I sat with the privilege of my life and vowed to do the best I could with what I had been given. I was reminded that people were kind and generous, my life was a blessing, and I owed my existence to serve the world as best I could. I went home and applied for the Peace Corps.
The full circle moment aboard the ship, which I wasn’t entirely expecting, was standing on the deck and seeing those familiar buildings of Ciudad del Saber in the distance, this place that had profoundly shaped me. I knew we were going through the locks, but I hadn’t considered that I would be able to see the buildings and how that would feel. We approached the Miraflores locks moments before our talk, and I couldn’t stay on the deck long, but long enough to reconnect with my 21-year-old self, imagining she would be proud of where I was standing, and to say to the land thank you, thank you, thank you.
The other full-circle moment of the trip is the second lightning bolt moment, which happened while I was volunteering with Peace Boat in their Tokyo offices back in 2008 when I was teaching English in Japan. Here is an excerpt of the talk I gave in which I shared about this moment (I may post the talk in its entirety later):
When I first encountered Peace Boat, I was already on a path of working for peace. I was introduced to the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh when I was a college student, and was inspired by his teaching of cultivating peace in every step to dedicate my life as a work of art for peace. I had joined the Peace Corps, a US government volunteer program like Japan’s JICA (the Japanese International Cooperation Agency), and spent two years living in Niger in West Africa as a community development volunteer. Afterwards, I visited a friend in Japan and fell in love with the place, and decided I wanted to spend more time there. I returned to Japan as an English teacher in 2008.
While teaching English in Tokyo, I was looking for a Japanese organization to volunteer with, and in my search, came across Peace Boat. At the time, they were organizing a large international conference, the Article 9 Global Conference to Abolish War (I wonder – were any of you at that conference?). I reached out to the head office to see if they needed help, and sure enough they did. In the lead-up to the conference, I did small administrative tasks like stuffing envelopes in their office, and during the conference, I helped at the coat check.
Participating in this conference changed me. I was so moved by tens of thousands of people who gathered in Chiba in the name of abolishing war. During a break, I was able to catch one of the keynote speakers, Cora Weiss of the Hague Appeal for Peace, giving her address to the arena. Standing in the back of the dark auditorium with thousands of people who were dedicating their lives to this cause, Cora echoed a refrain, “It’s time to abolish war.” Her words struck me like a lightning bolt, and every fiber of my being resounded with “YES!”, and I knew that I needed to dedicate my life to this path in a more serious way.
As an English teacher, I was integrating themes of human rights, peace, justice, and sustainability in my lesson plans. In my conversation classes, we would talk about current events and personal stories. I discovered that I loved teaching, but was yearning to teach peace more than English. After the conference, I started to look into paths of study, and found the University for Peace. I couldn’t believe such a place existed and I wasn’t sure if it was real – a common reaction when people first here of UPEACE. Friends from Peace Boat knew of the university and encouraged me to pursue it. The rest, as they say, is history.
This is the full circle moment I wanted to share with you. That Peace Boat, through the conference and through supportive and encouraging friendships I made at the office, my path carried me to UPEACE, which I now have the pleasure and joy of representing on this boat 16 years later. As part of my volunteer work, I created presentations on the boat for others to give, and today, standing in front of you, I am making my own presentation aboard the boat! It is a dream come true, to be here with you today. In the years in between, I have engaged in a wide range of different peace education work, with non-governmental organizations like Teachers Without Borders doing teacher professional development in peace education, and the Metta Center for Nonviolence doing community-based nonviolence education, in teaching peace studies at colleges in the United States, and finally pursuing my doctorate, bringing me back to UPEACE to lead the peace education programme in 2022.
As I get older, there seem to be fewer lightning bolt moments - or maybe there are more, but they are less dramatic. Maybe they sweep in more like storm clouds and the soft rain here in Costa Rica they call pelo de gato, or cat’s hair. Maybe less like a zap and more like a constant hum. A lot of things feel less dramatic in mid-life. Maybe it’s less an electric current of change, and more like being in the flow of the river.
There may be fewer lightning bolts, but there are more full-circle moments. You have been around long enough to circle back to people and places and key moments in your life. All I know is, in my mid-40s, I have been having a lot of them.
A UPEACE student now professor.
A Peace Boat volunteer creating material for the on-board education program, then a guest educator aboard the ship, a dream come true.
A 21-year old student, sitting in her pain for the world and not knowing what to do with it, and a 46 year-old professor, doing her best to create spaces for us to dwell in the beauty, wonder, awe, and enchantment of the world, honor our pain, and create worlds otherwise.
I titled my talk Widening Circles after the Rilke poem by this name, translated by Joanna Macy, one of my dearest peace education elders who is in hospice care as I write this and to whom I dedicated the talk. The poem reads:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
You can hear Joanna read it here, and you can also listen to a song by Rising Appalachia inspired by this passage and the Work that Reconnects:
I returned to myself at these different stages, and I wonder, where does this next circle lead? I don’t know, but the dolphins and rainbows feel affirming, and I feel confident to know I am on my path. That 21-year-old me and 29-year-old me could not have imagined who 46-year-old me would be, and I think they’d be proud.
But 46-year-old me also knows we are just getting started.
On the boat, I have been reading Sophie Strand’s marvelous memoir The Body is a Doorway. I want everyone I know to read this book (in the meantime, you can listen to this exquisite interview on one of my favorite podcasts, Green Dreamer). In it, Sopie quotes a passage from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which the character Jaques says, “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.” It occurred to me as I read this passage that I am more towards the rotting side of this equation than the ripening, that those lightning bolt moments marked the path of ripening, showing the way, and here we are, perhaps in the middle, perhaps teetering towards rotting, and what does that mean for a life?
Ripening and rot both have value in regenerative life cycles, as the rot gives way, makes space, and nourishes new life. It means in the rotting there is so much to give back. It means that I have accumulated so much on this path of ripening, and it is time to return these blessings to the earth community as best I can.
In my talk, I shared about the spiral from the Work that Reconnects, Joanna Macy’s body of work. The spiral goes:
Begin with gratitude
Honor our pain for the world
See with new eyes
Go forth
As part of my presentation, I offered participants a guided visualization experience moving through the spiral. At the end, I offered some reflection questions:
Gratitude: What are you most grateful for on your experience of this voyage on the Peace Boat? What are the moments that have given you a sense of wonder, awe, being in love with the world?
Honoring our pain: What is the pain for the world you have been holding? How can you honor it?
Seeing with new eyes: How has your experience on the Peace Boat allowed you to see with new eyes? How are you looking at the world differently from this experience?
Going forth: Given all of this, how can you carry this work forward? How will the path of your life change thanks to this voyage?
As I return home, I am asking myself these questions about my own brief but impactful experience on the ship.
Part of the pain we got to honor as part of our time on the boat, and at the event we held on campus on July 10th, is the pain of the effects of the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two. This year marks the 80th anniversary of those bombings and of the end of that war. While the war “ended,” the devastating effects are still felt today, and the world has experienced near-constant war ever since.
The Peace Boat, as part of its mission, brings hibakushas - survivors of these atomic attacks - on board to share their testimonies at ports of call, and we were fortunate to hear the testimonies in Jamaica and on campus in Costa Rica. To hear these testimonies is a gift. The youngest survivors are now in their 80s, so we are the last generation to be able to hear their stories directly from them. It becomes our responsibility, then, to amplify and carry these stories forward, lest we forget the horrific suffering unleashed by these bombs.
To hear first-hand the horrific effects of these bombs - the melting flesh, the rivers full of decomposing bodies, the pain that reverberates to this day - is to know and affirm the need for nuclear abolition. As we teeter on the brink of nuclear war again in multiple parts of the world - 89 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock - these survivors’ stories are more urgent than ever to remind us of the visceral, embodied, intergenerational human and more-than-human costs of these wars. To honor this pain, I vow to carry their stories further and to continue to advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons, and a world free of war, dedicating myself to creating a world where such horrors no longer happen.
I came back from this epic journey of a lifetime to a flat tire in my garage - and, to neighbors who will help. A flat tire is an annoying inconvenience, but having dear neighbors who are like family, who will drop everything to come help you, is absolutely priceless. Coming home to that is a treasure.
I came back to empty hummingbird feeders, the little gluttonous, insatiable beings swirling around the now-full feeders, who seem to be telling me thank you! as they flit from feeder to feeder in front of my desk having their morning breakfast (hummingbirds need to eat at least 50 times a day, so they come back for many meals).
After this voyage, I am seeing with new eyes - old eyes, in fact, reconnecting with the 21- and 29-year-old versions of me, seeing these threads looping through my life. Old eyes renewed. I can see these old parts of me still here, that I have nurtured. I see the moments of commitment that the lightning bolts inspired, and feel the urge to double down. In my bones, I know I am just getting started.
I have been reflecting a lot on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) and Joanna Macy, especially Joanna as she sits in this transitional threshold between life and what lies beyond. I am thinking of how much their teachings have impacted my life, and how I am doing my best to carry those teachings forward and share them with others. Both Thay and Joanna were scholars and academics, but arguably their most important work was reaching beyond the academy, and I feel this call and this pull (which is, of course, part of why I write here on Enchantable). It’s not a question of either/or - it’s very much both/and, and to me it’s a question of accessibility and inclusivity, of making this work available and accessible beyond the academy, which is inherently exclusive in its reach.
I am thinking about going forth, and the next circle widening. Upon my return to internet, there was an invitation to speak in Korea waiting for me in my inbox, so I know my circle will continue there. I don’t know where this next circle goes, but I trust it and I give myself to it completely.
I invite you to join me in sending some love, breaths, and gratitude to our dear elder Joanna Macy as she crosses this threshold beyond the earthly realm. I’ll close by offering the blessing I shared in my talk:
May our peace learning motivate us to act in waves that ripple out like the sea across the world.
May our circle of compassion widen and deepen to include all beings and the earth.
May our love and care for the earth and each other inspire and motivate our daily actions.
And may the reach of this work for peace continue to widen and deepen until it touches every corner of the earth.
With infinite love and care,
Stephanie
P.S. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share two ways to join me online this month!
My workshop with Mazorca Facilitation on Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks (plus see my last two posts about it)
Critical Conversations in Peace Education: Sustaining Hope and Nurturing Resilience
I hope to see you there!
I have so many thoughts to share and discuss. Here and now, let me tell you how deeply satisfying to hear of your circling connections, to know and appreciate you more. 💓 thank goodness for the flat tire humor-wise. But it didn't seem to deflate you at all 🤩