How to Find Peace and Hope Through Your Relationships

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MAUDE: We went away the week before last for a couple of nights. We needed a break from our own sense of bleakness and confusion. Life seemed to be filling up with negative energy and distress over the political mess. It was leaking into our hearts and our relationships as well.

We found ourselves in a very special part of nature, far away from the deluge of projections, divisive storylines and media outpourings. One of the days we walked along the cliffs of Montana de Oro, a California State Park with over 6000 acres and over 7 miles of coastline. It was foggy and pretty empty of people. We’d been walking for quite some time, breathing in the air and the atmosphere, when I grabbed Phil’s hand and motioned for him to stop. I realized our footsteps were the only sound other than occasional bird noises. We stood there wrapped in stillness, in an intense sense of quiet.

The peace that permeated both of us was profound. I felt my hope and a sense of belief in goodness and love flooding through me. It was palpable. It was okay. It was more than okay. It was wonderful. We were wonderful together.

All it took was to remove ourselves from the hammering from pundits and mainstream media and replace that with a few days of concentration on ourselves, our relationship, and of course, the healing power of nature.

And then we returned, renewed, connected, and filled with peace. We were excited over the sense of planned projects we would work on, of the sense of possibilities. This was then strengthened immeasurably by the positive political shift, suffusing us with a sense of not only possibilities but also a sense of hope. Somehow, without either of us even realizing it, that precious sense of hope had been gone, or at least dormant.

Let this be a warning and signpost for dangers we all face every day – the dangers of succumbing to doubt, loss of hope, a feeling of defeat, or just plain tiredness from the extreme landscape of our daily realities. Turn to your relationships to bolster each other up. Listen to the quiet and the strength of hope that you can find within yourself and each other, and face those difficulties with belief.

You can pick each other up when one of you is down. You can help each other remember the open-endedness, and that the field of possibilities is wide open as long as you stay open to it!If you want love to be in the world, you have to spread it yourself #quote #relationships Share on X

PHIL: I love the way Maude recognized the silence of the place we visited, and how that physical silence created a mental silence within us.

The dissonance of the world, and its politics in particular, is a constant challenge for me. How can they think and act so differently? To answer this, I have to start closer to home, with people I actually know.

The nature of my relationships depends very much on how I see differences. I may see others as better or worse: I’ll never be as good as they are, or they don’t do things right. That is a competitive mindset. But if I drop the value judgment and see differences as just that – differences that arise because we are all unique, then they are no longer a challenge. More than that, differences are to be marveled at. How do they do that? Why do they do it that way? What must they be feeling? And if I really have to think of them as better and worse, then I must also remember a hundred other differences that are the other way around.

But alongside differences are similarities – we each eat, breathe, dream, watch Netflix – that are both fundamental to being human and shared through culture.

People have essential differences, but also an essential sameness. Talking to a human being is nothing like talking to a dog or a table or a computer. It’s a different experience. I recognize them as another human being, although it happens so naturally that it gets overlooked.

It’s when I lose sight of that humanity and only see otherness that alienation and separateness arise, and politics is a difficult test for me. Can I acknowledge that people I don’t even know are acting in the only ways they know, and they deserve love, even when they do not offer it themselves? There is no other choice. If you want love to be in the world, you have to spread it yourself.

Photo credit: Maude Mayes

Photo note: Montana de Oro California State Park

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