365 Days of Peace
Over the course of a year, from late 2019 to 2020, I wrote a poem almost every evening around 8:30 pm that began with the word, “Peace.” These poems were eventually published as 365 Days of Peace: Benedictions to End Your Day in Gentleness and Hope.
I didn’t just write the poems, though – for me it was a kind of meditation or practice gleaned from spiritual practices I have learned over the course of my life. In particular, I used some elements of centering prayer, some breathing exercises, and some aspects of an ancient practice called the Examen. My goal was to quiet my mind and body and look inside myself, without judgement or trying to change anything I found, but simply to notice what was there and speak peace over it.
These poems were written from a place of quiet and self-examination, but they were also written in a communal context. I wrote them directly into Twitter, without writing a draft first anywhere else. (In fact when I decided to publish them as a book I had to go back and copy and paste them all from Twitter!) So they were deeply personal but also an attempt to speak to other’s experiences and emotions, naming not only my own—peace to the introverts, peace to the over-thinkers—but also those of people in different minds, and bodies, and circumstances—peace to the extroverts, peace to the mama bears. And of course some of the things I named were universal experiences – peace to the lonely, peace to the grieving, peace to those trying to hold onto hope in difficult times.
I wrote with the belief that we are all connected, and that the truer and deeper I was in sharing about myself, the more people would connect to what I wrote. We feel shame when we think we are alone in our weird, or sad, or even angry thoughts, but nothing we feel or think or experience hasn’t been felt or thought or experienced before. We are more alike than we know.
The 365 Days of Peace journal
A year after 365 Days of Peace came out I created a journal to go along with it. I included a guide I’d developed to using that same meditative practice, along with ten prompts to help focus in on thoughts, emotions, and experiences that we might need to speak peace over. For a variety of reasons (burnout, illness and injury, the fickle algorithm) I didn’t promote the 365 Days journal as much as my other books. So you may not even know that it exists! But I do think, if you enjoyed the meditations I wrote for 365 Days of Peace, you may enjoy the practice I used, and the prompts.
You can find the journal over on Amazon for only $12.50. I think it would make a great Christmas present, too—or birthday or graduation gift—with or without the original book.
In peace, hope, and love,
Jessica