Poetry - "PRACTICING PEACE"
Susan Loy and writer and poet Cathryn Hankla
collaborated to create this peace mandala. Loy hand
lettered Hankla's poem in concentric circles in shades
of purple watercolors. The poem surrounds the word for
peace in Arabic, lettered in blue.
The blue and grey background is made up of peace in
Akkadian cuneiform as well as the modern peace sign,
which is a combination of the naval code of
semaphore's code letters for N and D (nuclear
disarmament). The peace sign was designed by the
Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War in 1958.
Cathryn Hankla is the author of ten books of poetry
and fiction, and she enjoys painting and drumming in
her spare time. Hankla is the author of ten books of
fiction and poetry, including Poems for the Pardoned,
Last Exposures: A Sequence of Poems, and The Land
Between. She's a professor in the Hollins University
writing program and edits poetry for The Hollins
Critic. See CathrynHankla.comfor
further information.
Calligraphy by Susan Loy will donate $25 for EACH
print sold to the Endowment Fund of the Unitarian
Universalist Church of Roanoke, Virginia.
Signed prints produced from the original watercolor.
Cathryn Hankla
"It's not an idea. As an idea, it's no more powerful
than war. It's not a demonstration. We can carry signs
on behalf
of other problems. It's not an admonition; reproach
cannot produce it. It's not historical; we cannot look
back
and retrieve it. It's not human nature, not a natural
behavior. Primitive, we would not know it any better.
It might be uncertain. It might be an endless pursuit.
It might be a state of mind. It might be a journey.
It might be pure energy. It might be a dream. Peaceful
is not something we are, that we decided once,
or something we do, that is the only route. Like
forgiveness, peace is a practice. Moment to moment,
it's how we choose to be: when the grill won't start,
when the dog keeps barking, when the check bounces,
when the train is late, when we are angry and
searching for someone to blame."
The blue and purple border contains the word peace in
nine alphabets and twenty-seven languages. The
languages include Algonquin: waki ijiwebis-i, Amheric:
irq, Arabic: salam, Dari: sulh, Dutch: vrede,
Esperanto: paco, French: paix, Gaelic: sith, German:
frieden, Hebrew: shalom, Hindi: shanti, Hungarian:
beke, Irish: siochain, Talian: pace, Jamaican: satta,
Klingon: roj, Lakota: wolakota, Mandarin: heping,
Masaba: koosi, Navajo: k'e, Nepali: saanti, Polish:
pokoj, Russian: mir, Spanish: paz, Vietnamese: hoa
binh, Welsh: heddwch, and Zulu: ukuthula. The nine
alphabets are Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese,
Korean, Roman, Sanskrit, Thai, and Tibetan.
Print Image Size: 9-1/2" x 9-1/2"
Print Paper Size: 11" x 11-1/2" Frame Size: 16" x 16"
Read the COMPLETE TEXT for "Practicing Peace"
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