Peace is of the Heart

A Letter to Parents • September 15, 2024
by Head of School Jodi Grass

It is Peace Week at Oak Grove.

We acknowledge Peace Day with a week-long exploration into the notion of peace. This week throughout campus, we will be celebrating through classroom curriculum, via the construction of a collaborative art installation titled “Sharing the Light Within,” culminating in an all-school assembly on Friday. Although an anti-bias curriculum is woven throughout everyday learning at Oak Grove, teachers are dedicating more explicit time to intentional strategies that support anti-bias education – to teaching for equity and agency and exploring our shared responsibility for our world.

Peace, in the most crude sense, is the absence of war. To “make peace” is to stop the fighting – a cease-fire. But our lived experience of peace and war is much more complex and nuanced in our personal lives. We wage war in subtle ways, with our judgments, violent thoughts, our separateness – with taking sides for or against.

When we think about enormous topics like genocide, war, violations of human rights, and ecological devastation, we may feel disconnected from what this means in our daily lives. But these realities are right here.

Although in general violent crimes in the United States have gone down over the past two years, hate crimes continue to rise. This is happening in our community. We must rely on the strength of our interconnectedness to stand up in the smaller moments of casual cruelty – moments when derogatory language is used irresponsibly or thoughtlessly, or perhaps even maliciously, by our peers. Words can be the seeds of pain and violence, and they can certainly be barriers to belonging. As a school, as parenting adults, and as decent human beings, we can, and should, shine a bright light on hate and violence in all its forms.

Krishnamurti said, “Peace is of the heart, not of the mind. To know peace you have to find out what beauty is. The way you talk, the words you use, the gestures you make – these things matter very much, for through them you will discover the refinement of your own heart. Beauty cannot be defined, it cannot be explained in words. It can be understood only when the mind is very quiet.”

Saturday, September 21, is the International Day of Peace, which was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the day as a period of non-violence and cease-fire.

In the spirit of the day, I wonder which ways we can recognize the beauty that surrounds us as we role model for our children a “cease-fire” in our personal lives.