A 40th Birthday to Remember - #31
In Costa Rica at the University for Peace
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And without further ado, letʻs get to the first day of my 40s.
Back in NYC at the start of February 1996, Carman showed me an invitation to be part of a group of twelve men and twelve women from around the world with projects or organizations dedicated to peace in the new millennium. The organizers asked us to attend a gathering and share plans and excerpts from the Mass for the 21st Century, in April at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Thatʻs a real thing. An accredited university offering graduate degrees in peace studies.
The University for Peace was chartered in 1980 via a resolution of the United Nations. Our invitation came from the former President of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Carazo, and former UN Assistant Secretary-General Robert Muller, who collaborated in the founding of the University. Carazo secured a location in Costa Rica and Muller served as its first Chancellor - for one dollar a year - once the University became a reality. Their latest vision was to create a World Peace 2000 Network of allies. Those of us attending in April would serve as a Steering Committee and draft a report with recommendations to the United Nations.
Cool. Even cooler, the second day of the two-day meeting would fall on my 40th birthday. I told Carman I could think of no more appropriate way to celebrate my birthday and my new phase of life than being part of an international group meeting at a university devoted to world peace.
I offered to fund our travel on one condition. There was no way I was going to spend my 40th birthday in Costa Rica and only visit the campus just west of the capital city of San José! If we went, Carman would have to agree to drive with me after the meeting to an ecolodge to enjoy a few days in a bungalow surrounded by rainforest - meals, monkeys, and three-toed sloths included. Besides, I argued, it could be a combined birthday celebration as his 60th fell later in the year.
Really there was no argument. Of course my Big Brother Best Man was up for the birthday adventure, the first of many. These joint milestone year birthday adventures have become a tradition - for 25 years and counting.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I should slow down….
Three-toed sloth. They really do move exceedingly slowly and just hang there and do nothing for long stretches of time, the ultimate teachers of what “just hanging out” should be. And they really are this cute.
On April 13, 1996, Rodrigo Carazo and Robert Muller opened the gathering by recounting the legend surrounding the site of our meeting. Rather than summarize in my words, let me quote Robert Mullerʻs telling:
The Prophecy of Rasur
One day, a long time ago, in the village of Quisar, all the children suddenly disappeared underground. The parents could not understand what was happening and became extremely worried. Faintly rising up from the earth below, they heard laughter and singing and knew that their children were safe. The children began to move and the parents followed their voices until they were stopped by a strong magnetic force at the base of Mt. Rasur. The Earth abruptly opened up and the children as well as a being of light, Rasur (the god of the indigenous children), appeared to the surprised parents. Rasur then spoke to the children, never once looking at the parents, and said,
"Dear children, the Great Spirit is in every animal, in every bird, butterfly, flower, insect, leaf and grass you see. The Great Spirit is also in you, the Creator's children. Please take care of the wonderful nature created by God and some day, from this mountain, you will see the birth of a civilization of peace spread to the entire world".
The gathering to which we had been invited was one of the “2,000 Ideas and Dreams for the Year 2000” that Dr Muller had written in his farmhouse next to the campus. We were sitting at the base of Mt. Rasur.
It was an eclectic group, from retired CEOs to lifelong peace activists. Most of those present had a small non-profit or foundation with a goal related to the creation of a more harmonious world. Without the gravitas of the former President Carazo, and Robert Mullerʻs 40-year career with the United Nations, where he began as an intern before I was born and ended as Assistant Secretary-General, it might not have seemed like a group with the wherewithal to make any serious dent in the task of creating a peaceful new millennium.
And yet everyone in that room shared a vision, and the conversations were rich and occasionally inspired. The concrete ideas in the Report transmitted to His Excellency Boutros B Ghali, Secretary General of the United Nations, included calling for a worldwide cease-fire on December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000, and declaring the coming millennium a Millennium of Peace, Healing, and Forgiveness. There were also recommendations for reforming the United Nations into a second generation world organization with representation not just of governments, but also the NGOs and youth who would be essential for realizing these hopes for a more just and peaceful world.
None of that ambitious program came to fruition, but some of the attendees remain our friends and collaborators.
At the dinner that concluded our final evening at the University for Peace, President Carazo presented me with a birthday cake, and Robert Muller serenaded me with a rendition of Ode to Joy on his harmonica. Carman was subsequently commissioned to compose a substantial intermedia work for children called Rasur - God of Peace, which premiered in Costa Rica in 2002. A three-toed sloth made it into Rasur somewhere, as did the processional and recessional pieces Carman wrote for my wedding in 1998.
Our trip to Costa Rica and my 40th birthday seem like a lifetime ago. I am now in shouting distance of the age Robert Muller was when we met, with the gray hair to prove it. I marvel at him in “retirement” brainstorming two thousand fresh ideas in his farmhouse on a hill next to the “Bench of Dreams” at the foot of Mt. Rasur. Born in 1923 in Belgium, Muller was 73 at the time of our meeting and just hitting his stride in terms of generativity and wisdom. He genuinely saw his most important contributions as still being ahead of him. Which is saying a lot, given everything he had already achieved. I take inspiration from that.
But feeling the passage of decades also makes me question - can any one person, one regular ordinary person, really make a difference healing the cracks in our world? Robert Muller moved the needle just the tiniest bit in four decades at the United Nations. Maybe even more pressing for me at the moment is this: after devoting ourselves to a cause for decades, how do we, like Dr Muller, continue to get up each day filled with inspiration, with fresh ideas and energy to move them into form, at age 73 and beyond?
After writing those questions, I sat with them for a couple of weeks. I do not have a definitive answer, but my thoughts kept returning to Costa Rica, to the Bench of Dreams and the ritual in which visitors to the sacred site at Mount Rasur are invited to engage .
The tradition around the Bench of Dreams is this. Each visitor who comes to sit at the Bench is asked to find two pebbles, hold one in each hand and then press their hands together as they close their eyes and formulate or speak their dream. One pebble is left at the Bench, so that sacred place, the place where Rasur gave his prophecy and taught the children, will remember each and every personʻs dream. The visitor symbolically and actually adds their personal commitment to the energy emanating from the place, to the energy of all the others who have spoken dreams and prayers there. The visitor then takes the other pebble home to remind them of their dream, of the commitment made at a sacred site at the base of a mountain in Costa Rica.
I have said prayers and spoken commitments at this and other sacred sites, and now those commitments are also being remembered and “spoken out loud” in this memoir. In the telling of it, I see that the fortieth birthday visit to the University of Peace in Costa Rica weaves in with stories I have already written.
It seems I made this personal commitment early on, maybe came into this body with it. As I wrote a few weeks ago, World Peace was probably the first big idea of my childhood. By the time A Wrinkle in Time became my favorite book, I knew I was here to be a Warrior of the Light.
I also wrote early in this memoir that two months later in my 40th birthday year, 1996, the gathering for the first World Peace and Prayer Day declared by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, was held near the site where White Buffalo Calf Woman appeared to give her prophecy and teach the people how to live in harmony with each other and all creatures. In 1999, three years after my visit, World Peace and Prayer Day also traveled to the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Another eighteen years passed and in 2017, we hosted World Peace and Prayer Day here on Hawaiʻi Island, not far from where I write these paragraphs. A collective of spiritual leaders from many places and traditions gathered in prayer together at Halemaʻumaʻu, and at Puʻu Huluhulu at the base of another sacred mountain, Mauna Kea - two years before a university spontaneously took form there.
It seems I have left and kept metaphorical pebbles of commitment in these travel. In the Black Hills, then at sacred sites in Tibet. At the base of sacred mountains in Costa Rica and in Hawaiʻi. The decades on this journey continue to humble me. What humbles is my assessment that we humans are collectively further from realizing peace than we were when the group gathered in 1996 in Costa Rica dreaming of the new millennium.
Once more I feel the weight of those touchstone pebbles. The persistent voice of those pebbles, the ones I took with me, reminds me to look in the mirror and ask how I will live my commitments today. Will I be present to love, to connection, to a moment of taking care of what I care about, to a more peaceful approach to whatever conflict, large or small, I may find myself in or have a hand in creating this very day? The “pebbles in my pocket” anchor me to my core commitments, to the fundamental commitments of my soul, in the only way I can fulfill them - moment by moment and day by day.
The answer I found to the question of how we keep that commitment alive in us through the decades as Dr Muller did, is this. The sister and brother pebbles scattered around the world tie me to shared commitments and to the places where prophecies are born and fulfilled. It is our herd, our tribe, our sangha, our lāhui that sustains us through the moments when we tire and doubt. In the collective I find my place, and fill with love and gratitude and inspiration to move forward with energy once again.
It must have been a big commitment I made blowing out the forty candles on my cake in Costa Rica, because I was soon to embark on a year-long pilgrimage with no destination other than the next stage in my spiritual growth.
Postscript: After I drafted this post, I received a newsletter from Vijali, my companion and teacher on the 1992 trip to Tibet I chronicled early in this memoir. She has just returned from Mexico, where her latest environmental sculpture is called Touch Stone of Peace. She was invited to carve on “giant granite boulders that were strewn over [the issuer of the invitationʻs] family land at the base of the sacred Cuchuma Mountain, the ancient home of the indigenous Kumeyay Indians’ deity Kuchamay.” As I often say about the giant synchronicities in my life - you canʻt make this shit up. And this is why They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir.
Good morning from Colorado! I’ll share a personal note later this week.