It was cold last night and it’s going to get much colder tonight: 26 degrees Fahrenheit, with freeze alerts everywhere. I look with pathos at the impatiens still growing in front of Kwan-yin in back—the longest they’ve lasted here—not to mention the other annuals still hanging out of flowerpots out front. How many will be around tomorrow? The indoors plants came inside yesterday, and throughout the Valley people are bringing in the last remaining tomatoes, squash, corn, and other vegetables.

Imagine, all this because temperatures are going down. Above is my workspace when I work outdoors, a Muriel Spark novel by the computer. Is there a more gorgeous office? But change is all around, inside and outside; change is me. Leaves are turning? Some new white strands in my hair. Flowers are drooping? I drive more carefully now because my vision is changing.

“War over,” my sister emailed me today.

“How do you know Bibi won’t renew fighting after hostage/prisoner exchange?” I email back, and she immediately replies: “Trump won’t let him.”

There’s a lot to say about Donald Trump in this regard. I won’t do that now, other than to wonder why Biden didn’t do this a long time ago, before the killing of thousands and thousands of people and the razing of Gaza. If ever there was a sign that the former president wasn’t up to the job, it was right there in front of us.

There are always those who hold the space for peace. Over the past 25 years, I’ve had the honor of knowing them: my friend, Palestinian Sami Awad, currently co-director of Nonviolence International (read his book: The Sacred Awakening: Reclaiming Christ Consciousness); Rabbi Menachem Fruman, members of the Zen Peacemakers, Sr. Pia Gyger and Fr. Niklaus Brantschen, my brother, Mordechai Bar-Or, and those he works with, and others.

Can you appreciate what it is to hold space for peace in the Middle East? It’s hard to walk the streets of Jerusalem when you’re aware of the blood that has spilled over its sun-drenched stones for millennia. In Israel, the word shalom, or peace, became not just a joke, but if you landed in the Tel Aviv airport and told the security people checking your passport that you were here with the Zen Peacemakers, they’d make you empty your luggage and, once, even strip-searched someone.

Peace was left-wing. Peace was radical. Peace was nonsense.

Who are the people who hold that space—not just privately but publicly, in joint religious celebrations, in talks and teachings, unafraid of the ridicule and head-shaking that greets them? Unafraid of being called crazy, lunatics, and yes, even traitors? They don’t just say peace, they mean it with every ounce of their being. They can see it, smell it, taste it when the rest of us smirk, lower our eyes, or shrug hopelessly.

Last Friday evening I took part in a series on women Zen pioneers which honored Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, my older dharma sister, teacher, and dear friend. In my few comments, I recalled how when the AIDS epidemic first began, Enkyo made her way to the Gay Men’s Health Clinic and sat there.

“What do you do?” I asked her.

“I’m holding space,” she said back then. “People come, or else they don’t. I just hold the space.”I had to remind people that back then, almost no Zen teachers (other than Bernie) got involved in social justice work.

But holding the space for what? To sit in this present moment of being fully alive and aware, as if the world is newly created right now, ignoring the mind that reels off the same cynical train of thought and the same warnings, and  instead realize that even now, sick as you may be, war-ravaged as you may be, it’s a new dawn. Every moment is a new dawn.

Did Bernie have faith? I heard him express faith in just one thing, and that is that we are moving towards a universal realization of the oneness of life, a greater consciousness that we’re all One. He loved the internet for that reason, because it constantly reflected others’ life experiences and opinions. He wouldn’t have cared much for the algorithms that push us into like-minded corners, he said the whole point is to see and appreciate how different we all are, all manifestations of this one great body.

Will peace come to the Middle East? The naysayers are already at work, not to mention our own progressives who won’t credit anything Trump is doing and are ready to point to all the possibilities of failure and disappointment. I don’t care about who gets the credit or who wins a Nobel Peace Prize, I care about folks returning home and rebuilding. I care about folks emerging emaciated from tunnels and rejoining their families. I care about sirens finally taking a break and children eating their fill.