And with peace comes trust and progress.
Peace, walk upon this blessed land, goodwill upon all Earth. Satish Kumar has been walking this blessed land and many lands all his life, spreading goodwill and understanding upon all Earth.
He has been living and breathing the cause of peace and harmony to one another and towards the planet, talking and writing about it, bringing us the light of long-learned wisdom and hope in every word.
He has been showing us all his life that universal education based on love, mutual respect and understanding, truth-telling and empathy, is the only pathway to peace and harmony on this planet.
This article first appeared as the foreword to Satish Kumar's latest book, Peace is Possible: Selected Works.
Planet
That we are in dire need of his latest book, Peace is Possible: Selected Works, this great gathering of Satish Kumar's three wonderful and hopeful books on peace, can hardly be in doubt. We are all living through perilous times.
Mankind seems to be constantly at war with nature or with one another, usually both. It is hard for peace-loving peoples, Earth-loving peoples, not to be down-hearted. But, as the old song goes: "Are we downhearted? No! Then let your voices ring, and altogether sing - are we downhearted? No!"
Read Satish Kumar, learn of his life, and we cannot be downhearted.
We can be saddened, and indeed we should be saddened, by the warring state of the world, about the harm being done to our planet in the past and in the present, shamed by the endless horrors of wars, and by that oft repeated and hollow refrain after the end of every war - that war has been so terrible that surely this last war has to be the war to end all wars.
Determination
And yet, despite his example, despite his fervent dedication and determination, in word and deed, to pass on his passion for peace, and harmony, our world still finds itself locked into a seemingly interminable cycle of war and self-destruction, with short intervals of peace, and then only more wars, more destruction.
His plea for peace has been well-founded. He learnt it as a child on his mother's lap, from his early religious beliefs, then through the other great peacemakers and peace-thinkers of his time, amongst them, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Bertrand Russell.
When we think of the suffering and horrors of past and present wars, from the cruelties of empires the world over, from ethnic cleansing, from the Holocaust, from all the wars currently raging in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Kashmir, in Myanmar - and elsewhere - we might despair entirely of humankind.
And with peace comes trust and progress.
But Satish Kumar does not allow himself or us to despair.
He knows that love, hope, faith and determination can and must conquer despair. I think he wants us to recognise the damage done to one another, to the Earth, the shame of what we do, to feel the pity of all we witness, and to choose instead peace and understanding as the only path out of this cycle of violence and destruction.
Resolved
He knows we long for peace, and gives us through his life and his words in this book, the hope of peace, and the determination to find a way to bring it about. And there are ways. We know this because it has happened in our time.
For more than five centuries there had been conflict and colonisation and suppression on the island of Ireland, leading to a war of independence, which came to be called in more recent times, 'the troubles'.
It was in fact a war, a civil war - often the most bitter of wars. Hate, alienation, resentment, persecution and fear, had brought years of violence to the north of Ireland, and indeed to the streets of Britain. There seemed to be no pathway to reconciliation and peace. The hurt was too deep on both sides of the divide.
But the longing tor peace was still there in the hearts of enough good people on both sides to try to end the war, to bring the factions to the table to talk peace. And now there is peace, not a perfect peace but peace nonetheless.
And with peace comes trust and progress. In the end there was enough goodwill, enough peace-loving people, to make it happen.
In South Africa, locked as it was in a hateful system of apartheid, it seemed inconceivable that the degradation and hurt engendered by both sides could ever be resolved peacefully.
Peacemakers
The world was bracing itself for a war of liberation in South Africa. And, but for a man of peace called Nelson Mandela, that is what would have happened. His walk to freedom after years of imprisonment, his lack of bitterness, his determination to make a peace when none looked remotely possible, saved the untold suffering war might have brought to the people of South Africa. He chose the path of peace. Again, it has not been a perfect peace, but it is peace. And with peace comes trust and progress.
What we learn from this is that it is the men and women of peace who inspire others to believe in it, to work for it, to set an example ourselves, to have the faith to believe that there can and will be peace in our time, in Ukraine, in Myanmar, in Sudan, Kashmir, that peace and harmony over all the Earth is achievable.
Satish Kumar has kept the faith, led by example, by teaching, and helped keep the flame of peace, the hope of peace, alive in hearts and minds all over the world. He knows, and we know, that the struggle is not yet over, that there is as much tyranny and greed in the world as ever, probably more.
But Satish believes, as we must believe with him, that war will be no more, that the peacemakers will inherit the Earth. And then all shall be well.
This Author
Michael Morpurgo is a children’s author who has written more than 150 books. He has served as Children’s Laureate, and won the Smarties Prize, the Writers Guild Award, and the Whitbread Award, among other accolades. He is a co-founder of Farms for City Children, alongside his wife, Clare.
This article first appeared as the foreword to Satish Kumar's latest book, Peace is Possible: Selected Works, published by Bloomsbury and available from today. Satish Kumar is a member of the management team, and is the founder, of the Resurgence Trust, which owns and publishes The Ecologist online.
