Pause for Peace: For Citizenship

poem by John O'Donohue

A thousand people, dressed in bright colors to make each letter, gathered at Main Beach in Santa Cruz, California on May 31, 2025 to create this resistance beach art.

I hope you enjoy this Midweek Pause for Peace. Each Wednesday, I pair an image with a poem—a little something for your heart and your nervous system.

—Laura

I love street art. I guess you’d call this beach art, created and sponsored by Indivisible Santa Cruz to protest the Trump regime and celebrate the 50th celebration of Gay Pride Santa Cruz.

And here’s a poem to go with it.

One of the books that always teeters on the stack next to my bed is To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by Irish poet, John O’Donohue. I often turn to this book to choose a poem to send a family member, friend, or student on the occasion of a celebration, a turning point, a tragedy, a life passage or a death.

Within its pages, there is almost always the right blessing for the occasion: for love in a time of conflict, for friendship, for a new home, for the traveler, for the friend on the arrival of illness, for the parents whose child has committed a crime, on passing a graveyard, on meeting a stranger, for the artist at the start of day, and many, many more.

O’Donohue’s blessing, For Citizenship, feels so timely today.

For Citizenship

by John O’Donohue

In these times when anger

Is turned into anxiety

And someone has stolen

The horizons and mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down

And their eyes gleam with reflection

From aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

That we may have courage

To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home.

John O'Donohue (1956-2008) was an Irish poet, philosopher, and former Catholic priest known for his writings on spirituality, beauty, and friendship.