Johnny Peaceseed

My name is John Elmer Lee. In the Spring of 2003 Johnny Peaceseed was born. Johnny Peaceseed was to be my alter-ego. The name was chosen as I struggled with the hypocrisies of war, and how I might contribute to the peace movement. The name allowed me to step out of my skin, and any reluctance I might feel about standing out in a crowd. Johnny allowed me to make speeches on the steps of the legislature, to design and distribute t-shirts and buttons, to write blogs, to become comfortable outside my comfort zone.

Johnny was born out of anger and frustration at the willingness of my fellows to join the chorus for war. At the time, Johnny often wrote of peace, but anger was his engine. Eventually, I turned my gaze to unfounded belief, and saw that it was the ultimate engine that kept humanity in a perpetual state of unrest, uncertainty and the willingness to follow heartless paths. I saw that, in our reliance on language, belief was a fundamentally overarching false path. I did not write of this for many years because it took many years to fully realize the implications of that awareness, and how deeply encompassing humanity’s attachment to belief has become.

Johnny slept for the last six years while I studied disease, health care systems, cures and false hopes, and what healing truly was. That study ended with the death of my wife. I was left adrift in grief. Drowning in dark thoughts. Why had we failed? Was there more I could have done?

Finally finding peace with those unanswerable questions left me, once again, where I had started over two decades ago, and in July of this year I reawakened my alter-ego Johnny. Only not as the firebrand, full of blame and recrimination, but as the one who had been born sixteen years ago, the lost and then found lover.

On the First of July of this year, I decided to listen my intuitive mind and restart our long ago conversation about belief, and I, as my intuitive mind’s scribe, began to write once more. In case you are wondering, the intuitive mind is where our emotional and global thinking brain lives. It was then that I saw it fitting to give my intuitive mind a name, and so once again, I chose Johnny Peaceseed. Johnny and I had learned a great deal from our years of service to my wife, and birds, and nature. We learned that that anger begets anger, that hate begets hate, that selfishness creates loneliness and that love is always the answer. That love is all that we humans possess that will allow the restoration of balance. Loving ourselves, loving humankind with all it’s flaws. Loving the Earth and all her children.

As one who was awakened and who flirted with enlightenment for many years, I can finally say Johnny and I are back on the path. Love has healed our heart. We are gratefully still alert, and we are ready to tilt at the windmills of belief once more. In the past, what kept us from remaining awake continuously was inconsistency in our practices, losing our way for a while, and getting lost in another’s suffering.

We finally realized that the lack of discipline was most responsible for our erratic journey. We had spun our metaphorical wheels, until the day we finally decided to stop flirting, and started to develop the practices and disciplines necessary to stay awake. In spite of our turbulent journey, we cherish each moment of clarity, and the abiding purpose that still guides us. We can expect no more.

It is Johnny’s and my intention to plant seeds of peace wherever we can, and to follow a path with heart as long as we both shall live. And hopefully we live to exactly the same age, for I would be totally lost without Johnny’s wise counsel, whereas unfettered by linear me, he would probably thrive.

One thing you should know is that when I decided to write Path Finder, Johnny, my intuitive made, woke me up in the middle of the night, every night for six months, with bits and pieces that went into the creation of the book. All the ideas and themes in the book came from there. In truth, I was merely the scribe…

John Elmer Lee