Check out what Presbyterian Lura Pierce, a retired teacher, has been doing in retirement:
The time has come to travel for peace. I will carry the originally designed butterfly peace quilt wherever I am invited. I will tell the story of adolescents researching the U.S. Nobel Peace Laureates and then internalizing their own individual ways of becoming peacemakers. I will tell about their teaching peace to classrooms of first, second, third and fourth graders and to parents, siblings, grandparents, and other adults. These sixth graders commissioned the quilt from a fabric artist for $30.00 in pennies. I will simply spread the visions of peace they adopted and taught and sent to Oprah Winfrey in postcard form. Oprah's P.O. Box is still receiving postcards for peace. 1,000,000 is the goal. I will pack my carpet bag with that peace quilt to travel around the world in 80 days. In my mind at least. I like metaphors and teachers exaggerate. But, I did promise the kids.
And:
Outline Story of a Teacher's Promise: Sixth grade students researched 23(now 24) U.S. Nobel Peace Prize winners last year. Heroes' lives inspired unique dreams of making the world a better place. These word-pictures were mailed as illustrated vision-of-peace postcards to O's PO Box. Kids set a goal to inspire 1,000,000 others to write cards. They actively taught all ages to write ways to make a peaceful difference; the acceptance of diversity was paramount. Over 1,000 anonymous cards were mailed but school ended. I promised to continue promoting their goal. I promised to spend one year taking a peace quilt "around the world" sharing their words of hope that will inspire more cards to be made and sent. But then came last night's news: "Oprah's show is ending in a year." The time has come for readers and viewers to twitter, tweet, e-mail, and write postcards of peace…to inundate the Oprah airways and P.O. Box. As someone I overheard in Albertsons say this week, "Peace is in the small details." Listen to the children.
Lura is coming to the end of her journey. It will be interesting to see where her call to peacemaking will lead her next.
The photo is from Lura's blog.