Looking Back

Almost twenty years ago, I began troubling the word peace. Like many of us, I had long imagined peace as the cessation of violence, the arrival of stillness, the mutual exhale after the fire. But something in the word felt false—a bait-and-switch coded in its history. Upon investigation, I found its root was not the open palm or the gentle breath, but the iron fist of control.

Pax, the Latin seed of “peace,” is not freedom from conflict. It means to pack down, drive in, trap movement. It is the false quiet that follows conquest. The broken bodies beneath the Roman road. The silence after a screaming has been contained. To call for peace, in this sense, is to ask for cessation—but not healing. It is to plaster over rupture with domination disguised as order.

And so, I began to seek another word: not peace as absence of trouble, but tranquility as the movement through it.

The Current Empire and the Damaged Self

We live under an empire of control—not always by force, but by saturation. The society of control, as Deleuze warned us, is not a prison with bars but a field without exit. Here, identity is performance measured by metrics; relationships are transactions; healing is marketed as a luxury. Every self becomes a brand, every disagreement an algorithmic divide. In such a world, relationships fray. Communities rupture. The self fragments under endless demand to optimize and conform.

It is here, in this churning wreckage, that we must call upon three wyrd-wayfaring notions:

• Reversion
• Reconciliation
• Restoration

These are not doctrines. They are drifts. Each is a movement, not a final state. Each opposes the Empire’s Pax with gestures of return, repair, and re-weaving.

Reversion: Turning Gently Back Without Repeating

Reversion is not regression. It is a curved path—not back to what was, but toward what was lost or overlooked. In a damaged self, reversion means returning to an earlier version of ourselves not to remain there, but to retrieve something vital.

This is joyful song we used to hum before survival silenced us. A favorite name we abandoned out of shame or coercion. A buzzing memory that, while painful, contains our root.

Reversion heals not by reversing time, but by revisiting the points of fracture with presence and care. It asks: What did I lose when I was told to be acceptable? It helps us recover the pieces that were disowned—and choose, this time, to hold them to heart.

Reconciliation: Holding the Friction Without Forcing Harmony

Most are taught that reconciliation means coming back together by agreement, a resolution that makes all parties feel good. But this, again, is Pax thinking. Reconciliation in the WYRD way means the willingness to stay in friction without requiring erasure of the valley that arose within a relationship.

It is the dance between harmed and harmer, between past self and present one, between what we hoped for and what really happened. It requires presence, not perfect words. It is sitting across from someone who broke you—or whom you broke—and choosing not to flee.

Reconciliation when authentically engaged with care becomes a trance of trembling honesty. It is when two beings agree to remain visible to one another despite the pain.

And for those we cannot sit with—because they are gone, or unsafe—reconciliation may be with the wound itself. It may mean saying: this hurt me, and I will carry it without denying its shape. For the trauma, the wound in flesh and/or in spirit, abides as manifestation of the chasm between.

Restoration: Becoming Again Without Pretending Nothing Happened

Restoration is not the same as returning to a previous state. Restoration accepts that some things cannot be put back as they were. Instead, it asks: how can we make something whole out of what remains?

In a world shaped by the Current Empire’s cycles of extraction and betrayal, restoration must be inventive. It does not ask the broken to become unbroken. It honors scars. It makes beauty from salvage.

• In friendship: restoration may mean new rituals of trust.
• In body: restoration may mean new forms of care that were never modeled.
• In society: restoration must mean new systems that resist turning harm into norm.

The Empire desires repair without transformation. But true restoration insists: we will not go back to what was killing us just to pretend we’re healed.

Tranquility: The Way of Transisting

Where peace commands cessation, tranquility is the grace of continuity within tension.

To be tranquil is not to be unshaken, but to be grounded while shaking. It is the rhythm of breath beneath the argument. The eye contact that does not flinch. The dance of reconciliation that moves because the past is not denied but carried.

Tranquility is the spiritual tone of transisting—the movement through, with, and beyond contradiction. It is neither submission nor resolution. It is the stormwalker’s calm, the survivor’s laugh, the sound of two wounded people humming a new harmony that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Closing Drift

Reversion, Reconciliation, and Restoration do not offer us “peace” in the imperial sense. They do not demand we pack down our wildness, bind our movement, or silence our truths.

They offer us a tranquil way through the chaos—one rooted in ambiguity, presence, and the ever-unfinished weave of becoming. In a time when we are urged to perform healing as content and commodify forgiveness as virtue, these practices invite us to linger in the WYRD. To return without retreating. To connect without conquest. To rebuild without pretending the ruins were never there.

Let us not strive for peace. Let us cultivate the kind of tranquility that remembers everything and still sings.