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Heartache and Gratitude 💜🫧

  • Writer: CPC
    CPC
  • Jul 2
  • 2 min read
Elder Melvin Giles, 28th Annual Community Peace Celebration
Elder Melvin Giles, 28th Annual Community Peace Celebration

How a heart can feel so broken yet continue to feel saturated with such love-


Only Melvin could teach us that grief and gratitude

are not opposites, but companions,

twins of love with different names.


With Melvin, there was always room.

Room for your story.

Room for your voice, your creativity, your ideas, your gifts.

Room for your wild, unfinished curiosity.

Room for healing in the hidden places.


His life was a living testament of synchronicity and the deepest hues of purple -


He showed up when it mattered most,

not just in body, but in truth. Not just in words, but in rooted presence.


He bore witness to pain, to joy, to mother earth, to community, to young spirits and minds and to the quiet, steady rise of hope.


Prophetic in love, poetic in justice, he always moved like water - soft and strong,carving new paths where others saw boulders.


Melvin taught us that many things could be true at once:

that peace could roar,

that resistance could be soft-handed,

that love could be fierce and gentle, stranger and familiar all at once.


He was a friend to all living things,

a mentor guiding and passing the torch,

a mirror when we needed to remember who we are and the places we come from, 

a garden where we all belonged.


Now we stand in the hollow his absence has left,

and yet, we are not alone.

We carry him in the marrow of our movements,

in the rhythm of our gatherings,

in the songs, the stories, the soil and dirt under our nails.



As John O’ Donohue says, “Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.You would want us to find you in presence,Besides us when beauty brightens,When kindness glows. And music echoes eternal tones.”



Melvin, we ache with your loss-

and yet we rise in the shape of your love.

You shaped this city, this soil, these hands, hearts, dreams and minds.

You’ve taught us how to stay soft in a hard world,

how to hold contradictions like precious stones,

how to keep showing up. You are not gone. But merely among a great cloud of witnesses, one of our good angels as you would say.



Forever the voice in the wind that says:


There is still more loving to do. More peace to plant. More being to be.

Most importantly, more bubbles to blow.



To Melvin with eternal thanks.

From this city, this world, and all the way to Jupiter. We love you so much.


Elder peace 💜🫧- The world is better, more purple and more beautiful because of the loving message of Peace you walked and talked. What a blessing to have been in the presence of a light who burned so brightly. What an honor to be able to carry that torch. We are grateful for his life and his legacy. 


Peace and Love,


The Community Peace Celebration Planning Team


 
 
 

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The Community Peace Celebration is an all-volunteer effort, and depends solely on financial support from local businesses, community organizations, and neighborhood friends. It is a grassroots effort, organized by the people in the community for the benefit of people in the community. The event is always free and open to the public, with games, live entertainment, food, and activities for all ages.

The Community Peace Celebration is fiscally sponsored by Twin Cities Community Land Trust (TCALT).

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