The woman who believed that peace is a daily process

She has been called the “matriarch” of 20th century peace research, as one of the pioneers of the Peace and Conflict Studies academic movement. Elise Boulding was born in Norway in 1920 and her parents migrated to the United States in 1923 when she was all of three years old. Growing up during the World War II years, was life-altering. All of her and her family’s hopes, of having a safe haven to return to, were dashed when Germany invaded Norway in 1940. “That was when I realised that there was no safe place on earth,” says Elise. It was this primal childhood experience that was to set the stage for her life’s mission — the mission to create a peaceful world.

Elise’s seminal work arose out of identifying the role of the family in educating toward social change, and the role women have played in peacemaking. Her spiritual faith as a Quaker was the foundation from which she built both her profound life philosophy and career. Elise believed that peace in societies begins at an daily level between individuals. She reasoned that truly mutual “power with” relationships rather than hierarchical “power-over” relationships develop between individuals who can strike the “right balance” between two basic human impulses that create social tension — the need for autonomy and the need for connectedness. To her, in a culture of peace, people don’t suppress or eliminate conflict or difference, but rather, deal creatively with such issues as they arise naturally in everyday life. 
This lady lived out the creed she advocated in real life as well. To paraphrase a family friend, “(Elise) is a person who has been able to stretch so far the limits of human experience that she could address the United Nations with no problem and then, in the next second, stoop to tie a child’s shoe and be aware of the needs of both at the same time”
During the last decade of her life, in 2000, this remarkable lady released her magnum opus Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History, the essence of which was, in her own words, “Most people thought of peace as somewhere other than where they lived, and war as over there, and government somewhere else. But, I saw that peace-making is woven into every aspect of our lives.” After a half-century in the spotlight and in the twilight years of her life from the time she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, she gradually slowed the pace of her activities to match the limits ageing had imposed on her.  
On May 28, 2010, sitting with writer Virginia Benson on the patio of her retirement home, less than a month before she died, Elise recited impromptu a final, joyous ode to the trees visible from her window:

“Everything is in the now.
The trees and the sky 
And you and I
We’re in the now!
See the wind dancing in the trees.
Or is it the trees dancing in the wind?
Trees can’t dance without the wind 
The wind can’t dance without the trees.
We all need each other
And I need you
And you need me.
Now, I’m waving in the wind.
Everything needs everything.” 

The author is a spiritual writer with dna