 So glad to see you all this evening. I would first of all like to acknowledge that we are standing on Abenaki land during this entire walk in ceremony. This is the 75th anniversary of the United States dropping the first atomic bomb on a large civilian population in Hiroshima and three days later another one in Nagasaki. There were something like 100,000 people killed immediately when the bomb dropped and then another 40,000 or so lingering deaths from the radiation. One of those deaths was a young girl, Sadako Sasaki, and we have a couple of signs that have a paper crane on one side of them. And Sadako was two when the bomb was dropped and she was 12 when she died of leukemia as an after effect of the radiation. She attempted to fold a thousand paper cranes. That was the legend that if you folded a thousand paper cranes you would get your wish. She did not reach a thousand, but since her death, children all over the world have been folding paper cranes on her behalf and there is a children's memorial in Hiroshima with all the paper cranes that children have been folding. Today the survivors of Hiroshima are asking the United Nations for a ban on nuclear weapons. Unfortunately the United States is not supporting bans. We are in fact budgeting for increased nuclear armament development. But all is not grim. Because today is also the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the United Nations Charter by 51 nations. And that charter was derived originally from the Atlantic Charter developed by the United States Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. So there are these two poles. Human beings can be very destructive and human beings can be very creative in a positive way. And it's really up to us. It's our choice which way we choose to go. Mary will now describe a bit about the slow walking that we will do as we proceed to our final circle at the high school. Husband said, it was an ancient Zen master, Lin Shi, that the miracle is not to walk on the water, the miracle is to walk on the earth. We can't wait on our governments. We can't wait for the next treaty to be signed for our governments to legislate peace. We can generate the energy of peace in the way that we walk. And that's how we're going to be walking tonight. We walk in such a way that we ground our awareness, our mindfulness in our feet as they contact the earth. We walk in a way that our feet are caressing the earth. I like to think that this is the way that native people, Jesus Christ, certainly the Buddha, who walked over hundreds of miles in his lifetime, even to the age of 80, say in slow pace. So we're going to ground all of our awareness into our feet. This church will sound the bell 75 times at 7.15, which is the hour adjusted to Eastern Standard Time when the first bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945. It could be two or three minutes, I don't know. But we may take it as a time, however we experience prayer, to come into a place of prayer, praying for peace. If you are given to Buddhist meditation, you might come back to your breath, but it's a time of stopping and calming. So I hope very much that this is a meaningful experience for all of you. It certainly has been in my life. It is a meditation practice, and it can when practiced deeply, it can generate a sense of renewal and a lot of peace. Most of you were not around when the bomb was dropped. I was, and my friend Eleanor Ott, she wrote a long poem, I'll just read a few lines from it about her experience when that bomb was dropped. Remember in 1945, I was nine. Mom, Dad and I were at Watson's on Atlantic and Fifth when we heard the Japanese surrender. The restaurant went wild. People ran around in the streets through toilet paper over the telephone lines. Yelled, laughed and cried all because of the A bomb when so many died. The safe world of childhood blew up too. Even then people knew we had made the bomb and the power to end our sure world. Nothing again was ever the same. We did it in everyone's name to make a peace. We now know was only the next move in a game of chess nobody can win. The Manhattan Project, which was the project that the United States secretly started in the early 40s to build the atomic bomb, eventually had over 100,000 people working on it, engineers, scientists, researchers, and none of them knew the entire picture. Very few of them knew what they were building. They knew they were working on a component. Some of them were working on a trigger, some of them were working on casements. They were working on various pieces of it, but eventually down in Los Alamos where they all came together, or at least many of them came together, and began to realize what they were making was a bomb. And many of them protested that, and that's something we don't know about the history of nuclear weapons, is that from their very beginning, people who knew what was going on began to say no. And that has gone on for the last 75 years. People from all over the world have said no. We've been led by the Hibakusha, the Japanese people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They're known as Hibakusha, and for years they had to be silent in Japan. But finally in the 50s they began to speak out, and people around the world joined them. We had what was called the Band the Bomb movement in the 1950s. People like the Catholic worker movement, who by the end of the Dorothy Day refused to go inside into the subways or into the air raid shelters during the shelter drills, because they did not want to encourage the use of nuclear weapons. Here in Vermont we have a similar history. People have been opposing nuclear weapons from the very beginning, and in the early 80s, the late 70s and early 80s a movement was begun here for the international movement to freeze the development of nuclear weapons. It was called the Nuclear Freeze Movement. Town meeting effort was held in the early 70s and 80, 81, and 177 Vermont towns voted for a nuclear weapons freeze. In 1982, on June 12th, a million people showed up in New York City, in Central Park area. And us Vermonters went down there, carrying 177 signs with towns that voted for a nuclear weapons freeze. And it began a movement that spread throughout the world. And finally in Reykjavik, Iceland, when President Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev, the chairman of the Soviet Union, they finally agreed that they would try to work for a nuclear weapons abolition, not abolition but not building anymore, a freeze. And since that time, people have continued to speak out and continue to work toward the abolition of all nuclear weapons. In 1972, a nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty was signed by all the nuclear weapons states and all the nations of the world. And the nuclear weapons states agreed at that time that they would abolish their nuclear weapons if the non-nuclear states did not develop them. And that held until recently. In the late 80s and early 90s, the nuclear weapons opposition slowed down, but it again picked up in the late 90s. And here in Vermont, again, we went to town meeting and towns all over Vermont voted for a nuclear weapons abolition, not a freeze, but a mutual, verifiable nuclear weapons abolition treaty. It was then that the Vermont Senate and the Vermont House voted on a resolution which called on the United States government to enter into negotiations with the other nuclear weapons states so that they would negotiate a mutual, verifiable treaty to abolish nuclear weapons. Vermont legislature is the only state legislature in the nation to have done this. And the abolition of nuclear weapons, the work for abolition continues throughout the world. This is a beautiful circle because we need to wear masks and keep distancing. We are not doing our usual candle boat float down the river. We are not singing. We are not having a discussion where we would have to shout. What we are doing instead is asking each of us to make our own commitment to help create peace in the coming year. It can be creating inner peace. It can be creating outward peace. Whatever is your way of creating peace in this world, we cannot take peace for granted. We cannot take democracy for granted. We cannot take life for granted. These all have to be nourished. So what we're asking tonight is that you make a commitment to help nourish peace because it needs nourishment very badly. In the center of the circle are some flowers and some little battery-powered tea lights. As you are ready to make your commitment, would you step forward, take one of those tea lights, come back in the circle, speak your commitment to the person to your left. Speaking the commitment is important. It's important to have a witness to a commitment. When you have done that, there's a little switch at the bottom of the tea light. Turn that little switch on. Hold up your light and say, that little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Meaning I'm going to nourish peace. I'm going to do my part. Keep your candle to take home to remind you of the commitment you have made tonight. And then at the end, when everybody has made their commitments and turned on their lights, we will all lift our lights and say, it shines. And thank you so much for joining us here this evening. We will be taking the flowers down to the river in distance to watch the flowers go our welcome to do that.