3.1K
Downloads
229
Episodes
Peace Is Here explores the deep architecture of a life unweaponed with a light-hearted touch and a scholar’s heart. Join Avis Kalfsbeek, writer of feisty fiction, for a daily curriculum of peace. We explore historic treaties, nature’s quiet wisdom, and the creative art-vision required for #TheGreatDisarmament. From deep-dive series on peace heroes to fiction stories and personal riffs, we look beneath the surface to see the peace that is already here.
Episodes
Monday Jan 05, 2026
Monday Jan 05, 2026
Experiment Zero - The Peace Experiments: Ch 5 - Arguments Against Peace, Interview Day
Kitty O’Compost spends a single morning gathering the most common objections to peace, beginning with a defense contractor’s carefully rehearsed fears and ending in a public school science lab where those fears are treated as testable claims rather than permanent truths.
As corporate language leans on economic anxiety, innovation myths, and national identity, a science teacher and her students respond with hypotheses, experiments, and clarity, reframing peace not as an aspiration but as a practice subject to evidence.
This chapter sharpens the divide between postponement as policy and inquiry as action, revealing how power protects itself through delay while younger minds quietly begin designing what comes next.
Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.
Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay
Sunday Jan 04, 2026
Sunday Jan 04, 2026
Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 4 - The Leak: Protocol of Postponement
In this chapter, Kitty receives an unexpected document that reveals how close the world is to disarmament and how far it remains from choosing it. What appears to be a serious plan for peace is revealed instead as a ritual of postponement, built from charts, committees, and comfort thresholds.
As Kitty reads deeper, the real obstacle becomes clear. The technology is ready, the safeguards are complete, and the systems can act. What is missing is not capacity but courage.
This chapter explores how bureaucratic language can function as a form of fear, how delay is disguised as responsibility, and how peace can be quietly stalled by those who insist it must first be made comfortable.
Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.
Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay
Saturday Jan 03, 2026
Saturday Jan 03, 2026
Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 3 - Scratch-Fact-Check, The Global Pothole
A routine local story takes an unexpected turn when Kitty O’Compost realizes her reporting has begun to attract attention far beyond Midway. What started as a single pothole on County Route 12 now sits at the center of a widening web of polite warnings, unfamiliar acronyms, and unusually interested observers.
As Marzipan delivers increasingly emphatic scratch-fact-checks, Kitty begins to name the pattern emerging beneath the language of “harmonization” and “metadata.” This chapter introduces the idea of the global pothole—the space between ordinary facts and the carefully managed stories meant to contain them—and marks the moment when simple journalism starts to feel like evidence.
Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.
Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay
Friday Jan 02, 2026
Friday Jan 02, 2026
Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 2 - The Council Meeting of Unwanted Attendance
Kitty O’Compost arrives at a so-called informational meeting in the Old Gym, where folding chairs, fluorescent lights, and carefully chosen language are meant to keep the public at a comfortable distance. Joined by Marzipan and an unexpected student attendee, Kitty listens as officials explain a new facility using jargon that seems designed to obscure more than it reveals.
As terms slip, silences stretch, and a forbidden idea briefly surfaces, the meeting exposes a quiet tension between governance and participation, secrecy and shared responsibility. What was meant to reassure instead sharpens Kitty’s sense that something important is being managed out of sight—and that certain concepts unsettle authority simply by being named.
Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.
Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
Get the 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay
Thursday Jan 01, 2026
Thursday Jan 01, 2026
Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 1 - Goats, Potholes, and Servers
Chapter One introduces Kitty O’Compost, a small-town reporter easing into an ordinary assignment in Midway, armed with a notebook, a sense of humor, and a highly observant goat named Marzipan. What begins as a routine walk toward town—past murals, potholes, and familiar civic neglect—takes an unexpected turn at the edge of a newly built facility that doesn’t quite belong.
This opening chapter sets the tone for The Peace Experiments: attentive, wry, and quietly unsettled. It’s a story about noticing small things, trusting instincts, and recognizing the moment when a local story begins to lean toward something larger—before anyone has named it, and before anyone admits they’re watching.
Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.
Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
Get the 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay
Wednesday Dec 31, 2025
Wednesday Dec 31, 2025
This year-end episode offers a moment to pause and take stock. Avis reflects on the work of Peace is Here in 2025, the questions that shaped the podcast, and what it has meant to study peace seriously in a world still organized around war.
The episode looks back on a year of daily practice through series such as Wolff Peace, The Great Disfarmament and The Great Disarmament, Architects of Enough, and the introduction of The Next Peacelands. It also marks personal and creative milestones, including the release of Mono Mutante, the first Kickstarter campaign, and the arrival of Kitty O’Compost.
Looking ahead, Avis shares the direction Peace is Here will take in 2026. The podcast moves into a more intentional curriculum, inviting listeners to become peace scholars through attention, inquiry, and lived moral practice. Peace will be explored through history, philosophy, satire, and fiction, with an emphasis on imagining peace as a practical path rather than a distant ideal.
The episode closes with The Tip of the Peaceberg Prayer, a quiet New Year reflection on gratitude, unweaponed life, and the deeper truth of peace beneath the surface of the world as it appears.
Tomorrow begins a new thirteen-episode fiction series, The Peace Experiments Experiment Zero, where a small town reporter, a fact-checking goat, and a group of young people begin asking the questions adults avoid.
Thank you for listening, for your presence this year, and for walking into the next one together.
Peace and love,
Avis
Download the Peace Was Here 2025 Podcast Recap book: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025
Get the Winter Holiday Reading list with links to the full stories: www.aviskalfsbeek.com/holiday
Get Avis’s books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
- Music: “Una Manana” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez
Bandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW
- Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments – Season Zero starts 1/1/26! (Ep 184)
Tuesday Dec 30, 2025
Tuesday Dec 30, 2025
Kitty Reads Lit for Peace: Edith Wharton – 12/30/25 (The ’Seventies) plus The Next Peacelands
This episode features a New Year’s-season reading from Edith Wharton’s story “New Year’s Day — The ’Seventies,” part of her 1924 collection Old New York. In this piece, Wharton examines memory, reputation, and the quiet consequences of a life lived under the watchful eye of society. Kitty reads a short excerpt that brings out Wharton’s signature blend of precision, empathy, and moral insight.
Kitty O’Compost continues warming up her reporter voice for the forthcoming Peace Is Here series The Peace Experiments exploring peace, AI, and the commons.
For this special holiday edition of The Next Peacelands, Avis Kalfsbeek changes her focus from the factual grounding of warzones and arms suppliers to highlight the spiritual organizations and networks actively building peace around the world.
- Get the Winter Holiday Reading list with links to the full stories: www.aviskalfsbeek.com/holiday
- Get Avis’s books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
- Music: “The Red Kite” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez
Bandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW
Intro Music: PulseBox on Pixabay
- Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments
- Edith Wharton – New Year’s Day (The ’Seventies) on Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61321
Monday Dec 29, 2025
Monday Dec 29, 2025
Kitty Reads Lit for Peace: Henry David Thoreau – A Winter Walk plus The Next Peacelands
This episode features a reflective reading from Henry David Thoreau’s 1843 essay A Winter Walk—a quiet meditation on landscape, attention, and the moral clarity that comes from observing nature with patience. Kitty reads a short excerpt that highlights Thoreau’s deliberate pace and his belief that paying attention is its own form of ethical living.
Kitty O’Compost continues warming up her reporter voice for the forthcoming Peace Is Here series The Peace Experiments exploring peace, AI, and the commons.
For this special holiday edition of The Next Peacelands, Avis Kalfsbeek changes her focus from the factual grounding of warzones and arms suppliers to highlight the spiritual organizations and networks actively building peace around the world.
- Get the Winter Holiday Reading list with links to the full stories: www.aviskalfsbeek.com/holiday
- Get Avis’s books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
- Music: “The Red Kite” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez
Bandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW
Intro Music: PulseBox on Pixabay
- Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments
• Henry David Thoreau – A Winter Walk on Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9846/pg9846-images.html#chap05
Sunday Dec 28, 2025
Sunday Dec 28, 2025
Kitty Reads Lit for Peace: Sarah Orne Jewett – “Aunt Cynthy Dallett” plus The Next Peacelands
This episode features a winter excerpt from Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Aunt Cynthy Dallett,” published in her 1899 collection The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories. Set in the snowy Maine hill country, the story offers a calm, closely observed portrait of kinship, hospitality, and the quiet bonds that hold a community together even in the most isolated seasons.
Kitty O’Compost continues warming up her reporter voice for the forthcoming Peace Is Here series The Peace Experiments exploring peace, AI, and the commons.
For this special holiday edition of The Next Peacelands, Avis Kalfsbeek changes her focus from the factual grounding of warzones and arms suppliers to highlight the spiritual organizations and networks actively building peace around the world.
- Get the Winter Holiday Reading list with links to the full stories: aviskalfsbeek.com/holiday
- Get Avis’s books: AvisKalfsbeek.com
- Music: “The Red Kite” by Javier “Peke” RodriguezBandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW
- Intro Music: PulseBox on Pixabay
- Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments
- Sarah Orne Jewett – “Aunt Cynthy Dallett” on Gutenberg:https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74980/pg74980-images.html#Page_279
Saturday Dec 27, 2025
Saturday Dec 27, 2025
Kitty Reads Lit for Peace: John Burroughs – Winter Sunshine plus The Next Peacelands
This episode features a winter selection from John Burroughs’ 1875 essay collection Winter Sunshine—a calm, observant reflection on landscape, weather, and the steadying practice of paying close attention. Kitty reads a short excerpt that highlights Burroughs’ quiet conviction that nature offers both clarity and companionship.
Kitty O’Compost continues warming up her reporter voice for the forthcoming Peace Is Here series The Peace Experiments exploring peace, AI, and the commons.
For this special holiday edition of The Next Peacelands, Avis Kalfsbeek changes her focus from the factual grounding of warzones and arms suppliers to highlight the spiritual organizations and networks actively building peace around the world.
- Get the Winter Holiday Reading list with links to the full stories: www.aviskalfsbeek.com/holiday
- Get Avis’s books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com
- Music: “The Red Kite” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez
Bandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW
Intro Music: PulseBox on Pixabay
- Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments
- John Burroughs – Winter Sunshine on Gutenberg (various editions): https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4279/pg4279-images.html