WHAT DOES PEACE LOOK LIKE TO YOU?
Peace is often spoken of as a time when conflict has ceased and people can finally breathe. But true peace is not simply the absence of war or violence. It is the presence of justice, dignity, and the conditions that allow every person and community to flourish.
Peace looks different depending on where you stand.
For someone fleeing conflict, peace may begin with safe shelter, a welcome at the border, and the assurance that their children can grow without fear.
For a family sleeping rough, peace might look like a set of keys placed gently in their hands, a home that is safe, warm, and theirs.
For an elder isolated by loneliness, peace may be the sound of a knock on the door and the warmth of someone saying, “I’m here.”
For the earth itself, peace looks like restraint, renewal, and a commitment to care for all that has been entrusted to us.
At its heart, peace is relational
It is found in how we treat one another, how we listen, how we repair what has been broken, and how we protect the vulnerable. Peace grows through everyday acts like sharing meals, extending compassion, standing up for someone who has been silenced, choosing dialogue over division, generosity over judgement. It is nurtured in communities willing to tell the truth about injustice and brave enough to imagine something better.
But peace is also structural. It demands systems that uphold human rights, policies that protect rather than punish, and institutions that serve the common good. Peace calls us to dismantle the harms that create inequality: racism, poverty, violence, environmental destruction, and to build pathways where dignity, opportunity, and safety are not privileges but birth rights.
For peace to be real, it must include everyone. It must reach the person at the margins, the land and waters sustaining us, and the generations who come after us. Peace is collective; it binds us together. When one community suffers injustice, peace is fractured for us all. When we uplift the small, the struggling, and the overlooked, we strengthen the fabric that holds us together.
Ultimately, peace begins with the courage to imagine a world shaped not by fear or scarcity, but by compassion, justice, and shared humanity. It grows when individuals and communities choose to walk gently, to speak boldly, and to act with hope.
Peace is possible, not as a distant ideal, but as a daily practice. It is something we build together.
Hellen P
Peace to me is more than just the absence of war and conflict, it's also a way we live and connect to each other. As a Solomon Islander I have come to know that peace is something that was deeply rooted in our cultural values,traditions and norms and also the relationship we had in our community and land. As I grew up in a home my grandparents practiced and valued traditions a lot, they always told me and my siblings to respect our elders,respect one another and respect the people in our community. In my community I experienced peace by staying connected to each other, in simple moments like sitting under a mango tree with my grandparents as they shared stories from our culture, also laughing with my cousins after church, walking home in the evening with the sound of birds singing and the sun setting behind the hills. These small memories made me realise that peace is sometimes found in the way we care for each other, share food and sit together to solve problems in our community. I remember one time when two families in our village had a disagreement over land.There was tension and both families stopped talking to each other,but our chiefs stepped in and called the two families together. They sat under the big tree near our church,and the chiefs gave both families a chance to speak. There were tears,but there was also listening. In the end they found a fair solution.The families shook hands, shared meals together ,and life went back to normal. That moment showed me how powerful peace can be when we choose to talk and forgive each other. In my culture, peace is not just about fighting, it’s about togetherness, we help each other especially in hard times. Whether it's building homes after storms or sharing food with a family in need, our strength comes from unity. I feel peace when I walk through the village, hear the waves on the shore, or sit with my family singing and praying. These simple things remind me that peace is also found in everyday moments of our life as well. So to my own understanding peace starts in our heart, if I am kind, patient and respectful, I am helping create peace around me. My culture has taught me that peace is not something you wait for, it's something you build everyday with your actions and your words. Peace doesn’t have to be big or dramatic. It can start small. It can start with me.
Pushpa K
“Peace is not something we wait for; it’s something we choose to build, together.” To me, peace isn’t just about silence or sitting still. It’s something I try to create for myself, especially when life feels full. With studying and working both taking up a big part of my time, I have realised that peace isn’t something I can always wait for. I have to find it in small ways, even on busy or stressful days. Back in Nepal, I often heard the word “Shanti” during prayers or in conversations. At that time, I didn’t think much about it. But after moving to Australia and starting a new chapter in life, I have come to understand how important peace really is. For me, it’s not just a feeling. It’s way of living, thinking, and connecting with others. I feel peace when I take a quiet walk, listen to my favourite music, or make time to rest after a long day. But I also feel it when I complete a task I was struggling with or remind myself that I have learned that peace doesn’t mean everything has to be perfect. It means I try to stay calm, kind, and focused no matter what. Juggling with study and work is not always easy and there are times when I feel tired or overwhelmed. But during those moments, I remind myself of how far I have come. I have built routines, learned new things, and stayed strong through change. That gives me a sense of peace and confidence in myself. In my culture, peace is closely tied to value like respect, balance, and harmony. I try to carry those values into my everyday life. Whether I’m working with others, attending class, or just going through a busy week, I have found that patience and understanding go a long way. When we treat people kindly, we also feel more peaceful ourselves. Looking at the world, I know not everyone gets to live in peace. Many people face hardship, discrimination, or conflict. That’s why I believe peace should be more than just a personal goal. It should be something we all help to build. We can do that through compassion, inclusion, and standing up for what’s right. For me, peace is a daily choice. Even when I’m tried or stressed, I try to stay hopeful, grounded, and kind. That’s how I’ve learned to find peace not by waiting for things to calm down, but by creating it through how I live my every day.
WHY DOES PEACE MATTER?
So everyone knows they are valued and they are safe from harm
It matters as it is our right.
Solidarity with communities across the world.
It is the foundation we need for every other aspect of life
Peace and peace methods are a feature of an evolved society
So earth and everyone on it can have a future
Who enjoys conflict?
Because I want a world, and an Australia, where all people are safe, equal and living in harmony
War is horrific!! As humans living together it's a better option to care for each other and live together in harmony and with respect for each other. Peace is about finding ways to do that.
It is about being in a situation where I and all those around me are fully alive, supporting each other. It is about being in a situation where all beings, living and non living.
A cohesive society is a happier society 🥰
Peace enables dialogue, that despite differences, can move us beyond hatred and division and a desire for vengeance, towards mutual understandings of justice and ways to live in harmony. Perhaps real peace begins with individual change of heart and forgiveness for self and others.
Peace comes from love. As a Catholic, this is the core of my being and existence that is meant to be lived and shared amongst all nations. I come from a multicultural upbringing being born and raised in the Middle East until high school, then moving to Asia for tertiary education before moving to Australia as a young adult professional. My lived experiences has shaped me to have a global perspective of creating peace and harmony living with diverse multicultural and interfaith communities.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with watching the world from far away. We scroll through our phones and we see it — the rubble, the faces, the numbers that were also people. We sit with our families at dinner and we don't quite know what to say. We lay awake. We feel the distance between ourselves and the suffering, and somehow that distance made it worse, not better. We wonder what, if anything, we could do.
Fold for Peace began with that feeling. It did not try to escape it.
It began with the honest acknowledgement that many of us were carrying a quiet despair — about Gaza, about Ukraine, about Sudan, about the places that had dropped from the headlines but not from the hearts of the communities who called Sydney home. It began with the recognition that hopelessness, in that moment, was not weakness. It was the natural response of a person who still believed that human life was sacred, and who could not reconcile that belief with what they saw. But Fold for Peace also began with something else — the stubborn, ancient, deeply human refusal to stop hoping anyway.
The paper crane had carried peace for a long time. Most of us knew the story of Sadako Sasaki — the Japanese girl who, sick from radiation after Hiroshima, folded cranes one by one from whatever paper she could find. The old legend promised that one thousand cranes would grant a wish. Sadako wished to live. She wished for peace. She did not finish her thousand. But others finished them for her, and the crane became a symbol not just of peace, but of what it meant to keep folding even when you were not sure you would see the end.
There was something in that story that belonged to that moment. We were not folding because we knew how it ended. We were folding because we refused to do nothing. Because a small, deliberate act of beauty was its own kind of resistance. Because the hands that folded a dove were hands that had chosen, at least in that moment, gentleness over despair.
Across Sydney, people folded. In kitchens and classrooms, in community halls and places of worship, in parks where children played and along foreshores where the water held the sky. People of every background, every faith, every story. People who carried the conflicts of this world not as distant news but as personal grief — families separated by borders, communities fractured by violence, cultures trying to survive.
They folded, and they placed their dove somewhere that felt like peace to them, and they took a photograph. Not to perform peace. Not to pretend that a paper bird changed anything on a battlefield. But to say, quietly and together: I am still here. I still believe in this. And I am not alone. That was what this mosaic became, not a collection of photographs, but a map of solidarity. Proof, visible and growing, that across this one city on this one day, thousands of people chose to hold onto hope rather than surrender to despair.
To everyone who folded, we want you to know something. The grief you felt was real, and it was right. The helplessness was real too. You were not failing the world by not knowing what to do. You were simply a person who cared, in a time when caring was costly. But you were not carrying it alone. You were part of something, other hands folding, other faces sitting quietly with the same weight, a whole city that had not stopped hoping. A mosaic that grew, dove by dove, suburb by suburb, into something none of us could have made on our own. Peace is not only a destination. It is also a practice returned to, again and again, by people who had every reason to give up and chose not to. You folded your dove. You found your place of peace. You shared it. And you were not alone in hoping.
