by Aggie Perilli
I grew up with two beloved aunts who served as Roman Catholic Filopino nuns. Sisters Mary and Teresa, taught first grade and music, respectively, the latter also a musical conductor at the private all-girls Villa Victoria Academy in New Jersey.
As a Catholic grade-schooler in the 1960s, I dreamed I, too, would one day become a nun. This posed a dilemma because I just as enthusiastically wanted to be a go-go dancer on American Bandstand.
As a teenager, I explored my evolving passions and concerns writing poetry and prose in handcrafted books headlined with my hopes and visions. In my book on peace, I wrote to alleviate my fear for the lives of boys a little older than my brother, Bill, drafted to fight in our reportedly avoidable Vietnam war.
At the privacy of my bedroom desk overlooking our family’s tree-canopied yard, I prayed for the safe return of soldiers, and for peace to return to the lives and livelihoods of the Vietnamese people in their beloved homeland. I felt confident journalistic investigations into the truth and peace of oneness would unite us.
In a private book illustrated with my charcoal and pastel sketches, I also secretly professed my love for a blond upperclassman.
After the Vietnam War ended, I continued to journal as I completed my bachelor’s degree in magazine communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. Four days after my last class, I launched my career as a reporter for The Princeton Packet newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey, where my investigative journalism on neighboring municipalities’ collaborative land management would be awarded by the New Jersey Press Association. Later recruited to serve as social editor, I enjoyed also writing monthly magazine articles and occasional opinion columns.
In the mid-1980s, to realize my dream of creating original communications, I completed the postgraduate Radcliffe book and magazine publishing program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. Recruited from Radcliffe, I helped the European Travel & Life (ET&L) magazine in New York establish an advertising section that exceeded business expectations from our first bi-monthly issue.
Before I launched Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI) in 1990, I joined a four-member editorial team who transformed a biweekly New York trade newspaper into the monthly Housewares Retailing magazine. I later
Go-Go Nun Turns Mystic
Throughout APCI’s more than 30 years in business, I’ve also practiced spiritually motivated yoga, Reiki and complementary forms of mind-body healing. As the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi wrote, I have “let the beauty of what I love be what I do.”
In 2009, I married the brilliantly empathetic Michael Evans and became proud stepmother to similarly health- and fitness-conscious, Justin, a pre-med student soon to become an osteopathic Emergency Room doctor. Kindred spirits, we enjoyed sharing evolving enthusiasms and concerns.
During Justin’s medical residency in 2018, he found himself addressing the consequences of mankind’s accountable catastrophic exploitation of Mother Nature and climate change firsthand. Justin interned at a hospital near Camp Fire, California, during one of the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfires. Ashy air and acrid fumes caused ER visits especially among asthmatics, the elderly and children.
For the love of all children, I write my upcoming book, Communicate! When Push Comes to Love, after more climate-related deaths, preventable wars and gun violence, mass displacements, and billions of dollars in losses and essential repairs.
Communicate! When Push Comes to Love will explore the power of reflection in forward-thinking communications across interrelated areas of our lives. With today’s investigative reporting undermined by financial and partisan conflicts of interest, even accomplished communicators claim to have little idea how to unify acrimonious or frightened and acquiescent voters around our urgent need to prevent and potentially reverse the worst military and climate disasters.
Simultaneous crises span domestic and global terrorism and violence; racism and refugee crises; and the probable carcinogens in our food, tap water, and myriad products and processes yet to be independently tested and regulated for individual health and safety.
You, the reader, are needed to ensure universal safety and well-being the perfectly imperfect way only you can.
Become Like Children
Thankfully, more than one child is leading our world’s life-saving shift to transformative awareness and proactive responsiveness across government and industry now, rather than at an arbitrary future date that never arrives or is too late.
Many of us watched or heard Greta Thunberg of Sweden, at age 16, speak on humanity’s closing window of opportunity to mitigate and, as yet, potentionally reverse the worst catastrophic droughts and fires, elevated sea levels and floods, and bee die-offs in our Earth’s sixth mass extinction of a million species already underway. In September 2019, Greta rallied millions of people from 185 countries to fill our streets and insist all sectors of society partner in mitigating global warming now when we still can.
In the calamitous area of gun violence, since a 20-year-old shot and killed 20 children and six staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, child survivors and the families of victims and supporters have insisted legislators pass commonsense gun regulations. As of mid-November 2022, the Giffords Law Center established to Prevent Gun Violence reported that “45 states have enacted more than 350 gun-safety laws.”
Meanwhile, despite evidence that sensible gun laws save lives, extremist legislators passed reckless laws, such as permitless carry. This law accountably enables individuals who have neither a permit nor requisite safety training to carry concealed loaded guns in public.
To ensure universal safety and well-being, communication is essential, as my dad, Gus Perilli, illustrated as a teenager during World World II with the following editorial cartoon.
“But I thought you were supposed to land the plane!”
My vision is that Communicate! When Push Comes to Love helps more of us become as faithful to oneness and love as children. Highlighted is the meaning and purpose of communication to empathize and share understanding and universally enriching partnerships.
Even though communications is my calling as much as my career, I can find empathy and shared understanding as challenging as anyone amid today’s exploitative lies and where inclusive life-saving boundaries and universal values are threatened or compromised. I can vacillate between harsh arguments and enabling acquiescence rather than ensure healthful trust-building boundaries and equitably enthusiastic partnerships.
Communicate! When Push Comes to Love will explore unifying ways to ensure the only true and lasting power of love for ourselves, all interconnected beings and the native organic environment that so wildly beautifully sustains us.
How are you communicating the palpable peace and joy of oneness in your life and vocation?
Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
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