Under construction, almost ready

There has been nothing for me to photograph for the past two days but my hovering hands over the keyboard of a laptop. For two years I have been trying to pull together a critical mass of people grounded in meditation and the ethics of non-harming, ready to take their ethics off the meditation cushion and into the streets. This year, some persistent, energetic, creative people have joined me, and...(fanfare)...

We will have a public meditation before the Climate March on April 29, and we will have a walking meditation on May Day before the big rally. After those two events, we will come together to tweak our process, and we hope to go on offering public meditation before demonstrations and rallies for as long as it takes, or for as long as we can. We have a banner, buttons, and bandanas to identify ourselves to each other when we are in the streets, and we are ready to stand for all who are currently threatened by the war-mongering billionaire class that has taken over the USA. It has taken more screens full of digital words to bring this to fruition than I would ever have imagined. I feel I’ve been living in clouds of words. We've had many meetings and a few trial runs. And here we are. Almost ready.

There are many teachers who have paved the way for Engaged Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh. Angel Kyodo Williams. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Last month a scholar-monk called Bikkhu Bodhi got stuck in California because of cancelled flights, and he ended up offering a Q&A with James Baraz at a meditation center called Spirit Rock. Here’s a link to it, and if you are interested, I suggest you click on the link, pause it while it loads, and slide forward to minute 25. As the question-and-answer session heats up, Bikkhu Bodhi really spits it out. He says we can use our moral outrage in wholesome and beneficial ways. He distinguishes between detrimental anger and fierce compassion, and he says the current US administration is not “conservative,” but mean-spirited, greedy, and evil. I find his talk riveting.