Responding to the Moment

I don’t have skillful personal thoughts to add to the rightfully-cacophonous and beautiful responses that already exist to this moment. But I do have gratitude for all of you, in whatever small or big things you’re doing to be loving to both yourself and others. And I will re-affirm that any person or nation’s freedom that relies on the harm or oppression of any others isn’t freedom. No one is free until everyone is free.

What I do want to share, are two sources of insight that are helping me navigate these times:

1) A 12-minute talk from Thanissaro Bhikkhu that my teacher, Cittasubha, shared. It’s one of my favorites talks if I’m feeling overwhelmed by seeing suffering or hardship in self/others. He talks about being aware of what is difficult, and balancing that with a clarity and confidence that there is a way through, and that all of our actions matter. His context is talking about buddhist practice, but we can expand his insights to our context in the cultural/political moment.

2) What has been an intellectually fortifying (and free) curated collection of essays, put together by Toi Marie Smith, called The Deepening. My ability to understand american history, and what is happening socio-politically right now has been improved significantly by these essays.

[For those like me, who have a hard time reading manually on a screen or prefer audiobooks, I’ve been having my computer read the essays to me using the speech function! It’s been really helpful, and I can’t recommend the computer speech function enough.]