Lion’s Roar Affiliate Editor Pamela Ayo Yetunde introduces the Might 2022 challenge.
Photographs: Thich Nhat Hanh © Dana Gluckstein / mptvimages.com; bell hooks by Liza Matthews
“What has the USA ever finished to anybody?”
This was the query requested by a girl whose again was to me as we stood within the ticket line. It was September 11, 2001, and we had been in an overcrowded airport in Tucson, Arizona. I don’t know if her query got here out of shock, defensiveness, or actual historic and political naivete.
Though I used to be conscious of a listing of issues the U.S. had finished, it was one other reply to her query that got here to me a month later when somebody gave me the e book Touching Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh.
The primary meditation within the e book invited me to note my in-breath and out-breath and visualize myself because the nonhuman elements of nature. I used to be anxious in regards to the U.S.’s impending retaliation for 9/11, however the follow was so highly effective I felt my nervousness remodel the very first time I attempted it. Captivated by this expertise, I started my every day meditation follow that very day.
By studying Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings, I got here to know that the U.S. has repeatedly engaged in wars in opposition to others largely due to the wars we wage on ourselves. This was the reply to the girl’s query that Thich Nhat Hanh led me to. We deny the reality of our geopolitical greed, feed our aggression with violent leisure, put money into industries that produce intoxicants, and typically refuse to interact on this planet collaboratively.
As reported on this challenge, Thay informed a blunt reality to dharma trainer Peggy Rowe Ward in regards to the racial violence she and her husband Larry Ward had endured as an interracial couple: “You’ve got numerous work to do in the USA.” This work could be finished if, as Larry Ward places it, we’re “remodeling the breaking waves of our shadows.” In different phrases, it may be finished if we heal our fractured elements, and that is what Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings have helped the Wards—and so many others—to do.
Thich Nhat Hanh died on January 22, 2022. Now that he has transitioned, how will we proceed his instructing to stay with peace in each step?
Thay was a refugee as a result of the uswas at struggle in his nation. Honoring his life means we’ve got to sometimes ask ourselves, “What has the USA ever finished to anybody?” and be open to the reality. We have to ask ourselves, “What’s the U.S. doing to others proper now?”
Thich Nhat Hanh was an ideal lover of life. His love of life was seen and embraced by one other lover of life who, like him, will probably be sorely missed—scholar and Buddhist practitioner bell hooks, who died on December 15, 2021.
Hook’s article, “Towards a Revolution of Love,” is as related at this time because it was once we first printed it in Lion’s Roar — and it is going to be as related sooner or later. For it’s love that wholesomely binds Buddhism with skillful engagement on this planet.