The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We reflected on the heart breaking times we are living through. In our advocacy for social justice we can appeal to the light in others. When our own light falters may we seek out the lights of friends, gardeners, potters, politicians, marchers and faith leaders. May we remember the many caring hands that continue to shape the world in healing and loving ways.
We drew inspiration from the many hands that brought the Portland Japanese Garden into being. You can check the cherry blossom status with their 2025 Cherry Blossom Tracker. Learn more about it through Celebrate the Garden’s History.
We heard Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s poem Wings. American poet Jane Hirshfield cited the poem in her recent essay Two “Minor Planets”: A Post for Stand Up for Science Day.
We heard Bishop William Barber’s reflections on the 60th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. You can hear about last week’s gathering in which hundreds of faith leaders gathered to protest the proposed Medicaid cuts affecting millions of people. You can hear more about the findings of a new report Wednesday called “The High Moral Stake: Our Budget, Our Future,”In Friday’s interview with Democracy Now.
James Baldwin’s book, Nothing Personal, inspired us with the invitation to know the “inner light within oneself.” Cultural curator, essayist and poet Maria Popova followed his words with her own encouragement to magnify each other’s light in times of darkness.
We heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s answer to the question: How to Fight Justice Without Being Consumed by Anger?
Guided Reflection
Welcome. In our last class we let the world in to our hearts and came to know it is only kindness that makes sense. Our spiritual practice calls us to find the hidden light in all events and all people, and to offer our hearts to the healing of the world. We begin by cultivating peace within ourselves. We can find acts of kindness from this place of inner peace.
My heart breaks a little every day. I wake to the losses of “somethings” and “someones” every day. Breaking hearts also feel joy and love. Last week I spent precious time with family. We spent three hours in the Washington Park Japanese Gardens. Truly these gardens are the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. The plum trees were beginning to blossom. We were enchanted by the views that so many hands so heart-fully encouraged into being.
I gave myself the gift of being fully present with the people I love. It was such a joy to share appreciation of the ephemeral nature of this beauty. The Garden Museum had a show of Kintsugi – making broken objects beautiful whole. They are a good metaphor for breaking hearts: We learn to repair them again and again.
The gardener’s loving hands evoke the tenderness of our human condition. In her recent essay, Two “Minor Planets”: A Post for Stand Up for Science Day, poet Jane Hirshfield shares Miroslav Holub’s poem Wings. Mislov was a poet scientist. Between 1968 and 1982, Holub’s poetry was banned from publication in the Czech Republic. It was translated during that time into thirty languages. He meanwhile published over 150 papers in immunology. Here is his poem Wings:
We have
a map of the universe
for microbes,
we have
a map of a microbe
for the universe.
We have
a Grand Master of chess
made of electronic circuits.
But above all
we have
the ability
to sort peas,
to cup water in our hands,
to seek
the right screw
under the sofa
for hours
This
gives us
wings.
Imagine: The tender and curious touch of our hands gives us wings.
Caring hands held other hands 60 years ago on Bloody Sunday. In Friday’s interview with Democracy Now, Bishop William Barber recalled when Congressman John Lewis and 600 civil rights marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Many marchers were injured, hospitalized or incarcerated. Their struggles eventually lead to ending segregation and winning voting rights. Their hands eventually became wings.
Bishop Barber was one of hundreds of faith leaders who gathered on Capitol Hill last Wednesday. They met to protest the proposed cuts to our most essential social programs for millions of people. Bishop Barber affirmed that:
We believe that legal action, protest action, legislation action, moral action, preaching in pulpits, standing, sitting in, praying in, all are on the table.
Faith leaders are calling for our hands and hearts to protect the social services needed by the most poor and vulnerable among us. Their’s is a call to love. Their’s is a light I am drawn to. In his book, Nothing Personal, James Baldwin writes:
One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.
In our advocacy for social justice we can appeal to the light in others. Essayist Maria Popova believes that love is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. When our own light falters may we seek out the lights of gardeners, potters, politicians, marchers and faith leaders. May we the lights of our friends. Not so long ago Buddhist monk and social activist Thich Nhat Hanh spoke to his students:
I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.
We practice to become solid and calm and without fear. We practice to hear the cries of the world and not turn away. We practice to kindle and reflect the inner light of compassion.
Let’s begin our practice of being peace. I invite you to relax into those areas where you may feel solid, grounded. You can take in a few deep breaths and then let them go into a spacious calm. Gradually letting the breath come and go on its own. Breathing in living energy. Breathing out spacious calm.
You might attune to a sense of being solid and deeply rooted. You might sense a spacious universe. Feel each breath arriving to this moment of awareness. And this one. Awareness touching sensation. The body solid and also spacious. Experience may be expressing subtle emotion of pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Ephemeral and moving.
Awareness may rest beyond the reflex of doing or making. Breathing and being calm, restless. In aches and the absence of aches. Compassionate awareness: a field in which everything plays. A dance between the intimacy of hands cupping water and the vast space of the universe. In hands cupping water there is light. In the vast space of the universe there is light.
You might take this time to attune to this light. It may be as inner light. It may be many lights shining throughout the vast constellation of relationships of which we are a part. We can reflect on our family members and friends. Those who touch us – through kinship, friendship, mentorship; through our caring, work and creative relations. What we do and who we become is always in relationship. Our constellation is embedded in the greater web which sustains us: Earth and all creation. Whose light, what light illuminates your heart? Lights your way?
We can ask this of ourselves each time we practice mindfulness. We bring the open heartedness and open-mindedness of a beginner. We offer ourselves the time and space to feel the intimacy and inter-relatedness of our experience. Sensations, emotions, thoughts, words and deeds. Each spring from our conditioned personal and collective experience. We recognize our shared humanity and meet it with compassion and forgiveness.
Mindfulness offers us the opportunity to shine a light on an other’s goodness. It offers us the time and space in which to recognize ignorance or injustice as forms of suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of meeting this suffering:
The problem is not only what you can do. You are motivated by the desire to do something to help the world suffer less – yet ‘to do’ is just one option. ‘To be’ is another way of doing; if you can be relaxed, if you can be peaceful, if you can be compassionate, that is considerable action in itself.
Even the way you sit and look at people can be very helpful; if you have peace, tranquility, and compassion, then your presence is already very helpful. So to be is very important. To do comes from that kind of being. Be peace first; do peace later.
You are peace. You are fresh. You are compassionate.
That collective energy of peace, freshness, and compassion has begun to contribute to the well-being of the world. And, of course, it will allow you to know how to promote more peace and freshness and joy in the world.
We don’t have to be carried away by the collective energy of hate, violence and anger. We can breathe mindfully, cup water in our hands, become peace. We can then become a refuge for others.