It’s been raining for three days.  We lost power yesterday for almost twelve hours but we have a generator for back-up.  I was involved in a workshop on Zoom, Mahamudra and the Luminous Mind: The Third Karmapa’s Aspiration Prayer.

Our aspiration, our prayer was for world peace. The focus was on unifying emptiness and luminosity, on cultivating awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom.  This is both simple and complex, so I sit here now honoring the simplicity, the gift of it, even as I read the news of Trump. I’m with the challenge of holding it all with compassion and equanimity.  

I’m with these words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spoken after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945. “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”

Our commander-in-chief is guilty of war crimes.  Let’s hold him accountable.  We need to heal.

On another note, I highly recommend Lee Klinger Lesser’s book, Return to Our Senses, A Path to Stability in an Unstable World.  It’s a font of guidance and wisdom, and personal examples of how to work with what comes.

She quotes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: “The air we breathe contains one atom from every breath that every human has ever taken. In fact, right now, if you take a deep breath and then exhale, by the time a year goes by, approximately one atom from that breath will wind up in every other person on Earth’s lungs at any moment in time.”

Like the study of Mahamudra this weekend, that’s hard for me to visualize, and I understand it’s about connection.  We’re not separate; we are one!  Let’s cleanse and purify the air we share with each loving and compassionate thought and breath. We do it for ourselves, all sentient beings, and our beloved planet Earth.