​This past weekend, I did several things for the first time in 18 months. I stepped out of my normal routines. I donned a mask and moved back into the germ-filled world. And it had a profoundly healing effect on my mind's health. 

If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks.

In which I experiment with a social media cleanse, fail miserably at it, then find the teaching within it. ​

It is the middle of January in the year 2021. There is a spring thaw, although of course it's an illusion and not yet spring. We're still in the middle of a deep Maine winter. It was simply a rain storm that swept in and caused the brook to flow with a spring-like energy. In a few days, that water will freeze over again.

And I don't know about you all, but I had to pull myself out of bed this morning. I sat drinking my morning tea and my mind felt rocky and rough and muddy. And mildly annoyed. I felt pushed into a corner. A bit like my elderly cat who jumped into a deep and empty bathtub early this morning and couldn't jump out again.

June 4th is a day with vastly different meanings to me. ​The first is trauma. ​​June 4th is when, as an 11 year old in Hong Kong, I watched on live TV the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. The ensuing massacre of thousands of peaceful protesters in Beijing. For every year thereafter, June 4th was/is a day when HK people wear black and stand in vast numbers, holding candles to remember the lives extinguished by violence.

In recent years, June 4 has also become a day of extraordinary hope — perhaps the greatest hope. The fourth of June is Dharmachakra Day, a celebration of the first teachings given by Buddha 2,500 years ago, also known as "the turning of the wheel of Dharma." 

Today is NKT Day. It is a day to celebrate the founding of the New Kadampa Tradition, a remarkable Buddhist not-for-profit organization of which I am a part. ​I know it is this day because I was just sitting in the early morning light, on this first Saturday in April, sipping tea while the sun rose over the forest floor. I had flicked to Facebook, to see the wonderful Buddhist blogger Luna Kadampa share this news in my feed (the blog she wrote does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of this day.)  In honor of this, I wanted to share this poem below, something I scrawled in my notebook one early fall day. 

​Two weeks ago, at 5:15pm the day before Thanksgiving, my husband Tim had a major accident. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you may have read what I posted the following morning:

I am grateful for the woman with the calm and kind voice on the 911 call, who told me what to do. ​

To the paramedics who appeared minutes later and carried Tim onto a stretcher, down rain-covered steps and into the ambulance. 

​It was Sunday afternoon, 13 August 2017. The afternoon light was falling over potted plants in my living room. I had spent four days away from my phone and laptop, walking through forests with my family who were visiting from the UK. I had kayaked in the ocean and remembered what it felt like to touch water, air, land. 
 
It was 4pm and I sat on the sofa in the now-quiet house, and flicked my iPhone awake. And there was the Facebook newsfeed. Protests of white supremacists marching in Virginia. Anger. Violence. The shock that hits you deep in your stomach. The horror of seeing humans hurt one another. ​I scrolled further, switching over to news outlets and learning the facts. But then something else appeared in my Facebook feed. Something so drastically different that it astounded me. 

​This morning, I sit and write and attempt to let the emotions of the past three days find alignment. So I can release them to the wind.How does one reconcile the terrorist attacks in Paris? How does one react to a world filled with this sort of pain? 

I want to recount my movements this past week. How daily life and dharma met. 

It began last week, when I was deep in preparation for a meditation retreat. As a volunteer in my local Buddhist center - our Maine branch, I was helping to lead a full-day retreat on Saturday November 14 called Tranquil Abiding - Buddha's astonishingly clear teachings on how to still the mind, to bring it to complete focus.

​The meditation we would be focusing on was called 'Equalizing Self and Other'.

​I was following my teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's exquisite teachings in his books Joyful Path of Good Fortune and Eight Steps to Happiness. In this meditation, we use logic and reasoning to evoke a mind of love. ​I had been allowing this logic to touch my mind deeply in the lead-up to the retreat. Here it is quickly, in a nutshell: