​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: 

For the past five days, I've been submersed in a powerful peace. The kind of peace that wraps kindness around your temples. That pulls your center of gravity out of your fast-paced head and down into your heart.

​The kind of peace that is like cotton wool headphones plugging you into another soundtrack. Where air and space take the place of busy sound. Where we can begin to slow down the cogs. 

​It all started early last Friday when Rebecca appeared outside my window in the West End of Portland, with a rented car with New Jersey plates. We set out on the six and a half hour journey to the Catskills of New York and the home of the World Peace Temple at KMC New York.