It starts to become really clear that […] responding to the difficulties of our lives often requires the energy of others. That being with others, our daily routine that we take for granted, is often the way we gather the strength and energy to meet our lives.

In the knowing that needs no words, the entire reality of the thinking mind is called into question.

The ceremony of zazen is a ceremony of non-separation. It’s our intention to sit down and be with everything. This is how we start working with those many moments of painful separation, of harm enacted upon us, or that we have enacted upon another – all the vulnerability of our humanness.

We all, just like Siddhartha Gautama did, run back to the palace for a bit. We learn about the suffering of the world, we feel it, we run back to the palace. We come out again, we feel it, we run back to the palace. Until we come out enough that we decide: “Ok, I am not going back to the palace, I am staying here. I am going to understand what is going on, I am going to understand why we do this to each other.”

We are being confronted with the amplification of centuries of historic pain that just seems to want to be acknowledged, demanding our attention, demanding we reckon with it.

All I can do is cultivate conditions that are conducive for a vow to emerge. […] Vow is not something I generate out of my own power. It’s something that happens in community and relationship with others and through a practice that cultivates the conditions for it to emerge.

I have been thinking about waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night. It’s my first vow of the day to liberate all beings and it’s my last thought at the end of the day to vow to liberate all beings? And can I try to encourage that in myself? […] Because we know the suffering of the world and we are moved to respond to it.

We are a very small circle of water. We are not complete. The truth or liberation comes from all the truth manifesting, just like the plum trees – southern branch and northern branch. As they are. As we all are.

So when we sit in zazen, our karmic patterns come up. And we have an opportunity to see them and to not act on them, to let them fall away. So in that sense we acknowledge them, we see them and in that moment of acknowledging we can take responsibility. So it is a two-part process. There is an acknowledgment of it, and a avowing, which is a take on responsibility and the possibility of space around that. We are able to own it, own our twisted karma. And in that moment, be free of it.

How can we become a community that fosters awakening to these systems of harm, in our bodies and between us? I want to understand how we can go beyond a fragile superficial harmony in our community to be a better community, to be truly anti-racist. To tear apart what we have to tear apart, to take responsibility for what we have to take responsibility – a loving responsibility, a loving accountability that listens and it’s humble and it’s disciplined and apologizes. And tries again, even though we don’t know what we are doing. Because we don’t know what we are doing.