As I’ve scanned the headlines over the last few weeks, it’s felt like many of us have been holding a canopy just above our heads for a while now. A steady rain of trauma drips and trickles off the edge of the canopy. And there’s a wind blowing just enough rain under the edge to […]
Your cloud of witnesses
As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created [the 20th Century Black freedom movement], that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and […]
Dialogue in hard times
Your intentions are great, but you have to deal with your impacts, and you have to be accountable for that. People are dying. We don’t have time for every single police officer to maybe realize that their humanity is being sacrificed. Structural changes are things we can do now. [In the meantime] raise your tolerance for discomfort: […]
Wise selfishness
I learned a phrase today: “wise selfishness.” It comes from the Dalai Lama, who wrote this short thought a few years ago: It is important that when pursing our own self-interest we should be “wise selfish” and not “foolish selfish”. Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise […]
At the heart of community
Angel Kyodo Williams is a Zen Buddhist teacher who writes lucidly about the resources we have for staying grounded and gracious regardless of external circumstances. One of the resources she emphasizes in the book Being Black is community. We have the power to choose not to let our beautiful diversity be a source of division […]
What oneness doesn’t mean
Conversations about diversity, inclusion, and group dynamics require group members to come to a shared understanding of what community does and doesn’t mean. Religious groups that have in-built doctrine or philosophy about being one can start out aiming for community and settling for uniformity. Rather than training ourselves how to be together with others without […]
