Meditation for Black Lives

This photo of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship action July 14th was made by a young man named James Sissler who was there in person, and we even had fifteen seconds of time on the local news. The meditators are facing the Justice Center, which has been the center of violent police action for the past 45 days. We planned the action by Zoom, and I was online, managing the chat on the Livestream, which meant posting meditation instructions while deleting about a hundred unwanted “comments” including spam, racist name-calling, and harassments from those attempting to hijack the livestream. About 70 people showed up in person and over 300 online. We’re going to keep doing this every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. As young people step into leadership, I’m able to hand over the baton, and that makes me happy. Those who have been following my Blip journal for years may recall the beginnings, back at the end of 2014. As the I Ching says, “Persistence Furthers.”

Earlier in the day I had my weekly FaceTime conversation with Margie, and this time was extraordinary. Margie will be 94 in September, and she talked today about memory: how hard it is to remember what happened earlier in the day, or yesterday; how vivid the memories from childhood. The aging brain. She told me she suspects that what she is remembering is not what happened 90 years ago, but “memories of memories.” She said (and I wrote it down, it seemed so important), “We justify our own behavior as we reshape our memories of the past. We end up remembering our memories and not the past itself, and who knows what really happened? It’s all fiction.”