Prayers on the Plum Tree: Sensei Engu Dobbs’s Reflection on the Zen Peacemakers Native American Plunge August 2017

SOUTH DAKOTA, USA. Each day we sat in a large circle and began and ended our meetings by smudging with sage smoke, offering tobacco, and listening to Lakota songs and prayers. Listening deeply and bearing witness to the grief of others tends to be hard, hard practice…But if we’re able, more or less, to stay with the grief…The result is often a powerful and surprising feeling of joy.

Bearing Witness at Bear Butte: Reflection from The Wounded Knee Massacre Descendants Conference, October 2017

BEAR BUTTE, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA. In October 2017, Lakota elders organized a conference of Wounded Knee Massacre descendants in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Following from the connections made during the ZPI Native American Bearing Witness Retreats in August, a small group of Zen Peacemakers were invited to join. They were led by Michel Engu Dobbs, who afterwards gave this dharma talk at Ocean Zendo in Bridgehampton, New York:

We Are Sumud, or If You Imagine It, It Will Be

ISRAEL. “Sumud, like so many other acts of heartful resistance, begins as an act of the imagination. Someone dares imagine that force, occupation, discrimination, poverty, and violence can end.” Eve Marko reflects on her recent trip to Israel, and acts of imagination and revolution.

Despair and Empowerment in Our Watershed Moment

“How are we going to end polarization while we ourselves are polarized? How do we unpolarize ourselves from the people we want to blame and hate for this electoral disaster? How do we disarm ourselves of our own attitudes and prejudices? How do we do the inner work of self-transformation and simultaneously extend ourselves outward to organize and resist, which we absolutely must do?” By Paula Green A talk given at Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, December 7, 2016, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She has 40 years’ experience as a psychologist, peace educator, consultant, and mentor in intergroup relations and conflict resolution.

Rags to Rakusus: Irene

YONKERS, NEW YORK STATE, USA. A prayer flag, a childhood friend’s pajamas, her teacher’s denim, a t-shirt collected on a street retreat – The Zen Peacemaker Rakusu is a garment that those who take the Buddhist vows sew from discarded materials or of meaningful origins. In this first post of the series “Rags to Rakusus,” Irene Ji Un Edelmann of New York reflects on her experience of creating hers. “[It] is symbolic of the tapestry of life and the little pieces that form a whole.”