blessing in a bottle

 

As I began to slip into the despair of these times, feeling like circling a drain, obsessed with news feeds and horrific images, I came across entirely different images for which I hadn’t known I was looking. I had fallen into the desperate habit of scrolling on social media. I usually justified this by telling myself I was looking for beauty and I would pause on photographs of owls sending out wisdom or paintings of the sea inviting me to immerse myself in grace. 

Something different happened this time. A group of pedestrian monks were walking…just walking. Something about their faces, their pace, their commitment and their witness caught me up short. I opened their page, Walk For Peace, and started reading their posts. Peace, mindfulness, well-being. Image after image emoted these qualities. They were peace. And they were just walking. Yet peace seemed to emit from their bodies. 

Then there were crowds of people including children who seemed not only to anticipate their coming but welcomed them even as they passed. With folded hands and bowed heads. Flowers were exchanged. The monks were offered hats and shoes and boots. Bread for the journey. Each gesture so minimal and simple conveyed pure kindness in a magnitude I had feared lost.

I felt something like hope flutter in my heavy chest. …

A few days later, having checked their progress from Texas to Washington, D.C., I came across the following from one of my favorite poets. Besides being touched by the synchronicity and serendipity of it all, I also realized that Jane Hirshfield had a gift for words which I didn’t possess and so I offer it. But before you read it, take a few deep breaths and breathe in peace…breathe out peace. Feel yourself becoming that Peace.

To quote these dedicated monks: may you be well, happy and at peace.

“ The Vipassana monks’ walking visibly embodies how humility in action can look, and the difference it makes. The Peace Walk’s largeness of purpose and distance is undertaken in smallness – one step, another. A walk is plain, ordinary, what each of us might do, again, any day; it is not a March. The monks’ essential humility is one reason they’ve been welcomed so warmly, wherever they go. They make no demands, carry no signs. It is not themselves they put forward. They mostly just walk, and sparingly, quietly, convey to each person they meet or pass only the wish for that person’s own happiness, well-being, safety; tying a bracelet on one child’s wrist, giving a flower to another, placing into the hands of a baby tucked into a carriage a bottle of water the baby can’t know they’ve blessed. When welcomed to a town in North Carolina by its mayor, they make no speech in turn. The Walk for Peace draws attention because robed Buddhist monks on the streets of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, are exotic; a peace walk, however quietly undertaken is – like any form of communal public request or protest – essentially flamboyant. A Walk for Peace is meant to be noticed. Yet in their persons’ stillness, the monks seem almost to vanish as they sit behind the speaking mayor in a fairground shed, at day’s end, on folding chairs. “Jane Hirshfield

I believe something of grace which sustains is being placed in our hands like that baby’s bottle, perhaps without our knowledge or realization. These monks, this mission, these messages and faces bless and are a blessing. May we realize this blessing. May we become what we receive.