A Week of Transitions

Breathing in, I calm my body.

Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment,

I know this is a wonderful moment!

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming the breath (i)

The Meditation Teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh

The above verse is called a “gatha”—a Zen meditation poem and exercise. Gathas help to connect you to the present as you meditate. As you memorize them over time, you can recall them in a moment to reconnect your mind and body. A gatha serves as a poetic tool for restoring peace and awareness as you move through everyday life.

This week has been a week of transitions. I resurrected my meditation practice last Thursday, after a years-long lapse. I think my body and mind was ready to restart sitting meditation, because I woke up naturally at 6:00am that morning. I am not, and have never been, a morning person. Days like this are as close to a personal miracle as I think I will ever come.

On this morning, I set up a little spot outside on my back deck in the Rocky Mountain April cold. It was surprisingly dewy; the snowfall from the previous weekend having melted, and the moisture quickly being taken up into the usually dry air. As part of my set up, I had a towel, my phone, and a mug of coffee. I thought I should perhaps make tea for the occasion, but to be honest—I am not very traditional, and I am deeply devoted to morning coffee.

I decided that, to begin the meditation, it might be helpful to use a mindfulness aid to ‘ease myself into the water.’ The late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was on my mind because I am currently reading one of his works, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers. I quickly searched for some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditation practice teachings online and came across his gathas.

I went with the first one, which is the gatha featured at the beginning of this post, and I settled into a relaxed, seated posture. It took me a couple of minutes to memorize the verse so that I could close my eyes and sync the gatha with my breaths, but as I settled in a sense of calm and relief did begin to come. I was surprised at how easily my body and mind entered back into the gentleness of meditation. I moved between a mix of closed and open-eye meditation. I heard the cars on the roads around my neighborhood. I noticed a mother crow making a nest in the tree beside my house. I felt the coolness of that rare Colorado humidity in the air. And above all else, I recognized the weariness of my body; evidence of the stress, anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and rage of the past few months.

This first day of returning to my practice made space for an important reset—a fresh starting point. As I said a few paragraphs ago, this has been a week of transitions. One of the most significant of these transitions is ‘moving with purpose.’ This year has been a terrifying time to be living in the U.S., even as a U.S. citizen. I have been in and out of a state of frozen horror as I watch the government attempt to tear down constitutional rights, liberties, and freedoms. I have experienced rage beyond words as I have seen my country tear families apart, threaten transgendered people’s lives, devalue women’s lives, throw innocent people in prison, and throw away decades of progress for equal rights. I have wept bitterly at the mass destruction and genocide that the U.S. is aiding in Gaza and Ukraine.

Through all of this, I have felt the acute helplessness of being one person. A writer with a small audience. A mother trying to care for and protect one child. A daughter of a family not yet disillusioned by this tyrannical government.

What can I even do?

Nothing felt sufficient before this week. I did not vote for any of this. I have been calling my representatives. I have been marching. I have been protesting. I am boycotting Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I’m engaging in political debate with everyone I know that is still supporting this administration. And, of course, I ‘like’, ‘comment’, and ‘subscribe to’ many who are furthering this fight.

But—the truth is, as I can see now as I embrace this transition, that all of those actions have mattered. Because we are all doing them. Millions of individual actions are coming together, and they are building momentum.

I am not the one that should try to explain physics to anybody, but momentum is a concept of physics. According to the website for the Physics Classroom, “Momentum can be defined as ‘mass in motion.’” When an object (or a social movement as we are talking) has quite a bit of mass and is in motion, it will gain a lot of momentum. The more mass and motion added, the more momentum it gains. The more momentum it gains, the harder it will be to stop.

The more momentum this movement gains, the harder it will be to stop.

All of our individual actions are adding to the momentum of this movement. We are coming together to fight for freedom, equality, and constitutional rights, and people are noticing. We are creating a visible resistance, and this gives more people courage to join this fight everyday. Groups—large and small—are getting organized as I am writing this, and creating more opportunities to take action.

I can now see that I had no reason to despair before, only I could not see the actions of others taking place around me. All of you, and multitudes of others, fighting for freedoms, equality and justice one day at a time.

This week of mine can be summed up in this way: I will no longer despair; I will move.

I want to continue my meditation practice to ground my body and mind, so that I will not again abandon myself—or the world—in frozen terror, anger, or grief. I will continue to write, and to mother, and to have conversations. I will engage in community acts of resistance, as well as my civic duty (no matter how much I hate making phone calls). I recently discovered some info on my local Indivisible chapter, and I will follow up on that to see how I can get involved.

I am choosing to trust that the community around me and at-large is also moving purposefully. I see some of my long-time friends planting gardens to help their neighborhoods, or intentionally sharing news of kindness, passion, and joy around them so that they are not only sharing the bad news. I see people I don’t know, online and in-person, standing up for strangers and offering their own strengths to help who they can.

I hope you are encouraged as I am this week to not lose heart. Trust in community action, and keep moving with purpose.

The work you are doing is good, and we are doing good work together.

“Because you are alive, everything is possible.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

Kerri