March 21, 2020

Special bows for today:

• Please offer bows for Jeff Ghazarian, a friend of Lilliana Mendez-Soto, who died yesterday at the age of 34 from COVID-19
• Please offer bows of well-being for Carmen Ibanez, Lidia Luna’s mother, who had a successful surgery yesterday for sciatica
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Rev. Les Kaye, Misha’s Zen teacher, who had a successful surgery on March 18th for bladder cancer
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Brendan Haimson, Kate Haimson’s son, who had a successful surgery on March 18th for a brain aneurism
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Lilith Armitage, Shannon Bergman’s daughter who had knee surgery on March 17th 

Wonderful links shared by sangha and friends:

• From Kathleen Dickey: footage of Buddhist nuns in Nepal:   https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0862547/the-millennial-nuns-practicing-a-forbidden-ancient-skill?ocid=ww.social.link.email

• From Rick Moss: A letter from the virus: https://youtu.be/Z-SyZiwXKs0
• From Randy Komisar: https://radioopensource.org/springtime-in-the-plague-year/

“Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.” Rachel Naomi Remen

I think that this is a very encouraging idea given that we are all swirling in the midst of unanswerable questions right now.  Even the most reliable sources (the World Health Organization, for instance) admits that the scientific community is still in a state of searching for answers (although if you want to read an up-to-date and accurate study go to::   https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf )

There is comfort in knowing that it’s okay not to know—it’s a relief actually to realize how very little we really know about our world and that there is no way any one person could contain all that information.  It’s encouraging to realize that, in fact, the only reason we know as much as we do is that centuries of scholars, scientists, and philosophers have shared their individual knowledge with everyone—proving, yet again, how interconnected we are, how reliant we are on each other, and how this idea of being a separate independent self is a delusion.  Everything we do, say, and think affects everything else in ways we can’t begin to imagine…what happens in Wuhan affected the world 10,000 miles away.

Perhaps, as Remen suggests, sharing our uncertainty and anxiety about this new and uncharted territory is the best thing we can do for each other right now.  Perhaps this is how we each offer our best selves in the midst of personal anxiety and fear of a future that is rapidly approaching:  by listening deeply, by sharing our concerns, by doing whatever we can right here in this moment, ‘pursuing unanswerable questions in good company’.

Many thanks to those of you who are sending links and making comments, sharing your lives with everyone else... it is a gift beyond measure. Please know that you can either leave a comment on the blog itself, or send something directly to me and I will add it myself. Bows, Misha