Who comes to mind when I hear “tenderness in interplay with power”?

“Be a blessing.”

“Be a blessing.”

Remember the practice of compassion as Roshi Joan so hopefully took it apart for Krista on her first day in Dharamsala — the idea that compassion is not a thing you can point at: “compassion always looks like this, or compassion always does that.” It’s more an intention and orientation to be compassionate, and then will be discernment in any moment about what that looks like with the particularities of the person or the situation in front of you.

“Being a blessing” is the same thing. It is as much about modeling and presence as it is a defined offering or action.

Begin.

Blessings.

How does the word “ecosystem” land in my imagination?

Immerse in Ecosystem Imagination

Ponder this list of qualities of ecosystem vitality and wonder, together with others — how they might begin to show up in what and how you organize, partner, or collaborate:

Entanglement, reciprocity, tributaries, dying, composting, regeneration, mutation, underground life support, nutrient cycling and recycling, circulation and exchange, hierarchy and mutuality, absorption, detoxification, photosynthesis, biodiversity, germination, flowering, efflorescence, recombination, endosymbiosis.

What is compassion, through the story of your life — or maybe a story of your body?

Examine the Complexity of Compassion

“The beautiful notion of compassion — like the beautiful notion of unity — is all truth and all paradox. Flesh and blood struggle and absolute miracle. Symbiosis and independence, sometimes at odds. Utter vulnerability and total fortress. We find ourselves with compassion in the realm of bedrock reality, and incredible mystery.”

Discuss.

How would I describe my relationship to grief, right now, whatever that means?

Ponder the Notion: “we are all one”

With your someone(s), interrogate your gut feelings about the notion that “we are all one.” And then investigate what has been present, what has happened, in times and places where you’ve experienced something like “oneness” or wholeness to be realized, robust, and as complicated as life itself.

Am I, somewhere, openly metabolizing how the last few years have shaped me?

Voice Questions as Maps and Guides

“Our communal repository of questions may be the closest thing we have to maps and guides right now in a world that is without maps and guides.” – Krista Tippett

With your conversation partner(s) for this retreat, give voice to the questions that are maps and guides for you — and work on them, hone them, question the questions themselves, set them intentionally to carry communally and return to for discernment and sharpening in the time ahead.

Do I have a working definition of compassion? What associations come readily to mind?

Critically Investigate Compassion

We’re going to treat compassion (alongside some kindred virtues and capacities) as something serious — that is to say, something that can withstand tension and conflict and critical interrogation. Settle in by opening a journal and/or starting a conversation with someone in your life, asking them to be a conversation partner and sounding board as you walk through this retreat.

Can I stretch towards the love for the world on the other side of my grief?

Carry Rilke’s words with you like a friend: “Move back and forth into the change.”

That dance with despair, as Joanna describes. The way pain turns if we actually look at it, take it in our hands, be with it, and keep breathing. This analysis of grief is reminiscent of an idea in Christian theology that is about the move from grieving to mourning to lamenting.

The invitation here is to cultivate that move inside ourselves and, for the sake of the world, to stand reverently with our grief, to let it turn to mourning and lament and something that brings us more deeply into our love. A muscular hope may not be possible without the capacity to make that move. And it is something we can and must practice.

Can we build a beloved community? Interrogate what stands in the way of throwing your life at a wholehearted yes.

At the worst of times, Vincent Harding reminds us, there are these pockets of hope operating all over the place, but somewhat separately from each other. That is an important and instructive analysis of this generative narrative of our time, which is real but not connected up, and so doesn’t always experience itself and isn’t always visible from the outside as a coherent landscape.

And there is Vincent’s insistence that the only question big enough to live into is, can we build a beloved community, a beloved nation? Why don’t we try, as he says?

The invitation here is to say yes.

If Vincent Harding says this America is possible, we must say yes and throw our lives behind that yes. It’s so critical, too, to take in this observation or this underlying assumption that runs through Vincent’s vision, that stitching the generative narrative together — making it cohere as a visible, viable reality — includes stitching the generations together.

Because the work ahead must be generational in scope, we must accompany each other across the span of our life experiences, our wisdoms, and our energies.

I’m so aware, listening to this now again, of how prescient Vincent was when he resists the question of whether we are seeing places of hope versus places of no hope. He says, no, we have places that are operating out of uncertainty. And uncertainty can steal the ground from hope. It can send people into their fearful impulses, the fear places in our brains and bodies. He was prescient when he talked about the crisis of whiteness, which is now so much more vividly upon us.

Who am I, and why am I here?

Practice curiosity, starting with the simplest of things. Feel the expansion in your imagination and your body.

From her earliest life, Jane Goodall likes to tell this story about how she was driven by curiosity. And in fact, one of her earliest memories, and one of the earliest memories of all the adults around her, is when she disappeared because she had hidden in the hen coop to understand how chickens lay eggs, because nobody had been able to explain it to her.

It’s also interesting, in other parts of her story, how she retained her core value of curiosity even in the face of what she abhorred and felt she needed to fight, even in herself, as much as in others.

Jane Goodall brings home so much that we’re actually learning — again, on our scientific frontiers — about the power of the muscle of curiosity. Where experiences and responses like fear and anxiety tighten us up and close us off and shut us down, curiosity literally expands us, physically and emotionally, and it expands what becomes possible.