Dear Friends,
I signed up with members of Plum Village in the Bordeaux Region of France where beautiful practices are shared with the outer world through retreats and emails. This is an email I received with photos I have added. It is so beautiful and so very powerful that I wanted to share it with my own community here on my blog.
"I’m writing at the end of a retreat at the Plum Village monastery in France.
This place of peace has given me much to reflect on as I’ve watched our world this past week.
This is the place Thich Nhat Hanh came in exile as war raged in his country, Vietnam, in 1966. His book The Miracle of Mindfulness, which has such a tender practicality to it, reads differently when you know that it was written as a manual for monks and nuns seeking to be healing forces for people caught on every side of terrible violence.
The origin story of the Plum Village is one of the images that have touched me, and will continue to nourish and challenge me. This plot of land in a village in the French countryside was, during World War II, a site of bitter controversy and bloody reckoning. It is said that here, members of the local community who had participated in the Nazi occupation were executed. This ground was thereafter considered haunted, ruined for habitation or building. But Thay, upon visiting the site and hearing this story, decided that this was precisely where his community should settle. They were called, as he understood, to move towards and attend to the ruptures of this world.
And on the first morning of this retreat, the monk offering a Dharma talk invited each of us to clench a fist with one of our hands. Try this, if you will: move to force that fist open with your other hand. The fist only clenches tighter — as if by its own will, a natural reaction to force. And I invite you to try, then, a counterintuitive approach: cradle the fist with your other hand. With the same naturalness, but a wholly other quality of feeling and response, the fist releases. It softens.
A sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now. This exercise brings me back to a conviction I’ve long held, but can find hard to sustain in the tormented adolescence of this century: one of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a countercultural tenderness.
I like that word “calling” above, as you may know about me. So many of us are asking how we can be healing forces, what we are called to in this moment. And as instinctive and right as it is that we creatively and imaginatively ponder how we can be actively present to our world’s pain and its promise, there is a quieter calling that each of us can pick up in the places we know and live: to be a calmer of fear. To soften the fist that so many of our bodies and hearts have clenched into. Like it or not — for an action plan feels stronger — this is slow, relational, essential groundwork that we must lay if we are to find our way to our belonging to each other and our shared callings to create a transformed world we want all of our children to inhabit.
Nourishing and activating that belonging is our deepest calling at On Being. Our Wisdom Season just concluded — which you can listen to and share as a whole with this playlist — was one quiet offering. (And we’d love to hear how it landed with you.) We will be spending the next few months engaging complex conversations in the Netherlands and the UK, while preparing to produce a special short season towards healing after the U.S. election in the fall.
One thing is certain: whoever wins, my country will be as fractured as before. And so, in 2025, we are going to hit the road with a national On Being conversation we hope to build, convening as well as conversing in live events, around the U.S.
In the months ahead, you'll get the Pause in your inbox monthly. This will continue to be the place to hear all of our news and future adventures as they unfold.
I wish so fervently for you, for all of us, some respite and restoration in the months ahead — invite you, indeed, to know your need of these things precisely because of your love for this world, and your desire to be of service.
I send you my blessings, and my love – until soon!"
Krista Tippetts
The early days of Plum Village
You may enjoy reading this transcript of a Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh:
“I Have Arrived, I’m Home: Celebrating twenty years of Plum Village Life”
Plum Village Retreat in Bordeaux France
Gratitudes of love and light and deep and healing peace from my heart to all of yours.
Love and peace are like the light of one candle being lit and then that candle lights another one - on and on and on.
May each of us be that candle, that light and spreading healing love, light and peace.
Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting, from my heart and with my hands
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