Share, Care, and Be Fair

Ashley Wells, Co-Editor, Wisdom Quarterly

Reliquary burial mound (stupa, dagaba, pagoda) in Sri Lanka (Digifancanon/flickr.com)

 

Nature's own little stupas

I recently came across the apparently defunct Conservative Buddhist blog, not realizing that my grouchy grandpa's friends could write.
  
Kindred spirits, I thought, curious curmudgeons with one eye on the Dharma and another on keeping the status quo -- "conserving" everything just as it is.
  
We at Wisdom Quarterly are more in tune with social liberals like American patriot and Transcendental author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could have been speaking of serenity-meditation when he pointed out: 
   

"Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Poet Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem

Being an American Buddhist is being a reader. It might be about being a practitioner in the future. But it goes with our laid back, easy going approach to not being Puritans anymore. Now as mild Unitarians or Spiritists we are free to investigate and explore the world's spiritual traditions as well as paranormal perplexities.

Imagine one day when we all share, care, and are fair. That will be paradise, bliss on Earth, a sparkle of sunshine for the morning of our humanity. But conservatives want to go backward to a time that didn't exist, when the American Dream worked, everyone lived in suburbia, and we were all uniformly homogenous.

American Buddhism: Against the Stream

• Caroline Myss yells with Michael Beckwith: PLAY 
• Silent Auction, Aug 5, Santa Monica
• The Meaningful Life, 8-Week Series with George Haas, Aug 9, Melrose
• Breath Meditation Daylong with American monk Ven. Thanissaro, Aug 18, Melrose
• Intro to Meditation, Aug 18, Santa Monica
• Women's Group, Sept 8, Melrose
• Mindful Music, Sept 8, Melrose
• Impermanence Daylong with American Zen scholar and former monk Shinzen Young, Sept 23, Santa Monica
• Mindset, Mindfulness, and Money - Evening and Morning with Caitriona Reed, Sept 28-29, Melrose
• Unleashing the Soul of Money, Lynne Twist: PLAY
• SIT DOWN, RISE UP (Young People's Group, 15-21)