So some of you may know that I am enrolled in a training through the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies and it's an environmental chaplaincy program designed to support people in developing healthy,
Compassionate and supportive relationships with each other and with our natural world.
And it's also developing skills to help others reconnect with nature and to face our social and environmental crisis with wisdom and compassion.
So as I learn,
I will share this learning with you.
And one of the first practices,
The first homework assignments was to read Thich Nhat Hanh's book,
Love Letter to the Earth,
And to write our own letter to the earth,
Which I will share with you now.
Dearest Gaia,
Mother to all that lives,
You are the only home I have ever known.
Everyone I love has come from you and all those who have died return to you.
Your oceans have taken back my ancestors as ash and bone.
Your oceans are alive in me,
In the tears that I shed and the sweat I produce when journeying deep into your forests.
I take comfort by your rivers that surround my home.
I breathe with them.
I grieve with them.
I watch the flow and remember that is all we are,
Flowing experience changing all the time.
I feed your rivers milk and prayers on the full moon and bring a jar of your life giving water to my altar on the new moon as a blessing to your cycles and the cycles of our family.
Your power has been a source of awe for me.
When I hear your thunder and see you light up the sky,
I am reminded of your force.
When fire sweeps through trees and oceans are stirred by the mighty winds produced in your atmosphere,
I am reminded of the power of creation and destruction that lie within you,
That lie within me.
We are not separate,
You and I,
Yet I have been conditioned by my human species to see you as a resource more than an honored family member.
This I have fought against.
First by studying your ways and mysteries in college and then by moving closer to your mountains and rivers,
Your wildness.
I love your spontaneity,
How you will surprise us with an afternoon thunderstorm then clear your skies leaving ribbons of rainbows and rejoicing bird songs.
I wake in the morning to the sound of your creations and at the end of the day listen to the buzzing insects,
Crickets and frogs welcoming dusk.
In the dark quiet of the night,
I stand upon your surface and look toward the sky.
This is when I feel how very small we both are in this vast universe.
I long to protect you in those moments my little blue mother planet.
This is when I review my actions from composting and gardening,
Recycling and reducing my waste,
Conserving water,
Turning off lights,
Installing solar and traveling by bicycle.
My actions are for the love of you and yet I can't help wonder if they are just feeble.
I am just one of eight billion human beings.
How can I,
Just one,
Open the hearts and minds of so many so that they may see you as I see you?
You are the great mother,
The living organism that provides life to all other living organisms.
The qualities that you embody,
The stability,
Perseverance,
Equanimity and non-judgment are virtues that many of us human beings aspire toward.
I will bring these qualities to the best of my ability to others and share of your ways through my love.
In love and service for your health and the health of all beings.
Lisa.
So how does this relate to our practice?
I don't think we can underestimate the significance of the action on the eve of the Buddha's enlightenment when he was still a bodhisattva,
Where he sat under the Bodhi tree and was attacked by Mara.
And Mara is this mythical figure in the Buddhist cosmology who is the killer of virtue,
The killer of life.
So Mara recognizing that his kingdom of delusion was in jeopardy by this bodhisattva's aspiration to fully awaken,
Mara came with his different attempts to get this bodhisattva to give up his resolve.
He challenged the soon to be Buddha through lust and anger and fear.
He showered him with hailstorms and mudstorms.
And no matter what happened,
The bodhisattva sat serenely and unmoving,
Unswaying his determination.
Then finally,
The final challenge of Mara was one of creating self-doubt.
He said to the bodhisattva,
By what right are you to even sit there with this goal?
What makes you think you have the right even to aspire to full enlightenment to complete this awakening?
And in response to that challenge,
The bodhisattva,
He reached over his knee and touched the earth.
He called upon the earth to bear witness.
He remembered his connection to the earth and to all the lifetimes in which he had practiced generosity and patience and morality.
Lifetime after lifetime,
He's built this wave of moral force that gave him the right for this aspiration.
That action of touching the earth,
We forget that this planet that we're living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies.
The water is in our flesh,
Our bones and cells.
They come from the earth.
We are part of the earth.
The breath that we've been focusing on today,
That life force of breath,
Without it we would not exist.
The earth is not just the environment we live in.
We are it.
So in our time together over these next weeks or months,
I encourage you and maybe challenge you for some of you to write your own letter to the earth.
This is a way to create a dialogue with our planet and with ourselves which is really necessary if we're going to survive as a human species.
So write your own letter and in these next weeks together,
These months together,
We'll just see how this goes.
We'll take a few minutes after our meditation to hear the letters you come up with,
To share the letters that you come up with.
This has been an important exercise and I hope that you will take it on for yourself.
Thank you for your kind attention.
