Taking Part in the Gathering, term 1, 2025

Dear Bodhisattvas

Since our last online meeting in November 2024 to sit together and explore the dharma together in a trusting space, the results flowing from the US election has induced a strong – even vertiginous – sense of a powerful and cruel paradigm shift taking place.

The ground that we thought stable under our feet is rapidly becoming soft, and increasingly difficult to trust.

As always, our Dharma inquiry together always turns things around, to look for what is the true ground under our feet -- that which is untouched by extreme circumstances, while yet refusing to turn away from them.

This is unsustainable without access to some form of practical, testable, heartfelt hope. How does a healing energy of hope manage to thrive even within the compounding dangers that we face?

I recently learned of a longstanding group of people in the neglected and widely despised San Francisco ‘tenderloin’ district, called the Faithful Fools.  The Fools make themselves available to accompany and support people struggling in their daily lives against the mounting odds. Being Foolish, they don’t ask whether they can be of any use, or recognize the puniness of their efforts compared to the tearing down of all forms of duty of care we know to be intrinsic to sustaining a viable form of shared human life.

They’re often asked, ‘After all these years, what keeps you going?’ And they reply:

‘Well, we keep going because we are Fools, of course. This isn’t to say that our work is ridiculous or without foundation. It’s to say that we understand how uncertain the future is and we can’t lose our way when the road gets rocky and tiresome…We aren’t foolish enough to believe that hope alone carries the day or soothes the soul. No, we believe it’s the other way around; we believe that actions driven by justice, solidarity, and compassion are what sustain hope. Small gusts of good will are acts driven by justice and compassion and solidarity… and they are what soothes our broken hearts.”

Blessings on the heads of all such wise fools. Are you one such? Will you join us in taking part in the gathering, in what promises to be a most interesting dharma journey together, in this (very rocky, and in the Trumpian sense, already very tiresome) Year of Living Dangerously?

I hope so, as we need every wise fool willing and brave enough to ‘persist in his/her folly’, as William Blake put the matter.

As you know by now, these timeless evening online opportunities now interleave with the regular weekly Silent Sits, with some open group sharing afterwards, led by our Practice Leader, Deborah Chadwick -- happening at the same 4-5.30pm time, on first and third Sundays of the month, falling between the Taking Part afternoons.  One weave of Sangha relations.

Also, take note that each term of practice will culminate with an opportunity for Dokusan with Susan Roshi & Kynan Roshi.

Roshi Susan Murphy.

Please note to join this gathering, you must be a member of Zen Open Circle,  https://www.zenopencircle.org.au/member-fees