Dear friends,
The last two containers of tofu in my fridge expired yesterday, and the mundanity of this, on the one-year memorial of the Atlanta-area shootings, gave me occasion for pause. Yesterday, like every day, marked a birthday and death day and expiration day and continuation day for countless beings. Lately, I’ve been struck by the feeling that these are days of rupture, because of the rendings of war, the wounds of rapaciousness. Even the ruptures we choose—moving to a different city, starting a new job—can make us ache, no matter how much we welcome the changes they bring.
The start of this calendar year indeed found me relocating to a new city in the Bay Area. In the thick of the move, I had the unexpected pleasure of interviewing Jay Caspian Kang on how Buddhism influences his writing.
Having failed to send out a newsletter at the start of 2021, I told myself I’d write in time for the lunar new year, but February 1 found me sitting with the reverberations of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s cremation ceremony and finishing the revisions to my second book.
Surely by Losar, I thought, but it was not to be. Instead, early March saw me wrapping up a busy and fulfilling—and very cold by California standards—trip to the East Coast. Highlights included speaking at Skidmore College and losing electricity halfway through (if nothing I said was memorable, the power outage certainly was!), working with students at the Tang Institute at Andover, visiting nearly a dozen Buddhist temples (Khmer, Vietnamese, Lao, Thai, Chinese) in the Merrimack Valley, and co-leading a “Story and Song” retreat at the Barre Center centered around the Cambodian Dharma song tradition.
Story and Song: To be with this temporary sangha—an intergenerational, majority Asian-heritage group—and to hear our voices joined in chant… I often had tears in my eyes during those four days. This was the type of community I yearned for in Be the Refuge, when I despaired of ever "finding a group of young adult Asian American Buddhists off the page and in the flesh." Those days were a rupture in ways I needed: a disruption to ossified habits, a breaking open of limiting possibilities. I’m deeply grateful to the Barre Center for taking a chance on this retreat, and for offering to host it again next year, from March 30 to April 2, 2023.
I’m flying back to Massachusetts next week, to learn from and with others about what’s possible when we listen to the Buddhists in our backyard. I’ll be giving an online talk at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center on Wednesday, March 30, at 7:30pm ET (“Nothing Self, Everything Kindred: On Listening, Chaplaining, and Writing”), and routing through Los Angeles on the way back to the Bay to visit the Japanese American National Museum’s Sutra and Bible exhibit (maybe I’ll see some of you at the “Interlinking Past and Present” event on Saturday, April 2 at 5pm?).
As a dear friend texted recently, There is so much these days, both personally and collectively. For those of us who are feeling weighed down by the so much, may we know ease and expansiveness, may we remember that war and violence can never obliterate creativity and joy. For those of you celebrating Nowruz, I rejoice with you. (And, I got this letter out before Persian new year!)
With mettā,
~Chenxing
