Recently I engaged in my first practice of “forest bathing” or, shinrin-yoku as it is sometimes known in Japan, which could be considered a form of ecotherapy or mindfulness activity. Led by a Zen meditation teacher, five of us Zen practitioners engaged the forest of the Susquehanna State Park in Maryland. Walking slowly, we paid close attention to how each of our senses experienced parts of the forest. How nice it was to have a group mindfulness exercise away from our zoom screens and out of home offices.

As a mindfulness exercise, I found myself taking time to see, listen, and smell more closely and to feel more pointedly different sensations of air, temperature, pressure, and body movement. We would pause on occasion and share our experiences with other group members. When we sat together to eat the lunches we each brought, I noticed how I brought more of my senses to the experience of biting, chewing, tasting, smelling, and swallowing of my apple and sandwich. It was also a wonderful experience of fellowship as we got to know a little bit more about each other.

For me, mindfulness practice includes a great deal of silent sitting, and I am grateful for how the pandemic has led me to meditate more. It has also opened up for me meditation practices in different Zen traditions and contributed to expanding my reading in Zen and much more.

I will be interested to see how my shinrin-yoku experience will influence how I approach my next hiking experience.

The following is the opening paragraph of a story being covered by the NY Times:

The mining company, BHP, plans to move ahead with an expansion project that will destroy at least 40 ancient Indigenous sites in Western Australia — just days after a national outcry over the razing of another archaeological site.

In the midst of the outcries in our own country over racist killings and injustices against people of color and native people in our own country, this report sent me over the edge. It illustrates one more way in which white folks in power tend to have no regard for people or sacred places that stand in the way of their greed.

I just wrote my two senators to support taking a stand in the Senate to make a statement of disgust for the actions of the mining companies and show some solidarity with native people and the importance of preserving sacred cultural landmarks.

WTF is next?

This is the opening paragraph in the book I co-edited with a colleague at Boston College:

            Growing up in Baltimore and attending Catholic schools there in the 1950s and 1960s contributed meaningfully to my awakening to social, economic, and educational injustice. My senior year religion teacher, a De La Sale Christian brother, challenged us students to delve deeply into social issues of race, war, and poverty and the nature of God and God’s presence and participation in the world. At the large secular university I attended in the Northeast, this awakening continued as I witnessed the African American students demanding greater educational equity and marched in Washington against the Vietnam War, influenced in part by the example of the University’s Catholic chaplain. Fast forward a couple of decades when, as a faculty member at Loyola University Maryland (then Loyola College in Maryland) I developed service-learning courses and accompanied my students to underserved urban communities and Catholic schools and challenged them as my high school religion teacher had challenged me. Since I first started to examine the effectiveness of urban Nativity schools in Baltimore in the mid-1990s, I have involved myself in a number of community- and Catholic-led initiatives aimed at addressing issues of urban poverty, violence, and educational injustice. Most memorable about these encounters have been the Catholic religious and lay women and men who commit to the painstaking work of breaking the cycle of poverty through education in important and heroic Christ-like ways.

Our book contains chapters on Nativity and NativityMiguel Schools, Cristo Rey Schools, and Fe y Alegria schools, as well as Homeboy Industries, all of which were started by Jesuits and have grown to address issues of educational injustice, particularly in urban areas, and improve the lives of tens of thousands of children, adolescents, and adults deprived of equal access to high quality schools because of racism and the greed of white privilege and power. To think that there are millions of dollars being spent to help re-elect a racist tyrant committed to tearing down our fragile society when they could be spent providing high quality education and work for everyone and build a more just society sickens me to the core.

Check out: https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Responding-to-the-Call-for-Educational-Justice       

As I get ready to retire from academia, I look forward to expressing some of my thoughts again in hopes of stimulating some healthy and intelligent discussion. I recognize that many of my views would be considered liberal or progressive by some people. I can only say that what I offer comes from the heart and has the best interests of our planet and its inhabitants in mind. I seek truth, in a relative and absolute sense, and realize that I do not necessarily possess the truth.

I have committed my professional life to the improvement of lives through education for nearly 50 years and, for fewer years, clinical counseling as a psychologist and trainer of counselors. My spirituality is anchored in contemplative Catholicism and Buddhist thought and my personal contemplative meditation practice.

One of my challenges today is that of helping to promote wellness and serenity in my loved ones, friends, colleagues, students, and clients during these incredibly difficult times of the novel coronavirus. I acknowledge, as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests, that it is pretty difficult to find that place of serenity and well-being when you are out of a job and don’t have the money to pay necessary bills and put food on the table and you feel overwhelmed at just the thought of venturing outside of your house for fear of becoming infected.

One of the problems we have had in our American society that has made this situation worse is our failure to place a higher priority on the welfare of all of its citizens over corporate wealth. The power for big decisions is in the hands of those whose greed has helped to widen the economic gap in recent years. How telling is it that stimulus money has gone first to large corporations ahead of truly small and local businesses, as we see at least a few of them return the funds they received from the federal government that need to go those who really need it for survival. It is time to take action to install leaders who truly care about all of our people and will act according.

I am sure that corporate fraud has been around for decades – or centuries – maybe even millennia. The VW mess provides just one recent example of business leaders cheating the public to add green to their wallets. One contributing factor to their actions was probably the low probability that they would ever have to pay personally for the crime.

Our tolerance of such dishonesty is also  demonstrated in the popularity of Donald Trump. Here is a man who has defrauded large numbers of investors and workers of hard-earned savings and pay in order to add to his own wealth. He does not seem to have paid much of anything for his crimes. Is he an example of the part of the American dream that honors success obtained on the backs of people with little power?

Years ago I had an interesting summer job in which I was hired to sell colds products to independent drug stores for a relatively large American corporation and was invited back the second summer to supervise some of the new college sales force. It was during that second summer, after I had learned from a number of small business owners that the college sales agents had added additional products to their summer orders without their approval. Because larger orders provided more points in the sales contests, and because the college sales agents would be long gone by the time the orders were delivered in the fall, the contests provided opportunities for the sales agents to pad orders in order to increase their own contest winnings.

The seeking of personal gain without regard for people who could be hurt by our own greed has indeed been a feature of the human experience and the American way of life for quite some time. And that is why regulations and oversight are needed in the financial sector, construction and home repair, educational enterprises, and so many other ventures. Let’s not let the lawmakers who are in the pockets of big oil , Wall Street, or the NRA dismiss the need for sensible regulation so that the American people are not continually bilked out of billions of dollars and put at risk.

It sure didn’t take long for the climate deniers and fossil fuel barons to jump all over Pope Francis’ letter on climate and the earth with Bush and Santorum leading the pathetic charge. For whose benefit are these political and industry leaders railing against common sense? Why the wealthy, of course – those who can continue to live in their protected communities and have the resources to ensure that climate degradation stays away from their front doors – for now anyway.

The pope is not a scientist, nor does he claim or pretend to be. But he is an intelligent individual whose concerns lie with all of humanity. He is a Jesuit priest who lives the Jesuit charism of a “preferential option for the poor” – those among us who, as he so rightly indicates, lack the power to influence policy and protect the livelihoods of their families and communities, the communities most likely to bear the brunt of continuing environmental degradation.

The pope sets an important model for all of us to look at all sides of an issue such as climate change, to evaluate the science carefully, and speak “truth to power.” He models for us the importance of evaluating the sources of statements on all kinds of social issues. Oil is big money. Too many US congressional reps are being supported heavily by big oil money and end up supporting these interests rather than the interests of the people they are supposed to be serving. He models for us the courage to speak out and take the punches perpetrated by the right-wing backlash and other self-interested individuals.

Imagine a world in which politicians took it upon themselves to learn of the struggles of all of their constituents and listened with equal reverence and openness to independent analyses and voices of citizens across the economic strata. Who, as Francis asks , will be the real leaders who will take the necessary steps to show respect for the earth and all her inhabitants and take the necessary action for a promising future that incorporates alternative technologies to fuel economic growth while also supporting the greening of our planet, not its browning and rotting? Please stand up!

I am glad to see that some municipalities and corporations are getting the message that raising the minimum wage is good for America and for American business. Far too many people in our country are working hard to make ends meet and provide for their family members’ basic needs by taking on two or more jobs. Failure to provide a fair wage for work stems from what the Buddhists refer to as the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. The greed shows itself in the lobbying by big business to provide tax relief for the very wealthy individuals and corporations. More government handouts are given to corporations (agribusiness and big oil as two examples) than to the struggling poor and tax legislation continues to provide hefty breaks to the very wealthy (consider the raising of the ceiling on estate tax relief).  The supreme court also seems to be pandering to the rich white elite.

In his insightful column on the Pathology of the Rich White Family, Chris Hedges provides clear evidence of the greed and delusion that seems to have gotten into the DNA of some of the very rich. Their delusion shows in the way they point fingers at the urban poor who at times (less frequent than one would expect) burst with rage at how they are marginalized and mistreated by white society, represented in some recent incidents by the police. These rich whites see themselves as better than those with less education and less access to decent work and support services. They can steal from US citizens by deceiving others into purchasing worthless investments and taking bailout funds so they can continue to give themselves unreal bonuses and never suffer the consequences of jail. In a probably not-so-surprising finding, Hedges reports on a finding by social scientists at the University of California that showed that the economically poor demonstrate higher levels of empathy than do the rich.

Did you see John Stewart’s piece on a comparison of the wrong doing by some educators in Atlanta who were given jail time for dishonest practices of misrepresenting students’ scores on standardized testing with the wrong doing of Wall Street capitalists? Punishment does not seem to get meted out equitably.

So what then? We should look at ourselves first to examine our own poisons of greed, hate, and delusion and to look clearly at our social ills and commit to providing some assistance to reverse course on the treatment of the marginalized. We need to wake up to the realities before us before it’s too late.

What do you think?