Unity in Plurality

Ecology🌱Philosophy📖Environmental Humanities🌿Meditation ॐ Collaborative contemplatives creating conscious content🌍Paving common ground among diverse paths🙏

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

Maya Angelou's classic 1978 poem "Still I Rise" provides a snapshot into her personal contemplations on injustice. We thus join her in reflection in the midst of protests sweeping the globe, primarily letting her speak for herself in her own voice. https://t.co/1PGWFV0nba

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

In the Buddhist recounting of the Milinda Pañha, the dialogue between Nāgasena and King Menander (whose name is "Pāli-cized" as Milinda) likens the aggregates to a chariot, a motif traced to the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. Continued→https://t.co/lbJZIthSyO

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

In an era plagued by climate crisis, a virus claiming the lives of more than a million, civil rights abuses and political strife sowing the seeds of distrust throughout societies, contemplative poetry from the likes of Santōka offer their solidarity. https://t.co/YQsegKfSQ1

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

A pioneer of free-style haiku, Japanese poet Santōka's life was plagued by instability, losing his mother to suicide and facing multiple other setbacks. After a divorce, his family's bankruptcy, and the death of his father, he ordained as a Zen priest. https://t.co/7RznU8K2Op

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

We find in the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta a landscape of lived experience. As the world erupts in chaos upon crisis upon catastrophe, some may seek to deny mortality and mental-environmental collapse. As Kinsman of the Sun, the Buddha suggests an alternative. https://t.co/soQrmcTvcL

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

Poetically weaving together natural imagery to convey the impermanence of all phenomena, the Buddha's teachings in the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta are especially relevant to these times of epidemiological, societal, and environmental illness. https://t.co/2ZNtgCOdHF

[Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) @GlobalLF]

While news reports show forests burning in many places, one can take heart from the fact that trees are busily taking root upon the world’s vast swaths of farmland, @mongabay reports: https://t.co/PK1J89JhSV

@ICRAF #ThinkLandscape

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

Reflections on diaspora by Tibetan poet in exile Tsering Woeser offer a glimpse into the lived experience of those who create in the midst of destruction. Like many others, she invokes nature to join her in bearing witness to the ephemerality of life. https://t.co/VRtjH7Y6PD

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

Like the renowned Tibetan poet-sage Milarepa whose verses, subtle with symbolism, introduce this book of poetry, Woeser sprinkles Buddhist references familiar to her readers throughout her poems, lacing them in alongside her reflections on diaspora. https://t.co/apM4PACPX5

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

Through her poetry, Tsering Woeser succinctly captures the everyday emotions of not only contemporary Tibetan women like herself, but of displaced people across the global diaspora, writers and artists with stories to tell but few to bear witness to them. https://t.co/r0YCQJR3MR

[x.noaidi @NoaidiX]

"I may appear in a male body. I may appear in a female body. I may appear in the body of a god or dragon... I may appear as a mountain, as a forest, as a stream, as a spring, as a river, as a lake, as a fountain, or as a well in order to benefit people."

Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

"Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into the tossing waters... It is a mighty coast—ground out and pounded, scarred, crushed, and carven in massive, frightful lineaments... Near us lie isles of flesh and blood."

~ W.E.B. Du Bois https://t.co/N6ZCvHKShq

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

For Du Bois, the microcosm of tragedy and comedy enacts itself in human relationships and nature, forming a macrocosm encompassing all. These multidimensional dynamics, although cloaked in shadows, were for him valuable guides on his contemplative path. https://t.co/m2QOVcev1X

[No Context Buddha 💙💛 @nocontextbuddha]

Summer in quarantine #Buddhism #NoContextBuddha #如意輪観音

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

"Grant all its ugliness and sin—the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I—notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied."

~ W.E.B. Du Bois https://t.co/1eLPusoofy

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

We here investigate contemplative excerpts from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, penned 100 years ago, in honor of the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, a prolific writer and civil rights activist whose life work illuminated issues of racial discrimination. https://t.co/x8j4b6jnVF

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

"I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within."

~ W.E.B. Du Bois https://t.co/ieRzjnTFKA

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

In untangling the parable of the blind men and the elephant, we piece together its contemplative perspectives to construct a whole image, allowing the elephant to be seen as it is rather than as parts mistakenly and myopically grasped. https://t.co/W856PD0QGm

[God/Brahman is the Ocean of Love/all-Consciousness @GodBrahman]

“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Henry David Thoreau

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

The diversity of perspectives present in ancient Indian contexts finds a modern parallel in divided views on the pandemic. We are like blind men grasping at parts of an elephant, mistaking them for all there is, assuming we've seen the elephant as a whole. https://t.co/bsQ0PifPNn

[Unity in Plurality @UPlurality]

In the Pan-Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, each perspective in isolation falls short of discerning the whole. Contemplative practice, wielded wisely, illuminates these gaps in perception, allowing the bigger picture to come into focus. https://t.co/xm7rE63bBr