Eleven years later. Same heart, different hands.
Hi Everyone š Please take a few minutes to relax and read through this post, as it means so much to me, and I hope it will for you too ā¤ļø I wrote the first version of this post in 2015. I was younger then. Not in years, maybe...but in how I thought change worked. I believed if I just loved hard enough, wrote clear enough, stood firm enough, the world would tilt toward peace. It hasnāt..... Not yet. Some days it feels like weāve gone backwards. But hereās what eleven more years of Buddhism and Daoism have taught meā¦.The goal was never toĀ fixĀ the world. The goal is to keep showing upĀ insideĀ it without closing my heart. I still run a blog in the format of Skool. I still try to live compassionately, in how I speak, how I spend my money, how I fail and try again. But I no longer pretend itās easy. The negative comments still come. Sometimes crueller than before. The world is louder now. Meaner in some corners. And I have days where I want to shut it all down and walk into the woods and never read another argument about things that should be simple, like feeding the hungry, or not bombing children. But I donāt shut down. Not because Iām strong. Because Iāve learned something from sitting still. Anger is not my enemy. Burnout is. So I practiceĀ wu wei, not laziness, but knowing when to push and when to let the river carry what it will. I practiceĀ metta, starting with myself, because you canāt pour from a cracked bowl. The wars havenāt stopped. Poverty hasnāt ended. The environment is bleeding faster. And yet. And yet, I see more people waking up than I did in 2015. Young people who refuse to accept this as normal.Communities sharing food, not just recipes. Strangers on the internet choosing kindness in the middle of a flame war.... Thatās not nothing. Thatās the dharma moving through sneakers and hashtags and tired parents posting at 2am. So hereās what I actually believe now, not what sounds hopeful, but what keeps me getting up... We may not see peace in our lifetime.