View full issue in PDF - The Mindfulness Bell

One of the veterans in our writing group, Mike Wong,
was a deserter during the war in Vietnam. He went to
Canada and met American, Canadian, and Vietnamese draft
resisters and evaders. Mike wrote a wonderful scene about a
peace demonstration with his friends that turned into a sit-in
in the middle of the street. These young men were risking
deportation, arrest, and being put back in the army and
shipped to Vietnam, but they sat in the middle of the street
anyway. Suddenly, there was a moment of peace as the
crowds went around them. In writing that scene, Mike
described everything- the feel of the concrete street they
were sitting on, the noise of the crowd, the excitement of the
mounted policemen on their horses, the people shouting,
"Take the street!" He wrote about the peacefulness and the
great joy of things not happening-they were not arrested,
they were not run down, they were not beaten up by the
police- much like Thich Nhat Hanh's reminder to appreciate
a non-toothache. Mike had the ability to show a great
moment of peace right in the middle of violence and fear.
Many psychotherapists have believed that people need to
go deeply into their traumas and wounds and talk about
them. But lately, there has been some thought that it might
be better to strengthen the positive, joyful aspects of life. I
learned about this in my hometown of Stockton, California.
Several years ago, a man came into a schoolyard with a
machine gun and killed many Southeast Asian children.
Afterward, therapists from all over the state came to help the
children. The therapists wanted the children to talk about the
man with the gun, about who was killed next to them, and
so on. But the Vietnamese community in Stockton said they
had their own way of handling it. They had Sangha meetings,
meditations, tea ceremonies, and games. They constantly
had joyful practices with the children.
Last Thanksgiving at Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh
said to several of us, "Let go of your suffering. Don't be
attached to the suffering." But we also remembered him
saying at another time, "Stick to your suffering." I have
come to the conclusion that there is no contradiction in these
statements. In our writing and in our contemplation, we do
both. There are times when we attach to our suffering, we
feel it, we contemplate it, we breathe it, we hold it, we write
about it, and we find words for it. We almost instinctively
do that. But the idea of letting go of suffering is a really new
thought. Instead of coming directly at that suffering, we can
contemplate our joy. When we do this, peace and joy
become solid and strong and suffering takes care of itself.
Human joy is an advanced stage of our evolution.
Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of the National Book
Award, is author of The Woman Warrior, China Men,
Hawaii One Summer, and Tripmaster Monkey. She leads
meditation and writing workshops for veterans of war.
Redwood Sangha
by Wendy Johnson
M
any years ago Thich Nhat Hanh walked through the
filtered light of the redwood trees in Muir Woods
National Monument and reminded us that West Coast
Dharma students were practicing in the protection of a true
"Redwood Sangha." Just as the stately sugar maple of
eastern Canada gives color and form to Maple Village
'Sangha on the outskirts of Montreal, and the gnarly,
drought-hardy manzanita defines the lines of Manzanita
Village in the Anza-Borrego wilderness of Southern
California, so does the old growth redwood of the Pacific
Northwest sustain and deepen the Dharma practice of those
of us living in the remnants of the Redwood Empire.
This empire once stretched in a vast, 2000-mile arc from
Icy Strait on the North Alaskan panhandle as far south as the
forested flanks of Monterey Bay in central California. When
Europeans first entered these forests in the 1700s, they
walked into woods that had grown undisturbed for millennia.
The dominant conifers of these forests- western
hemlock, Sitka spruce, noble fir, western red cedar, Douglas
fir, Port Orford cedar, and coastal redwood- are all ancient
trees, some growing to a height of 200-300 feet. By a
million and a half years ago, these conifers had established
their dominance on the temperate Pacific Slope where they
have grown undisturbed since the dawn of time.
In the 1870s, commercial West Coast logging began in
earnest and these forests came under the saw blade of a
booming timber industry . Now, only a scant four percent of
the original two million acres of old growth redwood
remains. Loss of this ancient forest signals loss of life and
habitat for numerous inhabitants of the forest including
microscopic mycorrhizal fungi, the endangered Pacific giant
salamander, the coho salmon, the California black bear, the
red tree vole, the northern spotted owl and the elusive,
threatened marbled murralet.
Old growth redwoods have been my home and my
teacher for 25 years. Every winter at Green Gulch Farm we
dedicate January and February to caring for these trees and
plants. Each February since 1987, we have a Family Day of
Mindfulness during which we plant and tend seedling
redwood and Douglas fir trees. Some of our original trees
now stand eight feet tall with their long limbs stretched to
the sun. Children who attended our first plantings come
every year to visit their young Redwood Sangha.
Over the last two years, I have joined many people in
speaking out for the protection of our remaining old growth
forests. In partiCUlar, I have been involved in the peaceful
and steady campaign to protect the last stand of old growth
redwoods on private land, the 60,000 acre Headwaters forest
owned by Pacific Lumber Company in southern Humboldt
County, California. Ten years ago, the company was taken
over by Charles Hurwitz. In order to repay his sizable junk
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