Nomon Tim returns to the 21st century after a few weeks of exploring Keizan's Denkoroku.

Acknowledging the troubling and turbulent times we are in, he asks: How are you doing? Are you choosing to read the news or not? What are you feeling?Are there ways of responding that feel positive at all? Or it all just overwhelming (fair enough, if so).

Stream audio:

Tim's Talk Notes:

I thought we'd return to the 21st century tonight must as I enjoy sharing about Zen teachings from the 13th. And especially lately it's been nice to anywhere but now eh? Wow, what troubling and turbulent times we're living in. Probably people have said this periodically (or constantly?) since human society began, but it does feel very true now.

How are you doing? Are you choosing to read the news or not? What are you feeling?Are there ways of responding that feel positive at all? Or it all just overwhelming (fair enough, if so).

Perhaps the stress of it all in the background is affecting your attitudes or behavior in unexpected ways - finding yourself more impatient or grumpier than usual? 

I was choosing to avoid the news until the news came to me directly from my family.

Many of you know about my Kenyan daughter, Mercy Ukumu. She was here visiting last May with her new baby who just turned 1! She was able to come to Raizelah and my wedding too which was so wonderful.

I've been connected to Mercy since she was 13 years old when my first wife and I had the opportunity to sponsor her to go a residential boarding school to help her as an orphaned girl to get out of the village and get a good education.

And over the years various sangha members have helped other members of Mercy's family, too and their village.

After my first trip to Africa I had a moving experience while visiting the family farm. Mercy's older brother Maxwell is the farmer. He was walking me around - maybe 2 of 3 acres in various bits mixed in with their neighbors plots. Tomatoes, corn, rice down below by an irrigation cancel where it's wetter. One of the first questions he asked when I met him was, "what crops do you grow?"

We were walking by his corn field and the plants didn't look good. A bit withered and dried out. Maxwell explained that there is usually rain in January - the "small rains" as opposed to the "big rains" in April and May - and they plant dryland crops expecting them to be watered by the small rains. But that year the small rains just didn't come.

And I was confused as I could see just about 50 yards down the gentle slope was an irrigation canal. Why can't you use that water I asked? He looked at me a little puzzled and said, "but how would I bring the water up here?" No irrigation systems, no spigots, no pumps. Canals and shovels and I suppose buckets but even a small field would take forever to water with buckets.

I mused about that. No pumps and a rural village family would be just a bit poorer that year when their corn crop failed.

It was amazing and kind of intense to be face to face with subsistence farming that a family depends on for food and income without any machinery. In 2017 I think it was. I looked it up about about 25% of world's population depends on small subsistence farms just like that. And how vulnerable they must all be to climate change.

We all have our stresses about money but what if your retirement plan was that your grown kids would do a good job working the farm and keeping the family from starving?

Anyway I told that story in a talk just like this after I got back home and someone in the back - it might have been Connie Martin - piped up good and loud: "let's buy him a pump!"  And we did. We did a little fund raiser and sent I think about $600 for a gas powered water pump for Wellington. I made an agreement with him that he's share it's use with his neighbors which he did.

Now Mercy's a grown woman working in service of her communities in Kenya. She works for the international NGO Save the Children. She helps to coordinate aid projects in rural Kenya with the mission of making sure local people are directly involved in working on an implementing building the schools, opening the clinics, and drilling the wells. When locals are more fully included everything works out better for many reasons.

And then a few days ago Mercy was sending me photos from her son's first birthday on Whatapp (so cute!) and then shared that her agency had been shut down by the Trump Administration's sudden executive order to freeze all federal funding. Save the Children is largely funded by USAID.

To her credit she wrote that she's not so worried about her job (which is amazing as even with a professional salary, she can just barely make ends meet), but about the well-being of the communities, and especially the children, they serve.

The news of this crazy world came to me whether I wanted to face it or not.

Since then I've been again watching what's happening in Washington D.C., but with a deeper appreciation for how what happens there affects the whole world and can affect us right here in Bellingham. Even Meals on Wheels was threatened by the funding freeze!

Fortunately a judge blocked the implementation of that order. It was clearly unconstitutional. E.g. illegal. And for a moment I was thinking "oh good, all better" - I am such an optimistic sometimes it's a little embarrassing. In many ways it serves me well though.

And sure enough learning more I discovered lots of damage had already been done and of course there is plenty of damage the current administration is thinking of that they haven't unleashed yet. They've been pretty busy though. Wow.

While I haven't forgotten that serious political work also needs to be part of my response somehow - I just don't know how, not yet, it's overwhelming.

So I've also been recommitting myself personally to compassion and kindness. That idea that true peace starts at home is also true.

That sounds a little tidier than it really is. It's not like after the election I thought to myself, "I know I'll work on compassion and kindness as my response" - I just tried to keep going like we all did.

But recently I've been experiencing some interpersonal stress and confusion. I was pretty upset about it and kept working with it, thinking about it, trying to see different angles on it. I was watching my mind dig into righteousness - so convinced that the essential solution here is to convince other people they're wrong because I'm right.

And that might be true in some ways - hard to know for sure, that's for sure - but the righteous attitude, the motivation to straighten others out, just doesn't help.

When I'm reactive or judgmental of others, I've seen again and again, I end up being unhelpful, and even harmful, in how I respond when I'm under the sway of negativity.

I don't think so at the time, of course. I think I'm right and they're wrong and I'm showing them the error of their ways.

It takes me a while each time to wake up to this, but I'm practicing with it. I kind of can't help it.

Sometimes I don't know if what's happening in my mind looks like "practice" - it can look like rumination, or anger, or complaining but I'm seeing that actually, somehow, it is practice.

Why am I saying that? Because then, eventually it shifts. The bigger more spacious, kinder, more understanding me emerges again. So it must be practice if I look at these fruits.

So I can't help practicing turning these situations over in my mind, feeling into my heart, and trying to wonder what's really happening. Where's the energy of reactivity coming from? Are there parts of the situation that are actually mine?

Eventually it shifts, my heart opens and some degree of wisdom emerges. I move from proving my point to "how can I help?"  Can I can help in a way that honors and supports all involved? Can I bring some understanding to bear? Even when people behave poorly it made sense to them at the time. Can I move past condemnation to cooperation?

The wonderful thing is how Buddha Nature seems to work. When compassion and wisdom emerge it's not a chore to show up in this way. It can be delicate and can be tricky, but it's joyful. It feels so much better when we release from that dark internal aggression about how whatever so-and-so is doing into the light of kindness. 

This takes a while! I have to go through lots of thought loops, judgements and a bit complaining before I get there it seems. And unfortunately a grumpy email often slips out. (And no, I'm not going to share my journal with you!)

There are so many ways we help this world. And let's not neglect doing a better job with how we take care of ourselves and each other. That's crucial activism too.

I did feel overwhelmed by the political situation and then it came to me. Personally and I started learning more and then I started realizing that educating myself is also political activism. I didn't know much about USAID or American global relief efforts. And wow, there's a lot to that. Our country in so many ways has been the good guy as well as all of the crummy things we've done. And it's worth learning about the good. I'm going to share a little with you.

But be ready for some sorrow, it's a bit like that Joni Mitchell song about losing the natural world, "and you don't know what you've got till it's gone." Now that American aid for the developing world is being threatened I'm learning more about some of the good things we've been doing for year. Again my focus is on Africa.

This is from an article Atul Gawande in the NY Times. He's the doctor who wrote the well known book "Being Mortal". I've shortened it a little.

On Monday, January 27th, the United States Office of Management and Budget sent out an unprecedented directive instructing all government agencies to carry out a sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants, loans, and other financial-assistance programs. This “temporary pause” would provide the Trump Administration “time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding.” And the halt on payments was to begin the next day—Tuesday, January 28th—at 5 p.m.

The announcement provoked widespread confusion and disbelief. In a massive grab for power from Congress, the order seemed to halt almost every federal program touching people’s lives except Social Security and Medicare. O.M.B. identified twenty-six hundred programs affected. These include grants for law-enforcement and homeland-security activities; community health centers; firefighting; clinical trials across the country; special-education programs; and Meals on Wheels for the elderly. Even the portal for payments to states for Medicaid, which the Administration promised would be unaffected, shut down. Minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline, a federal judge blocked implementation of the freeze until she could review a challenge from multiple plaintiffs. Then today, O.M.B. rescinded its order. The legality of the plan was as murky as the intentions.

A week before the announcement, however, we received a clear indication of what was in store. On January 20th, amid the barrage of executive orders that Trump signed after the Inauguration—including the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization—was an order to pause new foreign-aid spending commitments for ninety days. Soon afterward, the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, issued a stop-work order for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, halting not only new awards but virtually all existing programs.

Foreign aid has long been funded by bipartisan majorities in Congress as a cornerstone of national security, along with diplomacy and defense. This supports work, much of it through contractors and nongovernmental organizations, with countries worldwide in areas of mutual interest. Examples include combatting global disease threats and malnutrition; stopping human trafficking and drug trafficking; advancing access to education for girls; and demining postwar countries like Vietnam and Cambodia. In the days that followed, nonetheless, organizations across the U.S. and the world received letters stating that they must stop all work and use of existing funds immediately. No staff can be paid. No services can be provided. No medicines or supplies sitting on shelves can be used.

“To be clear, there is no such thing as a temporary pause,” Michael Schiffer, a former U.S.A.I.D. official, has written. “When an NGO, a small business, or an American company that receives U.S. government funding to implement U.S. foreign assistance is told to stop work, even for 90 days, that means people are fired, expertise is lost, and programs are shut down with no guarantee they’ll start back up, even if they survive the review.”

On the afternoon of January 27th, major portions of the staff who operate U.S.A.I.D. were purged. The top layers of civilian and foreign-service leadership—fifty-seven people in all, including the agency’s general counsel and ethics counsel—had their badges turned off and were put on immediate leave. Technical experts and support staff hired through contractors—which includes half of U.S.A.I.D.’s Global Health workforce—were dismissed. Orders instructed the remaining staff that they not only had to stop funding work with partner organizations but they also had to stop communicating with them. There could be no coordination or information exchange, whether with the World Health Organization or local universities and nonprofits. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control was put under a similar gag order.

The impact has been calamitous. I know the effect on health programs vividly, having run U.S.A.I.D.’s Bureau for Global Health during the last Administration. For example, the U.S. has limited sight on infectious-disease outbreaks in many parts of the world, such as Russia and China. So U.S.A.I.D. has funded experts in neighboring countries, such as Kazakhstan, sitting between those particular two countries, to upgrade monitoring and share information on bird flu and other deadly diseases. That work has halted.

Many other programs are similarly affected. U.S.A.I.D.’s work with W.H.O. and the government of Tanzania battling a Marburg virus outbreak—a cousin of Ebola with no approved test, drug, or vaccine, and a death rate of up to ninety-per-cent-death—halted.

The U.S. government’s work with countries around the world, W.H.O., and UNICEF, to eradicate polio—halted.

U.S.A.I.D.’s coordination and delivery of more than a billion dollars in corporate drug donations, which have brought neglected tropical diseases such as river blindness and elephantiasis to the brink of elimination in whole regions of the world—halted.

The deployment of medicines, supplies, staff training, and systems aiding more than twenty-five countries to increase access to vaccinations, prenatal care, safe childbirth, contraception, and other lifesaving health services for ninety-two million women and children—a program that has dramatically reduced death rates—halted.

America’s celebrated global H.I.V. program, pepfar—halted entirely. This includes its H.I.V.-vaccine research trials; its delivery of low-cost daily medications, which are keeping twenty million people with H.I.V. alive in more than fifty countries; and the rollout of a new U.S. drug that could end the aids epidemic —an H.I.V. treatment-and-prevention drug called lenacapavir, which delivers six months of protection in a single shot.

The effects go well beyond health. U.S.A.I.D. comprises the largest nonmilitary operational capacity the U.S. has for assisting countries in many other areas of mutual coöperation. The agency has built a network of hundreds of thousands of personnel across the U.S. and the world, and it is supported to do this work mainly through federal grants and contracts. This infrastructure is the engine of American soft power. And in a matter of days—and contravening laws and budgets passed by Congress—the Trump Administration has attempted not simply to redirect U.S.A.I.D.’s policy but to gut the agency’s capacity.

This is not a pause. It is a destruction. And it’s all completely irrelevant to doing a “review.” Every Administration takes a top-to-bottom review of policy and spending and makes changes—even big changes, shifting the activities of whole agencies. But they act through constitutionally defined processes to make these happen—and work to protect people and institutions from harm. By both shutting down most of U.S.A.I.D.’s existing activities and purging the people who manage them, Donald Trump and his allies are eviscerating the entire structure.

Under public scrutiny and mounting pressure from Congress, Secretary Rubio did not rescind the foreign-aid funding freeze, but instead only issued a waiver backtracking on parts of it, including on some of the global health programs. “Existing life-saving global health assistance programs for H.I.V., malaria, TB control, nutrition, skilled birth and prenatal care, and immunization should continue or resume work if they have stopped,” the waiver says. However, it’s unclear how narrowly “life-saving” will be defined. The resumption is temporary. (How long is not specified.) Work combatting new disease outbreaks, eradicating diseases such as polio, and supporting contraception seems to be excluded from the waiver. Plus, the demolition of staffing already turns the agency into a shadow of itself.

For a century now, the U.S. has led the world on collaboration and impact in health, which has doubled the life expectancy of all of humanity—and delivered similarly outsized results beyond health. If this Administration really wanted to put America first, it would have built on that legacy. Instead, it is demolishing U.S. standing, our world-leading capacity and expertise, and our national security.

The Administration has seemed intent on deploying this playbook across the entire scope of federal agencies and activities for the United States. There are other institutions driving whole areas of critical work—environmental protection, education, labor, and disease control, to name just a few—that the President has targeted for dismantling, despite the fact that both red and blue majorities in Congress have voted to fund them.

Foreign aid is a speck in the 6.75-trillion-dollar government budget. At about eight billion dollars last year, U.S.A.I.D.’s global health budget is smaller than that of many hospital systems. But the agency’s experience reveals what remains at stake—the collective capacity of the American government to pursue the common good.

It's a lot I know. Maybe you knew more about the great good - very effective and smartly delivered aid where it's needed - USAID provides than I do. And now that good work is in jeopardy. People like my daughters family in villages all over the development world receive help through USAID. As the guests of honor at the new presidents were all billionaires. The saha world - this world of suffering - is right here. Greed, hatred, and delusion are right here.

How do we respond. It's not easy. There are no clear answers. I guess I'm discovering that my first two are to work on my own compassion and wisdom in being with others, and educating myself more about governmental aid programs - and this article is just a start there. We can't make convincing arguments if we don't know what we're talking about.

But even so with whom do make those arguments and if we can even get their attention, will they listen?

I know many are actively taking a fresh look at volunteering in the community - great idea!

I do think the energy we put into caring for our sangha - our practice community - is a rich and important response to the suffering in the world too.

And our American dollars do still go far in the developing world - check out one opportunity (of so many) to donate to help others in the Sangha to Sangha section below.

How is for you? I'd love to hear how you're doing. What are your ideas for making a positive difference?