Hopeful Thinking

What is your general rule of thumb when spending money? For most of us, we buy what’s convenient, affordable, and has a level of quality to it that we are willing to sacrifice to various degrees according to convenience and affordability. You get what you pay for. That’s how we shop almost all of us, almost all the time. Few of us ever spend very much time considering what it actually is that we’re truly purchasing when we buy something. Some of us know full well what’s at stake, but we justify our behavior because of convenience and affordability.  But you get what you pay for. We have expectations of the things we purchase. So check your expectations for a moment. What do you really expect from the dollar you spend? Do you expect that dollar to save the world? You darn well should. Buddhist teachings say that money viewed through the principles of right view, right thought, right speech, and right conduct help one to perceive their own money as a positive influence in the world,...

What does the term “woke” really mean? To some people it’s a battle cry, to others it’s an inspiration for eye-rolls or snide comments. Most of us fall in the middle. Like many things that have a tendency to confuse us, it’s an intention. The term ‘woke,’ in the broad sense, references a desire to be more aware of social justice issues.  In the minutia, however, there are great variations to the community of woke-ness. Those who tend to be more extreme in their views are the ones who also tend to be the most noticed, and therefore become the defacto prototypes of how a concept is publicly defined. That’s unfortunate, because the social justice community, by and large, is an extremely loving, gentle, and compassionate one, who wishes for unity among us all. It just doesn’t always look like that. Because that’s not the view we’re often given. The same is true on the opposite side of the social and political spectrum as well, of course. The more extreme someone’s perspective, the more...

My first memories, at least those about others, are of wondering about what people believed, religiously speaking. I’m not certain of the foundation of that curiosity. I have no memory of religion in my life until my brother and sister and I began attending Sunday school later in childhood. And even then, it was an opportunity presented to us, not forced upon us.  My parents did not really attend church. Eventually my brother and sister stopped attending as well. But I kept going. Walking down into the valley at ten years old every Sunday morning and getting a ride home from someone after coffee hour. Free range days long gone. So I’m not exactly sure where the early question mark came from about the nature of other people’s beliefs. But I remember the wondering distinctly.  My first formed thoughts about religion, once I had started to discover traditions outside my own, were that they all felt very similar in some ways and extremely different in others. But it was the simila...