MWA Newsletter, Zen, -  Nov 14, 2023

“Thank you for doing this on my behalf”

Dear Friends,

In 2006 I went on a pilgrimage that was funded by donations each of us solicited, and by begging food and shelter along the way. There were donors who said “Thank you for doing this on my behalf.” In 2013 I led the Compassionate Earth Walk, funded in the same way.

That’s in a long tradition in which some people do a needed thing and others support them.

In religions with monastic traditions, monastics engage in deep spiritual practice, follow a strict lifestyle supporting that practice, and offer teachings freely to lay people. Lay people have fewer ethical rules, live their lives as householders, and offer material support to nuns and monks, who share spiritual teachings with them.

In modern America and many other places that reject hierarchy, there are few instances of such full-time support. Yet congregations support ministers, Buddhist sanghas support teachers, and donors support many kinds of peaceful activism.

Nothing I do now is as dramatic as that walk was, and even that was less dramatic that the resistance to fossil fuel pipelines (and mining and other environmental causes) in which people use their bodies to block harm. Yet my whole life is given in that way. I loved living on the road, yet when I returned it was clear that there was something else to do, and that something is Mountains and Waters Alliance.

I planted myself in the earth, here in southern Minnesota, in 2014, and since then the direction has gradually revealed itself. A few years later I went back to work, to support the farm and its function as a learning/teaching center and residence. I spent most of the pandemic writing the book – will announce when I have a publisher – and am now ready to move into action. Something is clearly ready to be born. I long to give it my full attention.

If you would like me to do that – please use the GoFundMe to support me in doing so. There are more details there. https://gofund.me/cc0ded9b

If you’d like to do it with me, by all means get in touch.

 

With love,

Shodo Spring, for Mountains and Waters Alliance