This morning Hebe and I caught the train up from Hastings to spend the afternoon in London’s Trafalgar Square, joining with several thousand other people of goodwill to sit for peace.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese peace activist and Buddhist monk, had brought his fellow monks and nuns from Plum Village, their community in France, to speak about sowing the seeds of peace in our daily lives.
An extraordinarily beautiful soul, he is now 86 years old, and it was a wonderful thing to have the opportunity to sit quietly with so many others who care about the wellbeing of the Earth and the human community, and be led in peaceful reflection on how the way we speak to one another may transform our relationships.
On the video, the song you hear is not just some random music dubbed over, but is a recording of the chant the monks and nuns sang and the people all round the square joined in.
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Blige! (Oh – family exclamation – hailing possibly from an archaic usage of “Oblige me!”) How many of these darned things did we have? Obviously we were feeling low and I thought we needed a lot of inspiration! Well they worked; we were inspired, we did it – we’re OK now (for the time being anyway!). So we sent them on their way to inspire another set of despairing people. I think these cards might have come from our days of Maximum Intervention by builders, scaffolders and solar installation engineers.