On a recent Good News update we interviewed the steward of the Africa blogs, the person who compiles and posts the trip reports to the website. I was inspired in that conversation by the very real statement that All of practice takes All of us.
More than 15 years ago Cheri traveled to Italy where she met a Franciscan friar, John, born and raised in Zambia. It was he who led us to Kantolomba. He introduced us to Theresa, his biological sister.
Several years later while we were in Zambia at a local grocery store, we ran into the woman who had financially supported Theresa’s brother in his training at the friary. It struck me that the generosity of this woman some 40 years earlier had contributed to the establishment of the Kantolomba project. Or, perhaps, we could say Mary Kapenda, Theresa and John’s mother, was also responsible by having the tenacity and vision to keep her children at home to read and study so they were not out in the compound at the bars, as many of their peers were. Or maybe it was Mary’s mother, or the author of the book on Zen that Cheri Huber picked up decades ago, or….
In a very short time, if we follow all these threads of kindness, we come to see what Lao Tzu meant when he said, “Everything is connected and everything relates to each other.”
As I receive reports back from Theresa about how well the girls in the new Girls Program are doing and how excited they are about what is happening in their lives, I think of all that is making that possible. I think of the person who posts those blogs. I think of the thousands who read those blogs and are inspired to participate in the transformation. I consider the path that brought each of those folks to practice, and of the journey of each of the members of the cooperative in Kantolomba that has brought them there, and….
It seems truly that all of Life is contained in each moment. What a grand blessing to be HERE for it!
In Gassho,
Jen