We’re all part of this web of life, there is nothing without meaning, there is no such thing as smallness or irrelevance. The job of the artist and the teacher is to make our connecting strands more visible. Eve Marko
In the Strands section I consider my life from five aspects, based on the pattern developed by Bernie Glassman, adapted from the Five Buddha Families made widely known in the west by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I only realized a few years after choosing this organizing principle that I had been working deeply with a very similar model for a long time.
In creating the Zen Peacemakers Order, Bernie and Jishu emphasized that each of the five Buddha Families represents an aspect of each of our daily lives: Spirituality, Study, Livelihood, Relationship, and Social Action. I use them in this project as a way to appreciate my participation in the living earth community.
The paragraph below is excerpted from the Five Buddha Families chart of the Zen Peacemakers.
The Five Buddha Families is a Buddhist teaching that suggests the view of existence as a mandala, a composite of five main energies or ‘families’ of Buddhas. Each family is unique, indispensable and complements the others. Each aspect of reality, every animal, person, thought/word/deed, conflict, action can be viewed as a composite of the five, each in different balances and levels of constraint or liberation, delusion or realization.
Helping birth a thriving life planetary consciousness