Friends, please use wisdom and compassion regarding the repetition of disturbing news and scowling faces that you take in hourly and daily. Please, focus on the good in you that can be lived from each moment. Focus on the good in others and foster it. Please, smile, dance, sing, plant a garden or balcony pots with beauty and food plants. You, pollinators, and Mother Earth will smile in return.

As to the meditation: movement, energy, mind, awareness. In support of our practice, a video that includes Master Thich Nhat Han’s peaceful practice of slowly walking in nature was sent by email. Here it is also. The video is about living innate goodness and sanity and fostering it where one is for all beings. It’s called Changing the System from Within which is what we are invested in also: https://youtu.be/5U75w_P9IYk?si=PVPuioiap63pclxY .

This morning’s sitting employs three steps that everyone knows and has practiced before. You are encouraged not to rush onto a next step but, rather, to feel an urge if present and to settle in the Now. If step 2 doesn’t happen in the sitting, that’s the perfect sitting just as if one got to step 3.

• step 1: smile, settle. Take your time. Remember to smile.
• step 2: at some point, breathing will be forefront in one’s awareness. Be with breathing.
• step 3: focus on the out-breath. Follow it out.