Walk as if your feet are kissing the earth

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who, in the 1960s, in the middle of a war, taught that meditation couldn't stay in the monastery. He built a movement of monks and laypeople who rebuilt bombed villages, ran schools and clinics, and sat with the dying, and he called it engaged Buddhism. Exiled from Vietnam in 1966, he founded Plum Village in France in 1982, taught around the world for fifty years, and died in 2022, back home at the temple where he'd been ordained as a teenager.

His teaching is mindfulness in the most ordinary acts. Walking: he taught people to walk slowly, breathing with each step, as if their feet were kissing the earth. Eating: a single raisin, tasted completely, the sun and rain and the farmer's hands all present in it. Washing dishes: to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes, not to get to the tea afterward. The whole of life as the practice, not a cushion in the corner.

His word for the deepest insight was interbeing. Nothing exists alone. The sheet of paper contains the cloud that watered the tree, the logger, the logger's breakfast. You contain your parents, your teachers, everyone who ever fed you. Once you see that, kindness isn't a virtue. It's just accuracy.

It's the key for this month that takes awareness out into the world. Attention isn't only for the inner life. It's for the person across the table, the food on the plate, the ground under your feet.

He's also the gentlest teacher on this shelf, and his gentleness was earned in a war. He had every reason to be bitter and chose, every day, not to be. "Peace is every step," he wrote. That was the title of a book and the sum of a life.