Creating Sanctuaries & Letting Love In

Out this week from Hello America Stereo Cassette — my poem, Caravan, is included in the new “I.C.E. Out, Love In” audio literary mixtape of stories, poems, and essays on the topic of I.C.E. Resistance. All of the proceeds will be donated to the Immigrant Defense Project. Go listen, donate, and support this work here.

Listen: "I.C.E. Out, Love In" Mixtape

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an ordained Zen priest in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi lineage of Soto Zen, and a poet and author who writes from her perspective as a Black lesbian within a Buddhist tradition. Off and on since November, I’ve had the high honor and privilege of being a resident volunteer and practitioner at the temple where she’s been a teacher-in-residence. I was inspired to read her work after talking briefly with her over dinner, and hearing her give a Dharma talk where she so compassionately shared about living with chronic pain.

In Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging, Zenju writes about ancestral exploration following violent, generational severance from homelands, and some of the formative experiences that led to her ordination. While grounded in the Buddhist views of impermanence and finding Home wherever we are, she radically addresses the need for spiritual communities to acknowledge the loss of home that oppressed people feel from displacement, foreclosure, colonization, genocide, deportation, and other forms of collective and personal disasters. Physical safety and spiritual refuge are inalienable rights, essential to us all.

Each night, after evening Zazen, we chant the Three Refuges, taking spiritual shelter in the characteristics of the Buddha, the wisdom of the Dharma, and the communal brotherhood/sisterhood of a Sangha. In a time where masses of people are being separated from their families, criminalized for being Brown, and being violently stripped from their homes, may we all more deeply examine how we can be a refuge for each other, how we can be more of a physical and spiritual shelter, how we can open our hearts to creating true sanctuaries; the homes, cities, and nations we all deserve.

Masterful, exquisite, and divinely-inspired, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is a gift for us all, and for all times. A book to be born again to.

I recently compiled and organized a complete list of my book recommendations on my website, only including books I’ve read in full so far. Looking forward to adding a whole lot more this year and in the years to come. You can read my recommendations here.

Terra's Book Recs