There is a small, almost invisible moment each morning when the heart is especially impressionable. Before the armor goes on, the mind tightens around the day’s responsibilities, and before the world rushes in. What we place in that moment matters.
It becomes the first tone struck in the nervous system. The first posture of the heart and a lens through which everything else is received.
I’ve been deeply moved by following the monks on the Walk for Peace. In the middle of all the noise, the grief, the clenched-jaw headlines of the world, they have felt like a living counterpose. Sort of a soft, steady backbend of the heart.
There is something disarmingly simple about what they offer. No spectacle. No argument. Just feet on the earth, breath in the body, bowls in their hands, and an unmistakable field of care moving slowly across the land. Watching them, I keep thinking: this is what sanity looks like.
Their message of compassion doesn’t feel abstract or lofty, but practical and elemental, almost like water finding its way downhill. Like the most natural response to suffering is not hardening, but softening. Not turning away, but walking toward one another, step by humble step.
Somehow, in their quiet presence, watching their progress each day, I remember what I want to belong to. What I want to practice. What I want to keep choosing, even when the world feels heavy.
Lately I’ve noticed something else, too. I’ve started making it a point, in those tender first minutes of the morning when I finally screw up the courage to “check the news” to check on them first. To let my system be met by steady feet, shaved heads, alms bowls, silence, and love before it is met by outrage, urgency, and alarm. It feels like priming the heart. Setting the inner compass before stepping into the day. And honestly, it shifts how I receive what comes next.
I wanted to share this because it has been such a balm for me. And because I know many of you, too, understand the quiet power of small, luminous acts done with great love.
Maybe this is one of the simplest forms of practice: choosing what we let shape us first.
