What's A Buddhist To Do?

BPF's 25th Anniversary

For a special anniversary issue, Turning Wheel asked us the above question. We were given 200 words for our responses. Mine is below.

In my life as I live it:

• Simplify Consumption. Modern lifestyles are exploitative and destructive in their affluence. Have the courage to give up one harmful non-necessity after another. Live more on the expenditure level of the working poor; don't forget the standard of living of the Thai peasants who used to feed me.
• Foster Community among the people I interact with regularly. See through the blinds of our neurotic individualism to the inter-relatedness of life and relax selfishness enough to live out this vision in community. Cultivating healthy relationships in all areas of life is more important than what I accomplish personally. Specifically, build an alternative community at Liberation Park .
• Dismantle Patriarchy & Its Violence. Having left one form of the patriarchal violence intrinsic to organized religion, be careful not to repeat it in another form. Explore anarchic forms of community that are ethically valid partly because they are not about power over others.
• Find an ecosystem to be part of and help care for in a direct, daily way. Move out of the big city sprawlscape into something sustainable and serve, learn from, and be buried in it.   

Further thoughts on peaceful living as life at Liberation Park evolves.