The Boggs Blog

By: Joe Reilly

“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion is all around…But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”
~Martin Luther King Jr., 1968

I am practicing trust. Last week I boarded a plane to San Fransisco to visit dear friends and sing at the Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Marin County. I exercised my faith in the pilot, the mechanics, and the flight crew. I trusted that gravity and aerodynamics would still work the same way and that I would be carried safely through the clouds and over the mountains.

I practiced trust traveling to Green Gulch, a place I had not been before. I trusted that I would be cared for and supported along the way. I trusted that the effort and sacrifice involved in making the trip would be well worth the joy and happiness that shared music and ecological awareness can inspire.

At Green Gulch I trusted the strong meditation practice and the fellow practitioners to help me. I trusted the support of the rocks and the ocean. I trusted my breath and my intention.

The many, many television sets in the airports along the way seemed to be working hard against this practice. Our media, and subsequently much of our society, is operating under a premise of intense fear. The omnipresent news seems to project upon us our self-seeking insecurities that ask us worriedly, “Will I get mine? Will I have enough? Will I be okay?”

We all have these fears and the basic needs to feel safe and secure in our lives and in our society. We all have within us a primal survival response to threatening situations in which the outcome is uncertain. We also all have within us a deep and ancient ancestral love, running through and beyond the hearts of our Mothers, Fathers, Grandmothers, Grandfathers, the Buddha, Jesus, Mary, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph-through all Saints, Warriors, and Bodhisattvas in the rivers of time. This love can be our anchor if we breathe into it and allow it to work through us.

We need to stop ourselves from being carried away by the power of our fear. We need to stop, to breathe, to feel the earth deep below our feet, to invite the strength of our ancestral streams into our consciousness, and wake up to our abilities to be a continuation of these powerful teachers and agents of change.

We have all that we need. Right now. Right here. In fact, we have much more than we need. We have an excess of material wealth. Yet in this country we are still somehow spiritually impoverished. We need to renew our Spirits so that we can be available to practice the faith and trust in ourselves and each other that is required to move through times of uncertainty with wisdom, intelligence, and grace.

I am practicing faith and trust by voting for Barack Obama for President of the United States. I am trusting the lineage of activists and organizers who have worked and struggled and sacrificed for generations so that we could have this opportunity today. I have faith in Obama’s experience, intelligence, integrity, and ability to bring positive and healing changes to our government and our society. I also have faith in my own ability to be an agent of change as well as in yours.

I invite you to join with me and many others in this practice of faith and trust in Obama, in hope, and in love this Friday evening October 3rd when we celebrate together in the Folk-Rock-O-Rama for Barack Obama at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor. We will raise our collective spiritual, musical, and financial energies in support of President Obama. Please join us. Even if you live far away and are unable to attend the concert, you can participate in the local business silent auction to raise money for the campaign.

Visit the website generously created for and donated to this effort at www.annarborforobama.com and share your support.

In Obama’s own words, “Together, our dreams can be one.” Amen.

In Love and Trust,

Joe