TOWARD A BETTER 2016

We know all these things the Dalai Lama mentions in the text on the picture, but do we live better because of it? Can you make a commitment to change just one of these facts in your life in the next year?
The statement that jumps out for me is, “We have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor”.  This year I finally got the poetry box up at my house, it took me a year and a half to manifest the thing. The idea for it came on my travels, but getting it done was a process of finding the post,finding the just right moment to put the post in the ground, and finding the friend who wanted to build the box to put on the post. It could all have been done faster. I could have hired someone to put in the post, I could have ordered a three hundred dollar poetry box online and have some person for hire put it up for me. That is not how I felt about the project. This was a project of sharing, using materials I have laying around, utilizing relationships in my community to build the box, this was a project to bring people together, to slow things down, allow someone to stop, read and ponder, to say hello and ask questions, to let neighbors participate and share their poems. 
The idea I had is working: people stop and read, people bring their poems to share, people now think about what they can do at their house to make contact with the strangers that walk by. I took the window of my room to the edge of the street. I share what I read in my room, what I think about and what I love. I am communicating with the people in my neighborhood through my poetry box.  People have to walk a few steps to receive it, healthy steps. Poems are without judgment but full of awareness. Poems don’t take much time to read, but linger inside you, and infuse the next moment in a person’s life. 
What if all you readers, shared this blog with one or two other people and these people shared it with one or two others and so on? Wouldn’t we have a pyramid of power that could change our world? Will you take one line of the Dalai Lama’s text and change it in the next year? The world in 2016 will be better for it.

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