Slowing Down to Be at BPF

Image description: Author & Co-Director Dawn Haney with BPF Network Director LiZhen Wang, BPF Co-Director Katie Loncke, and former BPF staffer Kate Johnson, outside in the sun at the 2017 Block Build Be Gathering. All staff have big smiles with arms around each other while lifting their right legs in unison in a dance move.

Sabbatical as a Time to Be

It's been a powerful and wild seven years since Katie Loncke and I joined together as BPF's first Co-Directorship. Happy anniversary, my dearest work-wife!

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We started in 2012 with two goals:

• Fight to keep the doors open, if we believed it remained useful to do so
• Rebirth the organization with a more radical, racial justice approach

BPF's precarity supported decisions for bold organizational changes. We benefitted from connecting our work with national movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and border justice. As our conversations about racism have deepened, we've begun to learn BPF's part in invisibilizing Asian American Buddhisms, and have prioritized work bringing Buddhist wisdom to frontline movement communities.

The Guidance of Block Build Be

In 2016, we developed the Block Build Be framework to guide us through our spiritual-political practice. We block systemic harm, while building collaborative tools and gatherings that give us the strength to be with our suffering, in order to transform towards liberation.

If you are like us, you might be strongest in one practice -- Katie's our resident blocker of harms in the world, while I'm regularly tinkering away to make sure our organization is built strong.

Image: Cover of a tan journal, block-printed in red and orange with the words "Block Build Be" interspersed with a flower

In our seventh year, we're both taking some time to slow down and practice with be. Some brilliant BPFers before us put commitments into our personnel policies for staffers to have paid professional development time — sabbaticals — after working for five or more years. We are grateful to those who sowed the seeds, and to our current board and staff who will help care for the organization this summer while we take an opportunity to rest and to dream.

Sabbatical as a Time to Be -- and Block and Build

Sabbatical is a time to Be, but it has elements of Blocking and Building woven in.

Be: The opportunity to rest during sabbatical can help reset deeply capitalist patterns as a human "doing" rather than a human "being"

Block: Within the organization, sabbatical time helps refresh habitual patterns and tensions that have carried over from crisis moments in BPF's history

Build: Sabbatical has also helped staff prioritize a shift toward more collaborative administrative structures, particularly around finances and communications

What is Beyond Sabbatical?

We are fortunate to have a staff and board team who will be carrying great work forward while I'm offline April - June, and Katie is resting June and July.

The Block Build Be Earth Wisdom and Eco Justice gathering will blossom in May, our first year at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. To our friends at Highlander: We send extra love after this weekend's fire which targeted and destroyed your administrative building, including important historical documents. We stand with you in resilience and resistance.

Images, clockwise: Mayumi Oda painting, a brown-skinned woman at a march with the sign "we're just tryin' to breathe," five brown and black people at a sitting meditation action, bright blue origami butterflies.

For the fall, we are letting plans emerge, trusting that sabbatical time will generate new energy, like fallow fields offer time to regenerate soil health.

It can be challenging to choose a time of Being when the needs for Blocking and Building are intense.

In academia, sabbatical time often marks an opportunity to ground into a new stage of career. What's the research that would have been too risky while you were seeking tenure -- but is the kind of radical, heart-warming, and liberatory risk we need for the future?

I look forward to finding out where we emerge! Until then, I intend to use this sabbatical time to practice with the Buddha's instructions of being as fully alive in this body as possible.

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

— David Whyte

With deep gratitude, and great wishes that any benefits of this time ripple out to all beings,

Dawn