Home at the End of Another World

My last name means “I see the world.” It’s an Ethiopian name I took as a young man during the Black Arts movment, when a lot of us were dropping family names that were reflective of our captivity through the slave trade and reclaiming cultural roots through a new name.  This blog is a journal that reflects a life transition and also reflects global transformation. It’s both personal and global, documenting a journey from Minnesota to Ethiopia, which I look at as pulling together multiple threads in my life and focusing how I walk through the world. I’ve been a teacher for a large part of my adult life. Now what’s going to inform my teaching and my activism is my relationship to Buddhist Dharma, without being dogmatic but valuing it as a practice that helps to be present,  to act in a way that affirms the interconnection of all life and to live in a way that does no harm. I see my trip to Ethiopia is a trial — stepping into a completely different environment and seeing how it may reveal some hidden assumptions I have about myself and the world.