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“Coming home from work tonight I followed two middle aged, middle class ladies up the stairs into the multi story car-park.
One of them was carrying a banner mounted on a stick printed with an anti- Bush slogan.

I asked how it had gone today and she said:

‘I wanted to go on the last one. I wasn’t there today but these sticks are really good for my dahlias'”

Thich Nhat Hahn, who knows a thing or two about violence, counsels us to practice mindful consumption and not to ingest scenes of death, violence and hatred into our consciousness. This seems like avoidance on first blush, but one can see from a Buddhist perspective how it actually leads to peaceful liberation, as one avoids generating the energies that keep us locked in hatred. This is not to say one should not have compassion for victims of violence, far from it. In fact, he says that this practice is what allows us to have compassion. With hatred and violence dominating our consciouness, it is impossible to have compassion for anything.

In that respect, this story about the women making dahlia posts from protest signs is a huge teching for me, Euan. It is literally, as Thich Nhat Hahn says “turning arrows into flowers.”