I recently transcribed a talk given in the Online Gatherings on Tuesday May 27, 2025. When introducing this in a small ebook, I noted that while it is true I gave this talk, it is not wholly accurate to say I created it.

The Online Gatherings came into being in the first months of 2020. Covid was spreading. Many people I knew were reeling from the loss of a longstanding meditation community. Feeling the impact of these circumstances myself, I wanted to do something in response. So our first Gathering took place in early April.

I remember an instant from that initial get together well. We were just setting out, about to do what we always did in our recently dissolved spiritual home: recite a few chants. ‘We can’t do that anymore,’ a voice inside me whispered.

Honouring these words, I put my liturgies aside and started to meditate. So began a still-continuing journey to discover what this new group was going to be.

There have been many highlights in this undertaking. We have seen several new chants emerge. There have been revelations regarding how we meditate (like a tree: with branches and leaves, a trunk and roots, held by the earth and sky) and the importance of relatedness in this practice (absolutely essential). Most affecting, however, have been our discoveries about the teachings we engage, what the meditative tradition calls the dharma.

In my own past experience, teachings always come from elsewhere. This elsewhere might be a teacher or tradition, a text, an audio recording, or a video tape. What has evolved in the Online Gatherings veers away from this tendency.

While we still use buddhism as a supportive framework, often as not, the living source of the teachings we contemplate is our interactions with one another, our deepening sense of community.

I liken the process to quilt-making.

In our discussions, emails, chats, and posts, I am continually listening/feeling for instants that elicit a response in myself and/or others. When such a moment presents itself, I place it aside in the same way a quilt-maker does a resonant piece of fabric.

In time, I begin placing these momentary pieces beside one another, sensing for some kind of pattern. Eventually, I am able to stitch a series of instants together in a talk, a post, or a drawing.

Thinking of the talk mentioned above, I recall someone asking what the six paramitas have to do with meditation. This was a casual question. At the time, it elicited only a flutter of uncomfortable chuckles.

Yet that flutter was notable enough for me to place the instant aside and keep an eye open for similar moments: a comment likening meditation to surrender; Pema Chodron’s description of exertion as enthusiasm; an inquiry into how basic brilliance appears in our everyday lives.

Slowly, a ‘teaching quilt’ took shape. This fabric played an enormous role in shaping the talk I’m referencing here. It also reinforces some of the main understandings of the Online Gatherings:

(1) basic brilliance is alive and well in all of us; (2) through the medium of our lives, this brilliance is constantly guiding us toward our path; (3) while always evident, basic brilliance becomes more apparent when we honour our fundamental relatedness, when we gather in community; (4) learning how to sense and follow the guidance of basic brilliance – how to bring meditation alive – is most potently done together.

In addition to reinforcing these four main understandings, our quilt-making approach to dharma is also giving us some of the most affecting meditation teachings I have ever encountered.

For example, the revelation that meditation begins with the discipline of slowing down has been a game-changer. It has introduced an ease to practice that is a relief after years of relative effort. It has also liberated the term ‘discipline’ from its weighty connotations.

Which takes us back to the beginning of this post and my statement that I recently transcribed a talk given in the Online Gatherings on Tuesday May 27, 2025.

Again, it is true I personally gave this talk, but only partially accurate to say I created it. More precisely, everyone in our community played a role its gradual stitching together. Through our insights and uncertainties, questions, observations, and declarations, we all played some part in piecing that beautiful quilt – that beautiful teaching, beautiful dharma – together.