Focus
On Flowers and The News
(A reminder that I record all my Substacks. You can listen to them by pressing play above if you don’t feel like reading.)
I worry that I’ll lose subscribers because I keep writing about the monks, but every week I write about what is on my mind, and the monks are still on my mind.
I’ve picked up Alain De Botton’s The News, a User’s Manual again and every sentence resonates as I consider, both as a concerned world citizen and also a person who pitches news stories, what matters? What is timely? What is important? What is genuinely newsworthy? What should we spend our time on?
I watch the monks go off on various local news pages. My algorithm feeds me nonstop-monk-content. Yet many people in the US are still unaware of them, or seem to think their efforts aren’t newsworthy. I am pleased to see that Anderson Cooper did a story on them, also The Guardian and Fox News, which was reshared on The New York Post. The monks got a brief mention in the Washington Post, but nothing to be found (so far) in the New York Times. The News of these monks has been picked up which is great, but one needs only to scroll the headlines of any news outlet in the US to learn that the monks are never the cover story.
Surely as we cover the protests throughout the US that are drawing crowds, this walk too which draws crowds of the same size if not bigger, should warrant just as much attention, if not more so! It’s culturally significant not only because of the feat the monks are trying to accomplish, but also the way that it is extraordinarily bringing together people who almost certainly voted differently to each other. When The News regularly talks about how the US is on the verge of breaking, surely this is significant.
I listen to the monks lectures and their talks while doing yoga in the morning, while taking their advice and making time for peacefulness. A few key takeaways I’ve picked up on so far is the practice of detachment, of not relying on external validation from material goods or other people. They encourage you to take time away from your lovers (your phones). “Don’t bring your lover to the dinner table,” they say. “Don’t take your lover with you to the bathroom.” They tell you to write down every day “This will be my peaceful day” and think about it, which I have been trying to do. All over my house, I’ve scratched it onto random sheets of paper.
As you watch the monks walk, you will often see them carrying flowers. Sometimes people sprinkle petals on the ground in front of them in their gratitude. A beautiful sentiment went up around this on their post recently.
“Flowers That Travel Forward - The flowers we receive from your hands carry more than beauty—they carry your peace, your care, your open heart. And we want that gift to keep traveling.
So we pass these flowers forward to others we meet along the way, to anyone whose spirit could use the peace and joy that unexpected beauty brings.
We have received the gift of your peace, and we want to pass it along to the next person, and the next, so that peace continues growing, blooming, spreading from hand to hand, heart to heart, across towns and cities and states, until it has touched more lives than we could ever count.
This is our hope: that peace doesn’t stop with us, but keeps moving—passed forward like these flowers, like a flame shared from candle to candle, growing brighter as it spreads, traveling across the world one generous gesture at a time.
May the flowers you give today become flowers that someone else receives tomorrow. May peace keep passing along, endlessly, beautifully, until it has reached every corner where it’s needed.
May you and all beings be well, happy, and at peace.”
But perhaps the most powerful thing that the monks have said since I began watching their journey is that as humans, we only have one enemy and that’s our own mind. So many people I love feel helpless right now with a nonstop news cycle that shares the worst of society. Unless we are independently wealthy or a person with a lot of power, it is easy to feel that there is only so much we can do to have an effect. Some advocate for protesting, for political activism, for charity, and I think that when you find something that deeply resonates with you, you should act upon it. But I also worry, coming back to The News, that there are entities and outlets, and greedy people in this world who know, an angry mob brings clicks. Time and time again we are reminded, people are far more likely to “like and share” outrage than they are to share messages of good faith and good will.
When I look at the thousands of people that peacefully walk and greet the monks in every single city and small town the monks walk through, when I look at how people from all kinds of diverse backgrounds come together to say they want peace, and then I have conversations with dear friends who have supremely different algorithms to mine, I think about The News. I think about the AI generated videos that people I know and love have shared, not knowing it is not even real, and wonder when I might be duped into doing the same. I think about The News itself in 2026, I think about the book and I think about monks.
As I struggle to decide where to put my teeny tiny attention span in a world that begs me to pay attention to the worst parts of society everywhere I go, I feel called to focus on peace and focus on the monks.
I have included a photo I took a few months ago when my partner was trying to teach me how to take proper photos with an old school film camera. This was back in November or December, before I even knew the monks existed, although they had already started their journey from Texas. I like this picture because the flower looks a little wonky and trippy. It’s one perfectly weird, individual flower, standing tall in a blurry world of chaos. I’m glad I took the time to focus on it.
Beautiful!
Beautiful, my friend :)