There’s not much in the way of content there yet, but I just created a new site for people in the FWBO who work in prisons, so that they can share that aspect of their practice with the world.

I tried to go for a design that was rather different from any of the other sites I’ve made. I was striving for minimalism, but that’s, I discovered, is a hard path; minimalism can look very cold and stark, yet a touch of color can propel it into the realms of the garish or kitsch. I’ll probably look for another background image: a line drawing of the 1000-armed Avalokitesvara would be idea if I can find one.

Incidentally, the site looks best on anything but Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is now five or six years old, horribly insecure, and lacking in the most basic features like tabbed browsing and popup blockers that you expect from a modern browser like Firefox, Opera, or Safari (any of which I would use in preference to IE). Do yourself a favor if you haven’t already made the switch.

I wonder (see post below) how welcome I will be in China when my wife and I travel there next year to pick up the baby girl we’re adopting?

Last night marked another significant step forward in a process that started many months ago: our dossier of information was sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., from whence it will be returned to us so that we can forward it to our adoption agency, who will then send it to the Chinese government. As you can see, there are still several steps to go before the Chinese government considers us as adoptive parents for a Chinese child, but this marks the first time that all of our paperwork has been together in one place.

What happens after the paperwork goes to China? As things currently stand, we’ll wait around nine months while the Chinese government matches us with a child and sends the the child’s details (consisting of a photograph and a brief medical and developmental history) to our adoption agency, Wide Horizons for Children. About two months later we’ll travel to Beijing, do two days’ sightseeing, and then travel to whichever province our daughter has been living in before traveling to Guang Zhou to make her a US citizen. That puts us in China around March or April next year.

Since our daughter is likely to be between nine and twelve months old when we meet her, it’s possible that she has only just been born or is in her third trimester as a fetus! It’s a little odd, as I think I’ve mentioned before, to have started adopting a child before she was even conceived.

Adopting from China is very different from adopting domestically. In the US a couple who plan to adopt will be interviewed by the woman who plans to put her child up for adoption, and they may well be present at the birth and take the child into their family that day. Children adopted from China, on the other hand, are generally abandoned by their mothers. The government then spends six months looking for the birth family before putting the child into the adoption process. That’s why the children are so much older at the time of adoption, and why we won’t know until two months before meeting our daughter who she is.

I’ll say something later about why so many Chinese women abandon their children. It’s a sad story.

Time for some outrage.

A woman accused of heckling Chinese President Hu Jintao during a White House appearance was charged Friday in federal court with willfully intimidating, coercing, threatening and harassing a foreign official.

Dr. Wang Wenyi, 47, had obtained temporary press credentials for Hu’s visit Thursday as a reporter for a Falun Gong newspaper and positioned herself on a camera stand. After Hu began speaking, she shouted in Chinese and in English: “President Bush, stop him from killing” and “President Bush, stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong.”
(MSNBC).

Falun Gong is a peaceful form of spiritual practice representing an eclectic mix of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy and practice.

The Chinese communist government is a vicious dictatorship that has invaded Tibet, killed and tortured millions of people (both Tibetan and Chinese) to the extent that it has been acused of genocide by the International Commission of Jurists. The Chinese government has been terrified since the 1989 Tianenmen Square Massacre of losing control of its population. It therefore quickly moves to clamp down on any religious movement that may gain widespread popular support, and in 1999 began a nationwide suppression of the Falun Gong (practice of the wheel of the Dharma) movement.

The Chinese government’s initial suppression of Falun Gong sparked a peaceful gathering of 10,000 protesters, seemingly confirming their worst fears, and the practice of Falun Gong was declared illegal. At least 2,840 Falun Gong practitioners have since died in police custody.

This is what Dr. Wang Wenyi peacefully protested when she called on President Bush to put pressure on the Chinese leader to stop persecuting his people. It’s unlikely that W. acceded to her request. He’s much more concerned with persuading the Chinese to allow their currency to float free on foreign exchanges, and with complaining about the fact that the Chinese keep trying to buy the world’s oil, which, as everyone knows, rightfully belongs to the US. Bush in fact apologized to Hu for Dr Wenyi’s unauthorized exercise of free speech.

The idea that a lone protestor in the media area “intimidated,” “threatened,” and “coerced” a foreign dictator who was surrounded by secret service agents, purely by shouting a message to President Bush, is pure Orwellianism.

Dr. Wenyi potentially faces six months in prison and a $5,000 fine. Should she be fined I am sure there will be plenty of contributors who will cover her costs.

Circuit Judge David Mason erred badly in sentencing a St. Louis woman to a course of Transcendental Meditation for voting fraud, posession of crack cocaine, and possession of a crack pipe. Judge Mason, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “has advocated the relaxation and stress-management program for years”.

I teach meditation to inmates and I’m convinced it’s a beneficial tool in rehabilitation. So what’s the problem? It’s simply that Transcendental Meditation, unlike, say, mindfulness meditation techniques, is a religious activity. While mindfulness meditation involves no more than becoming aware of the sensations of the breath, T.M. involves reciting the names of Hindu deities. There’s no problem of course with an inmate freely choosing to adopt T.M. or any other religious activity, but it’s completely unacceptable—no matter how effective T.M. may be at bringing about beneficial changes in character—to force any inmate to practice a religion. T.M. of course presents itself as a secular religious meditation practice, but in reality it’s no more secular than reciting the Hail Mary or the Lord’s Prayer. And just as no judge should be sentencing criminals to Christian prayer or the celebration of Mass, Judge Mason should not have sentenced Michelle Robinson to practicing T.M.

I would have reservations about any inmate being forced to perform any kind of meditation, but my reservations in the case of mindfulness meditation would be about the coersion and not about the practice itself. Mindfulness meditation and many other, but not all, Buddhist meditation techniques have no “religious” component at all. There is nothing inherently religious about training the mind to focus on the breath or in encouraging the development of feelings of lovingkindness towards others. (In fact it’s debatable whether Buddhism is a religion at all.) But while I wholeheartedly support making various kinds of meditation—even including T.M.—available to inmates, let’s make such practices voluntary and not compulsory.

I saw Brandi Carlile last night at the Stone Church here in Newmarket, NH. She and her band were at the end of a three-week tour where they’d been supporting Jamie Cullum, and they’re just about to go off on another tour, this time supporting Train.

I fell in love with Brandi’s CD about three months ago and must have played it dozens of times since then. Brandi’s voice was a little rough, this being the end of the tour and all, but nevertheless it was a magnificent concert to a sell-out crowd. Peter Hamelin, one of the owners of the Stone Church, a small, but exquisite venue, reckoned this might be one of the last chances to see her in such an intimate setting, and I have to say that I think he may be right. Brandi, a young woman of just 23 years from Seattle, has an expressive and powerful voice. Her music, and that of her band — my two favorite songs were written by her twin guitarists (they’re literally twins) — is an almost indefinable mix of rock and country, sometimes with a religious quality to it.

A funny thing: Brandi finished her encore with Leonard Cohen’s stirring “Hallelujah,” which The Dresden Dolls, who I saw last month in Exeter, NH, also closed with.

You can hear a couple of tracks at Brandi’s website.