Introducing Mount Iris: Practicing the Skill of Beloved Community Building Together

For the past few months, I’ve felt increasingly called to do my part to create spaces where we can feel a sense of connection and more genuine, beloved community. For me, genuine, beloved community is an aspiration, more than it is something that I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing many times in my life before now. But it seems to me that if ever there was a time that we needed to experience more depthful communities, it is now.

But what are the characteristices of genuine and beloved community? And how might we build community one?

As I discussed in a San Francisco Zen Center dharma talk, the concept of Beloved Community is one that we have inherited from a long tradition of teachers and scholars, from Josiah Royce to Howard Thurman, from Martin Luther King Jr, to Bryan Stevenson.

What does it  look like to you? How might we build a version that might support us, across the miles and in person, in these turbulent times?

To see what an answer to this question might look like, I’ve put together a team to bring forth a community with this as the central aim. It is called Mount Iris. Mount Iris is a space featuring regular opportunities for sharing, connecting and learning together, among thoughtful, engaged human beings trying the make the world a bit better in these times. We meditate and befriend across lines of real and perceived difference.

For now, Mount Iris is an online gathering place. But we are working to establish places where we can met in person on a regular basis, around the world.

If these words speak to you, I invite you to join me and the community we are building at Mount Iris. Together, let us make real what genuine, beloved community might look like from here.