It began last June in Sicily. I was sitting with a dear sister-friend — a few days of intentional time together, nurturing creativity, dreaming new work, discussing the revival of ancestral art forms. Then she told me a strike had been called on the docks. Transportation networks disrupted. We needed to make alternate arrangements. My first response was petulance. I wanted to stay in my cozy dreaming world. Come on, y'all.

That response startled me. I took a moment in quiet observance and acknowledged what it revealed: nearly 23 years of Buddhist study, part of a global movement for peace — and my prayers for peace had not been as thorough as I assumed. My response was not up to par. My heart sent pain signals my mind translated as a question: Where is my solidarity? I had missed that crucial moment with my woeful response. I would not miss the next one.

I decided then: I am with the people in heart and in action. I would cultivate the wisdom through diligent practice starting immediately — not practice as I had known it, but praxis. Accountable to real conditions. Measured by actual effect. Three questions emerged that would not leave me alone: How are people surviving this? How are the helpers helped? What capacities must be developed to effectively care for people's spiritual needs in polycrises?

Several months later I was in the seminary classroom, teaching interspiritual strategies for facing atrocities — what I had been researching since Sicily. As I taught about practices for reducing fragmentation and strengthening coherence, I found myself constructing a stream of disciplines that gradually formed a kind of scaffolding for the human capacities requiring my own attention. I was teaching what I was simultaneously trying to learn how to live. The distinction between practice and praxis crystallized there: practice without accountability to real conditions had kept me insulated. Praxis demanded the discipline meet the world where the world actually was — addressing daily reality with skill, not just heart.

I intended to release this as a year-end threshold workbook, an expansion of last year's offering, 7 Holy Days. But the work resisted premature completion. Through MLK season. Through Lunar New Year. Through one threshold after another, this collection kept pressing on me — raising the bar, adding accountability, requiring that each practice be measured by actual effect and impact, not intention alone. I slowly realized this was no longer merely a document I was producing. It was the praxis working on me.

These pages are the result of devotion to articulating that commitment as clearly as possible. My personal study notes gradually became a community offering because these times demand stronger forms of participation than exhaustion, fragmentation, cynicism, or performance can sustain. You do not need me weak, depleted, resentful, or unreliable. You need me generative, alive, disciplined, courageous, merciful, and capable of repair. And I need the same from you.

I am completing this introduction on May 19 — Malcolm X's birthday — nearly a year from the moment in Sicily when the need for this formation first became apparent. That proximity is not incidental. It is the arc closing on its own terms.

Fresh Resolve is a daily praxis for peace builders. Not a devotional to consume and set aside, but a laboratory for disciplined experimentation. You are the investigator. These practices are working hypotheses. Your life is the field of observation. Let the results of your participation reveal what strengthens coherence, what increases fragmentation, and what forms of attention make more livable participation possible.

The practices in this collection emerge from applied interspirituality: Buddhist humanism, A Course in Miracles, Black liberation traditions, Black artistic and intellectual traditions, interfaith and interspiritual inquiry, and my own lived attempts to remain ethically awake within ordinary life. Daisaku Ikeda and Malcolm X are not in tension here — they are two expressions of the same insistence: that the inner life and the political life cannot be severed without cost to both. These are disciplined frameworks for attention, perception, imagination, ethical orientation, responsibility, and participation.

Each day centers one specific practice condition. One embodied and often unglamorous discipline that strengthens the interior and relational conditions from which more peaceful forms of participation become possible.

A peace constructionist is a person committed to expanding and protecting conditions under which human beings can participate in life with greater dignity, coherence, safety, agency, relational possibility, and meaningful access to livable existence.

These ten days focus on ten formative conditions:

Interior formation alone cannot eliminate domination, exploitation, institutional violence, or political disorder. But fragmented human beings rarely sustain the courage, discernment, discipline, and relational clarity necessary to confront those realities well. The quality of our participation matters. The coherence we cultivate matters. The ability to recover from fear, despair, defensiveness, or exhaustion matters.

There is one faculty without which every practice in this collection collapses into mechanical repetition. It cannot be prescribed and it cannot be automated. It is the quality of attention you bring that determines whether a practice remains performative routine or becomes behaviorally and relationally transformative.

Human beings participate in shaping the emotional, relational, ethical, and cultural conditions they inhabit. That participation is not reserved for artists, leaders, or public figures. Every person who recognizes that the quality of their attention affects the quality of their participation in life is already exercising the imaginative faculty in a meaningful way.

Peace is not sustained through wishing, denial, passive optimism, or aestheticized spirituality. It is constructed through repeated forms of attention, discernment, responsibility, repair, courage, and participation.

Bring your imagination to these practices. Bring your artistic instincts, your innovations, your observations, your experiments. Bring your ability to perceive what does not yet exist and work backward from possibility into disciplined action. That is one expression of Afrofuturism as daily practice: the disciplined refusal to surrender human possibility even under conditions organized around exhaustion, exclusion, or despair. It is the work of constructing more livable conditions despite evidence that fragmentation might be easier.

There is no single correct sequence for these ten days. Return to whichever practice addresses the condition you are currently confronting. Use the laboratory questions to generate observations from your actual life rather than idealized performances of insight. Let the music do what music has always done for human beings: reorganize atmosphere, emotion, memory, rhythm, and attention before the intellect fully understands what is happening.

To the extent that you find support, permission, challenge, clarity, or companionship in these pages, I invite you to join me. Not as a follower of a system, but as another peace constructionist attempting to build more coherent and livable forms of participation within the conditions available to us.

The world does not need you barely intact. It does not need you chronically depleted, emotionally unreachable, spiritually performative, or privately collapsing while publicly appearing functional. It needs you capable of participation. Capable of repair. Capable of discernment. Capable of sustaining meaningful life-giving presence under pressure.

It needs people who can help construct conditions under which greater vitality, dignity, coherence, relational possibility, safety, mercy, and meaningful participation become more possible for more people.

That is what these ten days are attempting to strengthen.

I hold this work in continuity with those who struggled to widen the conditions under which human beings could live with dignity, safety, joy, and meaningful participation. Many of them labored without guarantees. Many organized their lives around futures they would never personally see realized. I want my life, my relationships, my practices, and the character I cultivate to stand as evidence that such labor was not meaningless.