On the spine of the Taconic Ridge, where New York meets Massachusetts as Route 2 snakes through the leafy mountain range, Eric Wasileski of Pittsfield stood beating a ceremonial drum and chanting a Buddhist mantra. Beyond its complex spiritual meanings, the ritual is intended to interrupt stagnant thinking and throw a curveball into day-to-day understandings.
“It’s something we’re not used to, it’s not something that’s normal, so it creates curiosity, and curiosity is a place where we can we can grow a lot,” he told WAMC. “If we’re not telling the answer to ourselves, we’re actually questioning things, we can gain a lot of wisdom, we can grow as a person. And so, curiosity is one of the places of refuge. In a suffering world, curiosity is a place where we can take refuge and figure out what it is that we want to do and how we do it, and it’s a place that we can learn from.”
Wasileski is a member of Veterans For Peace, an ex-military community dedicated to promoting nonviolence and opposing war, racism, nuclear weapons, and repression across the globe. The chanting and drumming were his way of calming his nerves before setting off on the first leg of the Walk For A New Dawn. The mobile, statewide demonstration is to promote decades-old calls from Native American communities to update the iconography of Massachusetts, which depicts a hand holding a sword over a Native figure and the motto “she seeks with the sword peaceful repose under liberty.”
“If you look at the state symbol, it’s a weapon of war over a person’s head,” said Wasileski. “And those people are gone now.”…