More than 1,200 Colorado students have earned a climate ‘seal’: ‘We’re the ones growing up in this world’ as reflected on by Sensei Michael Jinpa
Morning fog clings to the beach plum bushes outside our zendo. Students from the local arts high school often visit Clear Mind Zen Sanctuary for quiet meditation. Their faces show the quiet exhaustion of living under an uncertain sky. They carry the weight of a biosphere fraying at the seams. Adults passed this burden to them before they found their footing. Twelve hundred young people across Colorado have earned a Colorado climate seal. They planted bio-indicator gardens, monitored ozone, and tended milkweed. This is more than an encouraging civic note. It is an act of deep spiritual awakening.
Cultivating Intimacy with the World
Our Zen tradition often returns to the teaching of Pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent co-arising. Nothing exists in isolation. Consider the jet fuel from commercial flight paths. Think about the fragile stomata of native plant leaves. Observe the migratory rhythm of the monarch butterfly. Remember the lungs of a high school student. These are not separate realities. They form threads in a single, breathing cloth. Young Anthony Muñoz knelt into the dirt near Denver’s airport. He planted a garden registering invisible ozone. This action moved him from abstract despair. He entered direct intimacy with the phenomenal world. He stopped looking away from his immediate surroundings’ suffering.
I served as a hospice chaplain for many years. I sat at countless bedsides. Regret often bloomed from neglect. People had treated life as something to manage or postpone. They failed to truly inhabit it. Existential dread thrives when we view ourselves as passive victims. It paralyzes the spirit. Grief turns into numb isolation. However, a relationship shifts when a young person places their palms into damp soil to measure air quality. Helplessness transforms into care. Taking responsibility is not a grim duty. It restores our natural relationship to the earth. The earth has nurtured us without demanding a single price.
The Wisdom of Right Livelihood
Here in Harborview Point, our local potters and painters understand a vital truth. You cannot shape clay or mix pigment while fighting the medium. You must yield to its nature. Observe how the wet earth responds to your touch. Likewise, these students learn true environmental care. It does not rely on distant rhetoric. It avoids performative outrage. Instead, they pair rigorous scientific observation with community service. They cultivate right livelihood and right effort. They look at a discolored leaf not as trash. Rather, they see a teacher. It offers honest feedback about our shared dwelling’s state. This is how they earn their Colorado climate seal.
The Colorado initiative acknowledges a profound truth. Institutional education too often forgets it. Moral development cannot divorce itself from our kinship with non-human life. These teenagers protect milkweed. Monarchs need it for their thousand-mile journey. By doing so, they practice the Bodhisattva vow in plain clothes. They declare through their labor that fragile, ephemeral lives matter. Lives passing through their neighborhood matter just as much as their own aspirations. This is radical compassion. It is stripped of pious posture.
Agency: An Antidote to Dread
Many adults lament the anxious burden resting upon the younger generation. Yet, mere sympathy can easily become a subtle form of abandonment. These young people demonstrate a powerful truth. Agency is the ultimate antidote to dread. They meet the reality of pollution with patience. They use trowels and data notebooks. They show the rest of us how to inhabit impermanence. They do not fall into cynical paralysis. They do not wait for the horizon to clear. Instead, they choose to act with love. This proactive stance is truly inspiring.
The bell chimes for evening sitting. The tide pulls slowly back through the harbor flats. The lesson remains simple and urgent. We do not heal the world by solving it from afar. It is not a distant puzzle. We heal it by stooping down. We notice where the air is strained. We tend whatever small patch of soil is right before our feet. This action embodies the spirit of the Colorado climate seal. It is a path to healing.
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