By Johan van Mol A few weeks ago, I lived on the streets for a couple of days with an inter-faith group of Peacemakers in Helsinki. We did this without money, without phones, begging for food, and sleeping on cardboard in parks and abandoned lots. We also visited homeless shelters to bear witness to poverty… Read more

Text by Kees HagenaarTranslated from Dutch by Mikko IjäsPictures by Stan Weyns I knew nothing about the Finnish civil war, which lasted from 27 January to 15 May in 1918. I only heard about it when I took part in the street retreat in Helsinki, Finland in September 2017. We also visited monuments that commemorate… Read more

I met Maija Kaunismaa at the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 2018 when I was a Resident student and she was working as Artist-In-Residence. Maija wrote much of her latest album, The Pine House Songs, at the Center and over that month, as we became friends and explained the landscape of Los Angeles, I… Read more

Johanna Hammarberg’s “Lost Letter” is an audio play installation based on twelve fictional letters describing the fates of the suspected Reds from Kotka area who were convicted in 1918 civil war prison camps. Scriptwriter, director Johanna Hammarberg (born in Kotka) has studied actual civil war documents, on which she has based the fictional letters on.… Read more

Blog post by Mikko Ijäs, retreat organizer We held our first Bearing Witness retreat here in Helsinki in late June 2018. The context of the retreat was set around the prison camps of the Finnish civil war of 1918. One hundred years ago Finland was torn in half by two opposing forces, the Whites and… Read more

In 2017 Roshi Frank De Waele asked Mikko Ijäs to organize a Street Retreat in Helsinki, Finland. For four days they were immersed in the Zen Peacemakers’ Three Tenets: Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action; they begged for food and money, slept where they could, and left their ordinary routines. Read more