Missing my monks | Nature of Things
Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 12, 2026
By Kimberly Mayer
Journal contributor
I don’t know about you, but I am missing the band of Buddhist monks who walked for more than three months across nine states to Washington, D.C., in the Walk for Peace. In single file with shaved heads and flowing robes of saDron, orange and maroon, barefoot and in running shoes, through frigid temps and winter storms of snow, sleet and freezing rains, they captured the attention and imagination of millions around the world.
The monks began their long journey Oct. 26, 2025, at the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center, a Buddhist temple in Fort Worth, Texas. Their pilgrimage, the Walk for Peace, often appeared to me as the only good news every day. And while many of us protested in the face of an authoritarian regime, the way of the monks was quite different.
“We walk not to protest, but to awaken the peace that already lives within each of us,” said Bhikkhu Pannakara, spiritual leader of the Walk for Peace. I’ve heard this before, I thought, remembering the practice of TM (Transcendental Meditation). Shut the world out and meditate. Each of us is but a flower in the garden. We must change the world in this way, one flower at a time.
The real journey, of course, was inside the monks. We could see it in their elation, their glow. The Walk for Peace pilgrimage was a form of prayer. For many of us, their yearning for the impossible felt reassuring and healing somehow. “In dreams begin responsibility,” said William Butler Yeats.
“Genius on the part of these monks to recognize how hungry people were for the opposite of the selfish greed and violence around us now, for something more spiritual, idealistic, altruistic. Genius also that they are so obviously non-Christian, non-white, non-Western at exactly the time these things are under attack but are here being celebrated and loved.
“They are following the route to the Capitol and leading people toward openheartedness,” noted Rebecca Solnit. But not everyone heeded the call.
Indeed, the Department of Defense (War) was building up a fleet of warships in the Middle East even as the monks walked. And less than three weeks after the pilgrimage concluded in Washington, D.C., the United States went to war with Iran. Still, even as some plan to destroy it, the monks pray for the world. One step at a time.
