Celebrating the Order of Interbeing’s roots, Happy Farm Manager Mick McEvoy encourages us to cultivate collective awakening and action in a world on fire.

By Mick McEvoy on January 29, 2026

I’m pretty sure there has never been a time when we humans have lived together in complete peace and harmony. But the current time in our human story is intensely brutal. The origins of the Order of Interbeing (OI) are testament to my belief. The Order was born out of the horrors of the American war in Vietnam, including the assassination of many original OI members at the bank of the Bình Phước River in 1966.

Amid the present global brutality, I believe it is critical to stop and celebrate the beauty in life. The sixtieth anniversary of the Order of Interbeing is worth celebrating. Even the premise of the Order of Interbeing is worth celebrating: dedicating oneself “to the continuous practice of mindfulness, ethical behaviour, and compassionate action in society.”¹

For me, the Order of Interbeing expresses commitment. I have planted my roots deeply in the soil of the Plum Village tradition. I commit to engage with life beyond my own personal path of healing and transformation. Service in the pursuit of collective wellbeing and planetary wellbeing, but not at the expense of my own wellbeing. I commit not to spiritually bypass through losing myself in service.

I believe the Plum Village Tradition and the Order of Interbeing are forms of open source spiritual technology. Our teachings and practices are universally accessible and universally redistributable. Our model of spiritual technology is decentralised and free. Our teachings and practices are adaptable to different situations, cultures, and communities. They are not static and can be skilfully modified, encouraging peer-led collaboration to help cultivate collective awakening. That, I believe, is badass.

No central phone line connects us to the monastic residences. We need not contact a central command before building sangha, practicing together, and organising public events that share teachings of the Buddha, Thầy, and our Plum Village tradition. As long as we embody love and trust, we can act, organise, and practice in our own communities, using our common sense, skilfulness, and intuition to be in harmony with our monastic community, our teachers, and our tradition.

This is especially true for OI members, but OI members or not, Plum Village practitioners may organise, gather, practice, protest, and take loving, right, appropriate action. There is no Batphone.

The world is on fire. Life can be so fast-moving, so overwhelming. Stopping, calming, resting, and healing are essential for all of us at this time. But as OI members we also have the responsibility to look deeply, to cultivate insight and take loving action based on the reality of interbeing. Guided by the Dharma and with Earth as our teacher, we can step forward and contribute to a spiritual revolution. A spiritual revolution that can help our societies evolve and can contribute deeply to systemic transformation, transformation at the base. Aware of the suffering caused by the global systems of violence, extraction, imperialism, colonialism, racism, religious and nationalistic dogma and ideology, I commit to take loving action alongside friends, family, and sanghas from whom there is support.

As OI members and Plum Village practitioners, we can take turns to step forward and lead with love, trust, and courage. Just as migrating geese flying in their V formation, take turns to lead and when they need to rest, drop back and let others come forward to lead the way.

The Order of Interbeing is a multifold community of lay and monastic practitioners. Our origins are rooted in the lay community, the School of Youth for Social Service, and we are guided by a revolutionary monastic teacher. Our spirit is radical love. Radical action.

As OI members we are asked to walk a “twin trail,” parallel paths we are called to walk on simultaneously. The first is the path that commits us to our own healing and transformation. A lifelong personal journey of commitment to cultivate insight, understanding, and healing. The second trail brings us into communion with the gifts offered by the world and by our many teachers in life. Then we turn outwards and offer these gifts in service for the world, for collective and planetary wellbeing.

We must practice the fundamentals of stopping, calming, resting, and healing. But we must also take the time to look deeply. Thầy skilfully adapted this first teaching of the Buddha, The Four Noble Truths. He declared:

1. Wellbeing exists (individual, collective, and planetary wellbeing).
2. There is a path to wellbeing.
3. Suffering exists.
4. There are causes and conditions that create suffering (individual, collective, and planetary suffering).

We have to be courageous and honest to name the injustices and systems of violence and oppression that exist in these extraordinary times. These are causes and conditions of suffering. We must call them by their true names. Empire, capitalism, the accumulation of extraordinary wealth in the face of extraordinary poverty and suffering, genocide, and ecocide.

Imagine our world if we took the reality of interbeing as the guiding ethos for all our decisions, all our actions, all our laws, organisations, institutions, and social structures. All our actions could be guided by Right View, by the reality of interbeing.

Now imagine a world, a society, a culture where we do not centre the reality of interbeing in our decision making, our actions, our laws, our organisations, institutions, and social structures. What sort of world, society, and culture would that be? A broken one!

Let us advocate for a world where no law, no decision, no action, no organisation, nothing of any kind can be created that contradicts the sacred reality of interbeing. What sort of world, society, and culture would that be?

In the Buddha’s time, the continuation of the human species was not in doubt. Today, it is. There is a real prospect that your grandchildren will live short lives and maybe you will not have grandchildren at all. The time for the revolutionary action of the Dharma is now. Our lives depend on it. We can act locally, and if we have the opportunity to influence national and international action, then we must take loving action both locally, nationally, and globally. Act within your capacity, do it with others, with community, with sangha, whatever that looks like for you. But act. Act with love, wisdom, kindness.

This is a call to action. Right Action. I prefer the phrase “appropriate action.” Any action we take must be appropriate for us, and let me be clear, right for us.  For some of us the appropriate and loving action will be to rest, to withdraw from dynamics that have exhausted us and maybe even caused us to burn out. Rest is Right Action for all of us at the appropriate time.

To use the language of Joanna Macy, some of us will be called to the front lines of protest and activism, to practice “holding actions.” This is not for everyone. We need to be wise and ask ourselves: “Are holding actions, direct actions of non violent, civil disobedience appropriate actions for me?” Others might be called upon to take loving actions that contribute to “Transforming the Foundations of our Common Life (Gaian Structures)”² as Joanna calls them. For myself, I choose to take action by contributing to the Plum Village Happy Farm (our agro-ecology/regenerative farming project) and the Plum Village Rewilding Project. Loving action in these realms develops and implements life-sustaining systems and practices. Continuing to invoke Joanna’s teachings, we may wish to engage in appropriate and loving action that helps “Shifts in Perception and Values.”² Our Plum Village monasteries are incredible examples of spaces and places where the loving action is shared by so many who host, teach, and hold space, leading to seismic shifts in perceptions and values of those who come on retreat. A huge contribution in Right Action, leading towards collective awakening.

At different times in our lives we may engage in three different realms of loving action or in the three “Dimensions of the Great Turning,” as Joanna names this work. We all have agency to take Right Action in our lives. Sometimes Right Action means to rest and withdraw. For some, it can be taking care of their children or nursing a sick loved one. For some, it can be practicing simple and loving livelihood as a baker, a farmer, or a teacher. For some, it will be on the front lines of direct action, perhaps being arrested in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. For others, it will be taking action that helps evolve our collective consciousness, that “recognises and honours our grief for our world, uprooting notions of the essential separateness of the self from other humans, the world, and the deeper energies of reality.”² Perhaps that may be cultivating one’s livelihood as a therapist, counsellor, or spiritual teacher.  Or perhaps living life as a monastic, pastor, priest, imam or rabbi.

The Order of Interbeing is sixty years old. Our origins are rooted in war, trauma, and deep suffering but also in spiritual friendship, community, and resilience coupled with a shared ethic that inspires loving radical action. We can help centre the reality of interbeing in making decisions, creating laws and policies, in building our cultures and institutions. We can take loving and radical action locally, nationally and globally for our world, societies, and cultures, where we declare that your humanity is bound together with my humanity. That what dehumanises you dehumanises me. That all life is connected and that we are the earth that carries us.

¹ “The Order of Interbeing,” Plum Village, accessed August 11, 2025, https://plumvillage.org/community/order-of-interbeing.

² “Dimensions of the Great Turning,” the Work That Reconnects Network, accessed August 12, 2025, https://workthatreconnects.org/dimensions-of-the-great-turning/.