Ellen, Buddhism

On Hope

Ellen grapples with the uncertainty of a divided and angry America.

“How,” she asks me in a moment of sadness, “do you find hope raising children in this broken world?”

As I reflect on my own lineage rising out of the darkness of concentration camps, Ellen remembers a teaching from her favorite Buddhist thinker, on the power of presence . “I thought hope was always a good thing,” Ellen muses, “until I heard Thich Nhat Hanh talk about it. He said that when we think too much of hope, we live in the future. The challenge is to remain here in the now.”

Ellen took a silent walk with Thich That Nhat Hanh in 2007 and found it to be one of the most profound moments of her life. While she joined a Buddhist study group in Long Beach, she craved more of a focus on an individual’s practice of Buddhist principles.

Ellen taught photography and communications for 35 years.

“For better or worse,” she explains it, “all those 4,000 students in my classes over those three and a half decades took a course in Ellen Butler. An example? I had a kid in first period photo. He was always late. One day when he came in late, I said something like, “Erik, I don’t get it. This is the first class of the day and starts at 8:00. That means you have 23 hours to get here on time. Why don’t you choose to do that?” And whadda ya know. He stopped coming late. A former student who’s a great friend of mine ran into him when Erik was a flight attendant for JetBlue, and Erik told Chuck how those words changed his life, forever.”

We also talk about Ellen’s long friendship with a homeless man she met on the streets, who she fought for disability payment, set up a bank account, and ended up being his sole proprietor when he died.

Ellen wasn’t sure that she was “Buddhist enough” to be included in my project. I thought she was just perfect. I order one of her book recommendations when we part.