Peace in the world
starts within you.
About this project.
"Let's tell our stories in ways that inspire more and more people to commit to the path of courage and peace, and to the work of building healthy, sustainable communities. That is the only path to peace for any of us. It's not about securing our own comforts anymore. It's about reaching out and extending kindness."
Thanks for being here.
This project began when Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) passed away in January of 2022. I started a series of portraits of him as a gratitude meditation for his life and teachings. A style of digital illustration started to emerge, and I imagined how cool it would be to create a graphic novel to share how much his teachings transformed my life. And before long, that's what I'd started. In February of that same year, the teenage daughter of a dear friend attempted a thankfully unsuccessful overdose with her medication. In the wake of that crisis, I remembered vividly the pain of my own adolescence and felt deeply for my friend and her daughter, and for their family as a whole. I was also hospitalized as a teen for my mental health. I made myself sick in a desperate attempt to find help with the violence and chaos in my family. Which just seemed like a microcosm of the dynamics in our broader society at the time. Even as a kid in the 1980’s, I saw that we were elevating blowhard bully mobsters to positions of social power and financial success. It was like people started wanting to be like the character J.R. Ewing from the 80’s TV series, Dallas. A man utterly consumed by greed, and ever chasing opulence and women while spouting allegiance to a faith that at its core is actually about humility and kindness. Today, many people have been convinced that making America great again means demanding the right to pursue the Dallas lifestyle while defending antiquated social norms from the 1950’s heyday of Americana with an arsenal of military grade weapons. The results of the recent election and the undermining of the Supreme Court are all serving this ideal. Right now, Voldemort is winning. So, we work to turn the tide. I remember as a kid feeling so sure that a path of true love and peace was possible. But I had no idea what that was or where to start looking. I had a few adults in my life that treated me with true loving kindness. I knew that was the core. But, the "conventional wisdom" of the time did not seem to hold love and peace with much value. Commodify everything. Aim for ever increasing profits. Like, they were selling us on the idea of "project an image of perfection that other people want, and then you'll have the power, wealth, and security." I knew even then that nothing could be further from the truth. But I didn’t know why. As I watched my friend and her family start to work through their family crisis together, in early 2022, I was inspired to start writing about a character named MJ Masters in a family and society coming apart at the seams. Her conservative father believes in the conventional wisdom of "projecting an image of power at all costs." While the rest of the family was becoming increasingly liberal and learning about things like mindfulness and equity, and taking the time to understand what real power is and where it comes from. So it never has to be about “dominance." That novel became 84 illustrations, and eventually the video series shared here. After writing the first novel-length draft of MJ’s story, I started using the digital painting style from my portraits of Thay to reverse storyboard the scenes I’d written in an attempt to understand them. I came up with a series of 84 illustrations that helped me edit the novel down to a storybook. But it was still too cerebral. The idea to share the story on social media came from my sister. I never set out to be active on social media or to make "content" or anything like that. But here I am. And, if you're here too, I hope you find this space helpful. In the initial video series, MJ walks you through her art journal, image by image, as she discovers what it means to believe in herself again. You watch her art come to life on the digital canvas as she shares her story in her own words. That’s THE STORY,”MJ Masters The Universe." THE STORY continues in THE SERIES. This will be a web series shared on Patreon with all those who join us there! MJ graduates from high school, and starts college in Washington DC, right after the 2024 US presidential election. She sets out to study art therapy, and gets involved in the peace movement. Somehow, she has to find the confidence to face a very uncertain world on her own, without loosing her footing and getting caught in fear on the path of waking up to her true nature. THE SERIES is, "Where In The World Is MJ Masters?" In addition to sharing THE STORY and THE SERIES, I want to help others express their stories in ways that empower and inspire ripples of peacework. That's what this project is about. Let's tell our stories in ways that inspire more and more people to commit to the path of courage and peace, and to the work of building healthy, sustainable communities. That is the only path to peace for any of us. It's not about securing our own comforts anymore. It's about reaching out and extending kindness at every opportunity. Especially to ourselves. And, connecting in community. THE BOOTH is the place I'm recording all the MJ videos. I also plan to offer guided meditations to support creative flow to share here. And, I'd love to help narrate other stories for peace too. So, if you have one you'd like to collaborate on, please get in touch!
Behind this project.
Selene Ammaccapane
AUTHOR / ILLUSTRATOR / NARRATOR
Why de facto Buddhist nun?
I've been studying buddhism since 1999, and have at several points on my timeline had the opportunity to connect with deep contexts of learning and practice. I only started to recognize and make progress working with my mind in 2020, after spending seven years studying mindfulness and design through work with the Plum Village Community at Deer Park Monastery. Thay's teaching helped me start to connect again with my innermost nature of peace and calm. But, it wasn't until 2023 and writing and illustrating this work that I started to make peace with my mind and my ego, and to understand and relate to that ego-self from a place more grounded in my non-ego nature, which is that of true love. I'm not sure how well I managed to share that experience in the novel, storybook, or video series of MJ's story. But maybe I've inspired you to explore your own story in new ways that are grounded in a commitment to courage and peace on the path of waking up to your own true nature. How you tell your story matters. And, it starts with not being too attached to it! I'm not actually planning to ordain as a nun in any tradition. Though at this point I'm not entirely clear on why. Being part of loving community working for peace is really the only thing that makes any sense to me at this point. But, for some reason, continuing in secular life seems like the better fit. I had a chronic respiratory disease in childhood that was made worse when I couldn't get the medical care I needed due to preexisting conditions as a young adult on my own. That resulted in new medical problems, until it was a huge disempowering snowball effect and the normalization of pain and debilitating fatigue. Also, I was kind of orphaned at this time. The terribly inconvenient truth about who my father wasn't came out a few days after I got engaged. That stirred things up! My apparently not-biological father and his side of the family dropped out of contact with me, and my mother threatened to never talk to me again if I didn't keep the secret within our family, so I stopped talking to almost everyone she knew, which at the time was most of the people I knew, because I could tell it wasn't a secret I could keep any other way. It was successive extinction-level impact traumas. At that point, my adrenal glands stopped working on top of the respiratory issues. Then my body started attacking my thyroid. Basically unprocessed stress of a lifetime was killing me. The family that did stay in touch with me seemed to think I was just an emotional wreck that couldn't cope with life to the point of extreme hypochondria. I even started to believe that about myself. Then, around the time I started working on THE STORY in 2022, I got two new medications that made it so much easier to breathe! As my lungs started to improve, it suddenly wasn't as hard to do things. I started doing yoga again––and enjoying it! I started moving just to enjoy moving in my body. I can feel energy and joy flowing in me again after decades without. I'm even learning how to dance on roller skates! Feeling even just a little bit better is so good it makes me want to share my experience in case it can help anyone else! In time, and with practice, it seems I keep learning more about how going through so much illness and trauma has given me the opportunities to unlearn a lot of my own unskillful behaviors and false beliefs. I'm in a part of that process where I'm starting to experience a sense of vitality again, but I still need a lot of medical care generally, and because of that I'm not sure I even could ordain if I wanted to. So, I'm not an actual buddhist nun. I am, though, most definitely in an extended period of dedicated practice and relative isolation. I'm still observing a lot of the changes I made in my life during the Covid pandemic. Getting less colds and viruses generally has been a big part of my lungs recovering and my vitality returning. So, I am leaning in to quite a solitary life presently and loving it! In a humous moment, it occurred to me that "de facto buddhist nun" summed all that up pretty well! So, that's why.
Background
1995-2000
College, Travel, Experiential Education DC / UK / PHL / CR / AZ
I graduated from high school in 1995. College for a year in Washington D.C. before leaving traditional education to explore my deepest questions and passions through experiential education programs. A year in London in 1996, where I was cast in a youth theater production for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, worked with students in an afterschool program, and studied the pedagogy of experiential education through Friends World College. After London, I returned to the US and joined Americorps, working for a Youth Services agency near Philadelphia. l learned and practiced adventure education, eventually also incorporating art and music activities into group facilitation work. I got to run ropes courses, and take kids kayaking, rafting and rock climbing. Then, I got to help develop a drama, art, and music therapy program within the agency. Everyday working with those kids challenged me to the core and helped me better understand how to help them relax into their calm and confident nature. It seemed like magic when groups flowed well and I would watch the kids light up. After Americorps, I was hired by Youth Services and again enrolled in Friends World. My job became my school and was informed by my hearts true path. I wanted to help other people find the happiness that brought me. I wanted to help move public education in that direction. In 1999, while working for Youth Services, I had the good fortune of being invited to live in the Roundhouse, as part of an community called the Peaceweavers. They combined practices from Tibetan Buddhist and Lakota Indian traditions and had been embraced and mentored by elders in these spiritual communities. They were working as a group to be a model of intentional community, based in kindness and compassion—much like the model of community Thich Nhat Hanh established with the practice centers in the Plum Village Tradition. While living with them, I even got to bring a visiting Tibetan monk to meet some of the students I worked with through Youth Services. His impact inspired me to deepen my understanding of Buddhism. After living with The Peaceweavers for a year, I left in early 2000 for almost 8 months in Costa Rica. I began studying how indigenous communities there were adapting to the influence of Western culture, and specifically how the youth were increasingly caught in the need for name brand stuff instead of learning and preserving indigenous wisdom in land stewardship, amongst other things. I kept up with meditation and yoga, and kept learning about buddhism and experiential education. It felt like I was getting closer all the time to understanding the path of true love and peace. That remained my aim. I also wrote and illustrated a children's book. My first attempt at illustrating a story! When I got back to the US in late 2000, I decided to drive across the country to find a community where I could create a model program to bring experiential education methods into afterschool programs, with the aim of eventually bringing the same practices into the instruction model of the main school day. I wanted to upend the public education system with experiential peace education. And, I had a plan. I landed in Prescott, AZ.
2000-2003
Prescott College
Prescott, AZ
When I learned about Prescott College it seemed like a community of friends I had yet to meet. I drove across country with a friend, visited the college, and decided to transfer there. Just after I arrived, I met and adopted my first dog, Serra. She showed up on my doorstep and changed my life. I started working for the Student Services office at the college, and for an afterschool program. I approached the school district about writing a grant to start an pilot program called The Art of Adventure. We used group process and adventure education games, along with art and music activities to help the kids in our groups learn to better self-regulate as individuals and work together as a group to tackle challenges and create things. I was so inspired by that project that I wanted to build a community network of “service learning” resources so that more students from Prescott College could integrate in the community in meaningful projects. I approached the college president with some ideas and was given the green light. Eventually, I was invited to represent Prescott College in a community-wide Americorps Vista grant, and that led to the start of The Ripple Project. It completely took me by surprise when I fell in love, got engaged, and planned to leave Prescott so my fiancé could start graduate school in California. I did my best to hand off the project and prepared to follow my heart into a whole new adventure. I was married in Monterey by a Tibetan Buddhist nun who was dear friend an mentor at the time. I had been studying with her and helping her start a meditation center in the downtown Prescott area. Ani was the one who helped me through learning that the actually identity of my father was unknown, and that I had no family support in dealing with that as I got ready for marriage. She walked with me in the woods just after I found out and gave me two pieces of advice that have been like lighthouses to me in the years since. “Don’t confuse the relative and ultimate dimensions.” And, “Decide on one point.” I had no idea how much I was going to need the guidance of those words as I packed up my life in Prescott and moved into married life.
2003-2011
CA / AZ / NV / CA
I arrived in Monterey CA in early 2003 with my then fiancé. We found an apartment a few weeks before all our friends and family were coming to attend our wedding ceremony at Marina State Beach. I quickly sourced things we needed. We showed up on the beach as a group of 30 or so, and had a brief ceremony without official permits or anything. Dolphins came and played in the water. And hang gliders played in the air above us. I was basically sick for the entire duration of my marriage. The respiratory disease from my childhood did not deal well with the moldy apartment we could afford in walking distance to downtown Monterey. Things got worse when my adrenal glands stopped working after years of taking steroids to manage the pain from the sinus surgeries. The shock of the paternity situation and family abandonment probably compounded things. Still, I was undeterred. I thrived in crisis and challenge. I’d known it all my life. I started several part time jobs within weeks of our arrival in Monterey. I worked in a little British shop right on Alvarado street that I could walk to from our apartment several times a week. I also started working for and eventually running an after school program, until my immune system got so bad my doctors requested that I stop working directly with kids. That was devastating for me. And, I had a contract to write a book that was in many ways the precursor to MJ’s story. But, turns out, I could only handle so much. Eventually, I was on crutches, in pain, and falling asleep at work in any moment I had to sit down. Things got rough, and through it all, I was so grateful to have my husband and best friend by my side. By 2011, I reached a breaking point. And so did my marriage. We were living in Las Vegas Nevada when I had my first mental breakdown requiring hospitalization. The stress of my health brought up the possibility of divorce. It was at this time that I had the inspiration to find a place of true sanctuary where I could heal and reconnect with the inner light inside me that had always guided me. The prospect of divorce led me to realize I’d lost touch with that. I imagined myself as Maria von Trapp in the Sound of Music. I remembered feeling that connected to life and wanted to connect with that again. That’s when I found Deer Park.
2011-2019
San Diego, CA
In 2011 I had the last to date of nine sinus surgeries that occurred over about a decade. They had to remove large tumor-like growths that became so aggressive they completely filled my sinus cavities multiple times to the point of loosing my sense of smell and taste completely. Once for several years continuously! A new protocol was discovered to treat my respiratory condition and no longer needing continuous surgeries was actually the beginning of my health story starting to turn. I couldn’t fully appreciate it at the time because I was focused on “not getting a divorce.” I didn’t think I was well enough to support myself. I was terrified. I had the inspiration to find a place of sanctuary to restore my connection with life, like Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music. That’s when I found a video online that brought a feeling of hope like a cool breeze after near suffocation. There were nuns laughing while playing badminton, children walking slowly and peacefully with elders, and people joyfully working together and beaming with a gentle light. It was a video about the Plum Village community and Deer Park Monastery near San Diego. I felt if I could go there, I might somehow be okay. The first time I entered the monastery and crested the hill before descending into the oak grove, I felt an immediate sense of peace. It was the first time I’d felt safe in longer than I could remember. I knew I was in a place where I could open my heart completely and heal. And overtime, that’s exactly what started to happen. My first retreat at Deer Park had the theme of…The Sound of Music. I was in the “Raindrops on Roses” group for activities. We sang “My Favorite Things” all the time. I felt like the universe was letting me know I wasn’t alone. Through a series of remarkable connections during that retreat, I was offered the opportunity to move to California and help start the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation. The woman leading that project took me under her wing personally and professionally and brought laughter and sisterhood back into my life. I was devastated when she left to move back to her hometown. New leadership was brought in for the foundation and I was offered the opportunity to work in the registration office of the monastery to help facilitate adaptation to new technologies and automate processes to reduce administrative overload and the use of paper. For almost seven years, I got to spend 4 to 6 hours a day, three or more times a week, working and practicing with the Deer Park Sangha. Slowly, I started to heal and remember my true inner nature. Mindfulness became the most potent medicine of my life. My dog, Serra passed away in November of 2016. I held her and sang her to sleep. The results of the US presidential election at that time led to moving with my husband to downtown San Diego. Our marriage had been much repaired during my time at Deer Park. But we had both settled into unhealthy behaviors and hid from dealing with them by blaming each other. Being downtown, I traveled to the monastery much less. And, as MAGA began to rise, my anxiety tipped me into another mental breakdown by November, 2018. That hospitalization led to a divorce. And suddenly, I was living a nightmare.
2019-Present
Madison, WI
When I got home from the hospital in 2018, I had to confront the reality that my husband, best friend, and pretty much only family, wanted a divorce. He couldn’t really articulate why. It just felt like the right decision. And, I could tell by how scared I was that it was a kind of fear I had to face alone to ever overcome. My dear friend and mentor from the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation invited me to live with her in Madison, Wisconsin so I could start over with some support and find my way back to myself. I got on a plane and never looked back. My friend in Madison introduced me to a wonderful meditation community soon after I got to town. The Tergar Community studies with a teacher named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. He also shares the Dharma in a very clear way that is different from Thay, and complimentary. When I first arrived, the group in Madison was studying Mingyur Rinpoche’s new book at the time on The Bardos. These are Tibetan teachings on working through transitional spaces. Bringing that focus forward in my practice slowly transformed the context of my divorce into one of empowerment and healing. And, the true kindness of the community held me together somehow. I also reconnected with a few people from my family that I’d been close to when I was young. Finally being open with them about the paternity situation, illness and other things I’d been through helped me finally come to terms with what had happened. Being forced to keep a secret out of shame, even to protect someone else, even a little…I underestimated how much it was harming me. The pandemic started soon after my move to Wisconsin. I got my own little studio with an emotional support puppy named, Lola. I had been helping my friend foster dogs while we lived together when I first arrived, and Lola was the last to come through before I moved out. I hadn’t planned to adopt another dog after Serra. But somehow, Lola just fit. The pandemic was good for my lungs because I stopped getting colds that invariably became lingering bronchitis. And then, around 2022, when some new medications were introduced, my lungs started to significantly improve! One day, I noticed I didn’t need a break after dusting for 10 minutes. Then that started happening more and more. As I started to feel a little better, I began daily practices of meditation, writing, art and yoga. In 2021, I wrote a memoir that helped me let go of the story-laden pain of my childhood. In 2022, I started working on MJ’s story as a retelling of much of my own life with a focus on how I found my way to the path of waking up to my true nature. Then the illustrations guided me into creating this space to share this story. I hope it helps you with your own.
Here's how I did it.
Because the these illustrations started out as "just" storyboards, I gave myself a lot of room to play with them! I fell in love with the practice of creating art every day and telling the story that had always been in my heart to tell. The joy of that helped my healing beyond measure. I developed a digital art process that's really accessible and something I want to share as a tool to help you tell your stories, too. Initially, I wanted to quickly sketch in the scenes, and then focus on exploring each one through the "digital watercolor" style that developed as I worked on the portraits of Thich Nhat Hanh after his passing. I hoped that would help me meditate on and better distill the novel-length manuscript into something more coherent. And it did! I work from reference photos. I can create a good likeness of photographs or artwork, or when drawing scenes from real life. But I have to see something with my eyes to get it on paper. I started creating rough composite photographs of each scene from the story as I imagined it. Then, I’d bring the composite image into a layer of the digital canvas and drop the opacity down pretty low, and trace in guide lines for perspective and relative proportion, drawing in detail while looking at the composite photo on my phone, and changing various detail like hair styles or the clothes each character wears. In the beginning, I used tracing a lot because I was focused on quickly developing the storyboards to understand the draft I’d written. But as I started focusing more and more on just enjoying the art, I got into varying the use of the opacity based on what part of the skill I wanted to work on. This turned out to be a great way to relearn some of my sketching skills. I filled many sketchbooks as a kid drawing from photographs or Disney scenes, but I hadn’t really done much of my own art since college. I’m pretty sure that’s all too common a scenario. Eventually, I used the opacity level like training wheels. Bring up the opacity, take in the shapes and proportions with your eyes. Lower the opacity and sketch in what you noticed. Do it again. Help yourself over trouble spots without getting frustrated. Stay at the edge of joy and play in your learning. Let your heart tell you what it most wants you to know. The digital canvas gives you endless supplies and the chance to save versions and experiment with so much freedom! And that is how good stories are told. Using tracing this way allowed me to speed up my learning curve and keep a good production schedule, and focus on exploring and having fun painting the emotional dynamics of the scenes in layers of light. Then it occurred to me that by sharing my process, it might inspire you to play and experiment, too! I can show you how I create this style, but once you sketch in the scenes, there are a world of possibilities in how you bring them to life. You’ll know it when you find the one that’s right for you.
Get in Touch!
