The posts for each year 2012 thru 2015 are now available as eBooks on Amazon. The plan is to continue publishing the remaining year-books from 2016 thru 2022. And all will be done and available by the end of December 2022. It will then be the end of our ten-year anniversary, and time for us to consider how much further we can go with things… is there a retirement home for WordPress bloggers? A time also to reflect on the decade we will have shared together here, so now, some acknowledgements and a little history of how the Blog began, and evolved and is what it is today.

It started as a discussion between Tavaro and Tiramit in 2011, driving by car from London to Kandersteg Buddhist Monastery in Switzerland. In the beginning, Tavaro had the skills in WordPress and he was (is) the Master. Tiramit the learner, quickly gathered speed and eventually went on alone. Before that there were discussions on all kinds of things, the name of the blog; early titles included ‘BudInTransit,’ the idea of travelling here and there and anicca the Buddhist term for impermanence. The subtitle “Postcards from the Present Moment” first arose at this time. As for the title Dhamma footsteps, it suggested a child learning to walk. Also as adults, each new writing/reading was a step in the dhamma, towards a clearer understanding of dukkha and an end to suffering.

The collection was intended as a Buddhist journal, presenting a series of short written pieces, ‘posts’ on the Dhamma Footsteps blog [dhammafootsteps.com], and the dhamma is everywhere, starting at the end of 2011 and moving on to 2012. The idea at that time was about how the present moment is always with us, the here-and-now. In the past, the here-and-now becomes there-and-then, of course but is significant that ‘there-and-then’ also refers to the here-and-now in the future – no other designation for future time… language never got around to inventing a future form because future doesn’t exist, except in the realms of imagined content – the same can be said of the remembered past. So, there-and-then in both the past and the future becomes here-and-now in present time which it always was, and is.

The posts then became the ‘post cards’ thus, “Postcards from the Present Moment;” the Buddha’s teachings applied as day-to-day events in a stream of consciousness. Each entry is an analysis of these short events (cittas) noted in the course of a day, or in an instant, an analysis of causally linked mind moments in the paticcasamuppada, Dependent Origination. This kind of investigation into the nature of mind and being is accessed through the practice of meditation. The simplest of things carry meaning. There is mindfulness, meditation, and careful analysis of awareness, moment by moment in the expanded present moment.

Special thanks also Chadarat for technical support. Also, to Manish Jain for extended technical support and inspiration. He is with me now… I would also like to thank all my co-travellers who have been following my blog and occasionally sharing their own experiences in the comment section. As a gesture of gratitude to you, I am sharing an eBook from 2013 for free/ no-cost, in PDF format. You can simply download it from the eBooks section on my blog or please click here to reach that page. That’s all for now.