I’m Thinking About It
When I arrived at the Forest Refuge last December (I think this photo was taken about a week after I got there), I was delighted to find that someone I knew from the CDL program was already there — someone who I didn’t really know all that well, but who I’d sat several long retreats with, and had developed a very sweet, very heartfelt connection with.
The Forest Refuge is a silent retreat center, so of course we didn’t get a chance to chat — until just before I left, when I found out that my friend had already been there for 3 months before I’d arrived — and that they’d be staying on for another 9!
Meaning: they are at the Forest Refuge — on retreat — for a WHOLE YEAR.
Which is amazing enough. Except that last November, when Spring Washam was here and she was telling me how she had spent a year on retreat in Peru, I found myself saying: Wow, that’s so cool. I’m been thinking about going on retreat for a year at the Forest Refuge.
Which I had! Except that I’d never said that to anyone before. Maybe not even to myself quite that clearly.
So I backtracked right away. Saying: of course I couldn’t really do anything like that. What would I do with my house? My cats? My responsibilities!
And then I forgot about it. Sort of.
Until I saw my sweet friend: RIGHT THERE — DOING IT!!!
So while I was waiting for the van to take me to the airport (I was in the office, where it was OK for us to talk), I told my friend what I’d said to Spring and we talked about it.
They said that the first 3 months had been pretty intense. And that maybe it was a crazy thing to do. But maybe not. They said some people do it in 3-month “chunks.” Meaning: 3 months on retreat, then 1 month back out in the world (to integrate the retreat experiences), then back in again for 3 months, then out for 1, and on like that, for a year.
Which sound surprisingly doable!
Not any time soon, of course. But at some point. Maybe.
Or maybe not.
Let’s just say: I’m thinking about it.
Do We Dare?
I enjoyed the flexible schedule of being on retreat at the Forest Refuge (no bells being rung every 45 minutes) and the intimacy of being at a smaller center (only 30 rooms instead of the usual 100) and a lot of other things too that were very special about that place — but I have to admit, I really missed the nightly dharma talks. (There was one on Tuesday night and another on Friday night, but that was it.)
So, now that I’m back, I’ve hunkered down almost every night listening to dharma talks. Which is kind of like being on a retreat in itself! Especially since I also listen to guided meditations with instructions, like these, at the very end of Phillip Moffitt’s talk from 2013, The Metta of Awareness and the Awareness of Metta:
“Let go. Let go. Let go.
“Let go in terms of experiencing the emptiness. But also let go in terms of opening to the possibility of metta — this love — that in all of our smallness and all of our anxieties and all of our feeling as though we don’t have enough — that we’ve not had enough of ‘our turn’ or ‘oh, we have it so hard’ or ‘we’re at an age when it’s all falling away from us now’… In the midst of all of that, let go of those mind states, as best we are able, such that we can open to the innate sense of wellbeing that the brahma viharas represent…
“We see it as empty, and that is wisdom. And we also see it as love — that we are sufficient the way we are. That we’re not separate. We’re part of some huge unfolding. That it’s all got a kind of perfection. Even though we are actively trying to make it better — and SHOULD be actively trying to make it better. Yet it’s got a kind of perfection in the very knowing of it… The very unfolding of our life as it is, is perfect, when known from that love-space.
“Do we dare? Do we dare let go? Just into the emptiness? To let go into this kind of vulnerability of caring, as though we ARE sufficient. As though we ARE enough. As though we have something to give, and are also worthy of receiving. Just as we are.
“Do we dare? Do we dare? Do we dare to let go in this way?
“…And now dropping our attention into the body, to the belly area, into the Intuitive Body. What would the Intuitive Body have us know? What wants to be heard from that Intuition?
“…Shifting attention to the Heart Space. What needs attending in the heart? What do you know-that-you-know in the Heart Space? What needs to be allowed, received, or let go of, in the Heart Space?
“…Shifting attention to the Head Center, where all our comments are made, all our views and opinions chatter away. But respecting the Head Center. What has the Head Center noticed that it would have you listen to ?
“…And then letting go of all this knowing.
“Just be. Just for a few seconds.
“Trust yourself to let go of everything and just be.
“No doing. No knowing.
“Just be.”
Just Opening.
Frequent readers of this blog will not be surprised that I was delighted when the first dharma talk I heard upon arriving at the Forest Refuge featured part of a poem by Mark Nepo. But it may surprise you as much as it did me that the poem was one I had not heard before.
Maybe that’s why it stayed with me pretty much the whole time I was there. I found myself focusing on one line, each day. Not thinking about it. Just saying it (silently) thought the day. I hadn’t intended to do it. It just happened. And right away it became clear to me that these were practice instructions!
Sacred Tremor (excerpt)
by Mark Nepo
Having loved enough and lost enough,
I am no longer searching
just opening.
No longer trying to make sense of pain
but being a soft and sturdy home
in which real things can land.
These are the irritations
that rub into a pearl.
So we can talk awhile,
but then we must listen
the way rocks listen to the sea.
And we can churn at all the things gone wrong
but then we must lay all distraction
down and water very living seed.
Happy New Year!
I was on retreat at the Forest Refuge on New Year’s Day, where (much to my disappointment) there was no acknowledgement that we had passed from 2017 to 2018. I hadn’t expected champagne, but I had thought that there might be some special chanting ceremony, or blessing, or at least that someone would ring the big bells outside the dining hall at midnight. (Maybe 108 times, like they do at the New Year’s Retreats I’ve attended at Spirit Rock.)
Oh well.
Today is the Lunar New Year, celebrated in China with the greeting: Gong Xi Fa Cai! Which I understand translates as: May you be Fortunate and Prosperous!
That will do.
May it be so!
Maybe We’re Necessary to Each Other
Finally all of the web files have been moved to the new server, so both Dharma Town and I are back up and running!
I’ve missed these postings. I hope you have too. Which brings to mind this poem:
A Music
by Wendell Berry
I employ the blind mandolin player
in the tunnel of the Metro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.
Maybe we’re necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
— it’s vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.
By some fate or knack he has chosen
to play his music in this cavity
where there’s nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.
His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It’s his music, not the place, I go by.
In this light, which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;
his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but a singing in a dark place.
A Wild Human Ride
Dear Faithful Readers:
I’m back from retreat — which was totally excellent, although pretty wild a lot of the time — and I hope you’ve been looking forward to reading all about it. But my web hosting contract is now up for renewal and since Go Daddy has upgraded their server, they need to do a bunch of stuff to move it over to the new one….which means we’re all going to have to wait another week or so before I can start posting again.
So. A great opportunity to practice patience!
In the mean time, I leave you with this quote from Jack Kornfield’s New Years e-letter, which I have just now gotten a chance to read:
“We are consciousness itself — loving awareness — born into this body and having a wild human ride.“
I Find Myself, Again, Always….
One more passage from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, before I enter the silence tomorrow at the Forest Refuge:
Kublai: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
Polo: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.
Kublai: I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, listening to the splashing echo, and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army, conquering the lands you will have to describe, or cutting off the fingers of the attackers scaling the walls of a besieged fortress.
Polo: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.
Kublai: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they sift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them.
Polo: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging gardens of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.
***
Friends: I will return from retreat on January 31 and hope to post again during the first week of February.
Till then, may you all be safe, healthy, and happy!
Till the Period of Sojourn is Over
Note: This will be my last post until I return from 5 weeks of silent retreat at the Forest Refuge in Barre, Mass.
To accompany you as you embark on your own expedition into 2018, I offer this passage from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino:
Thin Cities 4
The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest.
One of the half-cities is permanent, the other temporary, and when the period of sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.
And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary.
Here remains the half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it beings to count the months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.
Through This to That
blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
To Live in This World
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
***
(for my sister whose beloved dog — Max — has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer)