A replica of Argo, the mythical ship that bore Jason and the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece, sails through the Corinth Canal, Greece. The ship carries a crew from all 27 EU states. source: BBC
Just in the door after two flights from Portland to Seattle to Victoria. Feeling just a bit disoriented after five rich days of silent life at the monastery, sleeping in a dormitory (replete with farts, snoring, and narrow beds), hours regulated by bells, drums, gongs, and clappers. Forty-plus people meditating, eating, chanting, working, and resting en group. The focus of the retreat was to develop the skill of metta.
“The Pali* word metta is a term meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, benevolence, fellowship, amity, concord, inoffensiveness and non-violence. The Pali commentators define metta as the strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others. Essentially metta is an altruistic attitude of love and friendliness as distinguished from mere amiability based on self-interest. Through metta one … renounces bitterness, resentment and animosity of every kind, developing instead a mind of friendliness and benevolence which seeks the well-being and happiness of others. True metta is devoid of self-interest. It evokes within a warm-hearted feeling of fellowship, sympathy and love, which grows boundless with practice and overcomes all social, religious, racial, political and economic barriers.”
Wow … quite an undertaking, running counter to the ways I’ve viewed myself and others. Spending a week in intensive practice was merely a first step–well, a second. First, to acknowledge that the habitual ways are competitive, judgmental, and self-centred; that they cause suffering in self, others, and the world at large; and that gentler ways are essential. Then one sets out to unlearn and to relearn. In that sense, last week was basic training, a boot camp on becoming a kinder creature.
I’d best not burble on right now as thoughts and emotions are swirling in my heart-mind … my body, too, is sore (yet refreshed) from endless hours of sitting in meditation. One way to ground in the ‘ordinary’ is to make my way to the hospice and see who’s there and who isn’t (any more).
More tomorrow. Thank you for visiting.
source: Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka. *Pali is the ancient language spoken at the time of the historical Buddha.
A tumultuous morning at hospice. A patient in her twenties died at 9:32, leaving behind a five-year old daughter, a husband-to-be, her parents. Word of her passing rippled through the floor. You could see people hugging, some with tears, others silently going about caring for the living.
We’d had eleven deaths last week and this one touched us especially. Why was that? Because she’d been so young, too young? Old people die, yes, but not someone at her age, with so much life still ahead. Did her death alert us to our own mortality, and that of people dear to us? “This sucks,” someone said, another that it was “all so wrong.” Then we heard that a fellow-worker was away, taking her twenty-year-old to the cancer clinic for a scan of a reoccurred tumour. A call went out for an impromptu healing circle.
We gathered in the meditation room, seated in a circle, nurses and volunteers. The bell rang three times, calling our attention inward, there to locate our breath. Each in-breath new life, each out-breath a dying … built-in reminders of the impermanence of everything. We practiced metta (see my post on May 20), expanding awareness from our own heart to others’ who might be hurting. May they be free from fear. May they be at ease. May they be happy. Our music therapist played ”Ashokan Farewell” on her flute and I read this poem:
God of the Wind,
Spirit God,
You, God, Larger than Life,
Greater than the Day,
Fuller than the Event,
I can be alone with You.
Alone with the Alone.
I feel scattered.
Yet centered, breathing,
Allowing your spirit to be in my sensing.
I dance and settle and move on. Slowly.
Present to the Moment,
Full of human frailty and longing,
Enclosed in joy and wonder.
poem source: “Enclosed in wonder” by Donna J. Maebore. Sacred Journey: the journal of fellowship in prayer. June/July 2008, p.25. www.sacredjourney.org; image: www.ssprj.org.
While anyone is at risk of food insecurity at some point in their lives, certain groups are particularly vulnerable (based on 2007 data from the Canadian Association of Food Banks cafb/acba):
Welfare recipients continue to make up 50.7% of food bank clients in Canada.
Working poor constitute the second largest group of food bank clients, at 13.5%. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of food bank clients with jobs are employed at low wages.
Rural dwellers: Despite the fact that many of Canada’s rural communities are located in prime agricultural areas, hunger is a reality for tens of thousands of the nation’s rural residents.
Persons with disabilities have made up the third largest group of food bank clients in the last five year.
Seniors accounted for 6.8% of food bank users in a typical month.
Children: Child poverty is now at the same level seen in 1989, the year when the federal government made an all-party resolution to end child poverty. 38.7% of food bank clients were under 19.
Single parents: Many of the single parent households assisted by food banks (28.4% of the total) are women: according to Statistics Canada, 1 in 4 single-parent families are headed by women.
Several times a year, for a decade now, I go somewhere to be silent with others. There is a magic of being alone in community, to retreat. Few words, no eye contact, no touching, no polite gestures; just being together, meditating, eating, working, chanting or praying. I’ve done this at Zen, Benedictine, Franciscan, and Thai monasteries, for as short as a weekend to as long as ten days.
A few weeks ago a friend initiated a day retreat and advertised on local bulletin boards. Fourteenof us met from 9 to 5 in someone’s home and garden: we meditated, worked outdoors, and ate our bag lunches together. No teacher, no chanting, just silence. A rare time to turn inwards. And what is there, on the inside? Nothing muh once you get past thoughts; but that the point of this practice.
Have you ever done a silent retreat? Would you like to? Is there a place and a time you could go on one where you live? If you’re at all curious, you could start in small steps (a good idea for most): an evening “sit” at a local Zen, Vipassana, Shambala centre, or a church that offers Centering Prayer. In the Quaker tradition people get together in a “meeting for worship,” a designated time of communal silence, occasionally broken by words spoken spontaneously from the heart.
Writing about the spiritual path in the Sufi (Islam) tradition, Llewellyn Vaughnan-Lee explains that “at the beginning of the path, our longing turns us away from the everyday world and the hustle and bustle of life. Later, this same path will lead the wayfarer back into the marketplace to take part in the affairs of life, with the difference that she will be in the world but not of the world. This is the Sufi practice of solitude in a crowd: whatever one’s outward activity, the inner attention remains in the heart.”
source: Llewellyn Vaughnan-Lee. (1998). Catching the thread: Sufism, dream-work, and Jungian psychology. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, p.36.
I’m again struck by the parallels in intention between Buddhist and Christian meditation. Below a take on the Christian practice of Centering Prayer by one of its best-known teachers, the Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault.
See also ‘learning from monks’ on April 11th and ‘centering prayer’ on the 12th.
“The obvious place where meditation–any form of meditation–plugs into the Christian theological mainstream is through the additional light it sheds on the gospel instructions: “Whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will find it” (Matthew 16:25). This is of course a foundational teaching, modeled in Jesus’ life even more than in his word, and as Christians we are bound to emulate it. Our life is to be a continuous “dying to self”: a voluntary relinquishing of a small and more relative life in order to actualize a larger and more permanent one.”
source: C. Bourgeault. (2004). Centering prayer and inner awakening. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publ., p.80.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Cistercian monk and one of the 20th century most influential religious writers, has been my spiritual companion for the last nine years. In him I’ve found a “brother” who understands my longing for silence and solitude. Together we share, with Henry David Thoreau, the wish to “live deliberately.” The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer equates solitude with freedom, saying that we can’t truly appreciate freedom if we can’t enjoy solitude.
Merton writes: “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.”
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver
I’m in town for a month, sub-letting a tiny studio apartment while its owner is visiting universities for his PhD in English. One of the perks of having this home away from the island is access to high-speed Internet. Whoopee! For most of you this is ordinary stuff. Dial-up, you say? How quaint!
This morning I made my first visit to YouTube, following a link about Laotian monks going on alms rounds. What a treat! The sights and sounds, right there on this little screen: bells ringing, monks chanting, bare feet shuffling, dogs barking, cars honking, cocks crowing, women kneeling at the roadside offering rice alms, and millions of cicadas competing for air time. Please visit and taste for yourself. No wonder I want to go back there.
image: picasaweb.google.com
An invitation to join a Japan Temple Tour, October 9 to 17, 2008: visit sacred sites, travel the trains and see amazing sights; sleep at Temple Grounds, International Hostels and even one or two fancy hotels. Enjoy the food, but most importantly, change your life with an understanding of the Buddha-way of energy, practice and personal realizations. Click here for more info or call Henry at 250-715-1976.
image: www.istockphoto.com
ROME, May 14, 1904 (excerpt): “It is also good love; because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far into life is–: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind oneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person …, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to becomes something in [themselves], to become world, to become world in [themselves] for the sake of another person ….” –Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell (1984, pp 68-69).
The next time you find yourself longing for some alone-time, consider the ancient practice of solitude. Having lived as a Trappist monk for half his life, Thomas Merton knew a thing or two about this.
“Solitude is not withdrawal from ordinary life. It is not apart from, above, better than ordinary life. On the contrary, solitude is the very ground of that life; simple, unpretentious, fully human activity by which we quietly earn our daily living and share our experiences with a few intimate friends. But we must learn to know and accept the ground of our being. To most people, though it is always there, it is unthinkable and unknown. Consequently their life has no centre and no foundation.”
Thomas Merton (1950). The sign of Jonas, p.255.
Rumi says:
My heart is so small
it’s almost invisible.
How can You place
such big sorrows in it?
“Look,” He answered,
”your eyes are even smaller,
yet they behold the world.”
etymology of courage: c.1300, from Old French corage, from Vulgar Latin (everyday Roman speech) coraticum, from Latin cor “heart,” which remains a common metaphor for inner strength.
These lines are in David Whyte’s poem “What to remember when waking”:
You are not / a troubled guest / on this earth, / you are not / an accident / amidst other accidents / you were invited / from another and greater night / than the one / from which / you have just emerged.
With so much talk about “self-improvement” and “change is good” (especially as new year’s resolutions are coming home to roost), it is tempting to think that there’s something wrong with me, that I’m flawed somehow, not good enough. And then I notice (or, as happened today, when someone reminded me) how easily I project this view from myself unto others.
Whenever I catch myself doing this (and I’m not good at that J), I turn to a question which Zen Teacher Joko Beck gives her students: What is this? What is it that bothers me? How does it bother me? What or whom does that remind me of?
I stay clear of why-questions as they tend to, at least for me, lead to because-answers, get me thinking about problems and ways to fix them rather than allowing me to listen to what actually is at that moment.
Then, after a few moment of this gentle excavating, I ask the next question: What is going on right now? Where—in my heart, my body, my feelings—do emptiness, longing, confusion, sadness, loneliness, despair, etc. reside? As my breath of awareness washes through a lifetime of deposits, I open up–allowing myself to be taught by my body, by the Self which knows. Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
I love the dark hours of my being. / My mind deepens into them. / There I can find, as in old letters, / the days of my life, already lived, / and held like a legend, and understood. / Then knowing comes / I can open / to another life that’s wide and timeless.
D. Whyte (2004). The House of Belonging, p.27; A. Barrows & J. Macy (1996). Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love poems to God, p.51
. Look for this gate for related topics in previous posts.
“… une mesure de renforcement de l’interdiction de fumer dans les lieux affectés … dans les débits permanents de boissons à consommer sur place, hôtels, restaurants, débits de tabac, casinos …”
In short, effective January 1, 2008, smoking will be forbidden in all French hotels, restaurants, discos, and cafés (outdoor seating exempt). Any smoker caught flouting the ban faces a 450€ ($662) fine, while those who turn a blind eye to smokers on their premises can be fined up to 750€.
“All my customers smoke, all my employees smoke. What are we going to do?” laments Olivier Colombe, 43, owner of Parisian cafés Le Panier and Le Faitout (in Herald Tribune). Poor dears!
Just imagine, riding the Metro from, say Gare du Nord to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, writing memoirs in ‘your’ café, awaiting romance dans un petit bistro … all without risking lung cancer and hair fumigation? What will they think of next, those crazy French people? Waiters acknowledging your presence, cabbies offering to help with luggage, dogs not shitting on side-walks? Mon dieu!
