Buddhist Ground Force

One of the great blessings of living in community is working meditation, especially those times when we work on a project as a whole community. It is more difficult to gather enough people together in a small temple to get a large project completed, but not impossible.

At Telford Buddhist Priory a few Mondays ago a trusty group of gardeners did a ‘make over’ on the front garden. These pictures tell the story well. Click on the slide show tab at the top of the frame. I’m really impressed with this way of showing photographs.

For the uninitiated Ground Force, a long running BBC TV garden make-over program, became almost a modern British institution. Now after an eight year run it packed it’s bags and left.

Wing Dingers

E-mails have been flying back and forth these past weeks between here and Texas, that’s mission control as far as the technical aspect of this move is concerned. As I write more tweaking is going on behind the scenes and more features are being added, even as I speak! Is it not a minor miracle that one site can be edited by more than one person at a time, and in different countries as well?

Today a reader from North America wrote in support of the new site, she was the first to try out the Contact tab to get in touch. She wrote saying she was quite content with the old one (Moving Mountains) and daily expressed gratitude for its existence, but this one is really a wing-ding, in the vernacular. Wonderful expression.

To be perfectly honest I feel a bit inhibited about continuing to write in the freewheeling kind of way I’ve grown accustomed to. Moving into Jade Mountains has been rather like leaving the comfort of the lay common room, with spotty wallpaper, after three years of doing ‘lay tea’. That’s a time on the schedule when a monk comes to join the lay guests for tea and biscuits. It’s a chance to ask questions about practice and to generally relax and chat together with a monk. Bit like Moving Mountains talk. I regard teas as advanced training for the visitors because they come to realize monks are humans! For some I’m sure Moving Mountains has been a test too.

Now I’m caught in a corridor, still with a smile on my face, but anxiety is rising. Seems like I’m scheduled to do a talk in the library, and I’m not prepared. It’ll take some time to find what I’m going to talk about and how. Come to think of it I can remember some pretty good freewheeling times talking in the library.

Another wing ding has just arrived. Over on the sidebar on the left is a link to Buddhism in the News. Perhaps in this more formal setting reading the news will become yet another aspect of sitting still, and offering merit.

The Green Mountains are Forever Walking

To recognize your own moving on will certainly be no different from recognizing the moving on of the verdant mountains.

Sansuikyo, On the Spiritual Discourses of the Mountains and the Water
Shobogenzo, The Eye and Treasury of the True Law.

Here is an extract from the translators notes attached to this chapter:

In this discourse in particular, ‘mountain’ is most often used as a descriptive epithet for one who is sitting in meditation, as still as a mountain among mountains (that is, one who is training among other members of the Buddhist Sangha),…

If here is a place to sit as a mountain among mountains all will be well. Let us walk on the Way, together with all living things.