This poem is from The Sounds of Valleys and the Forms of Mountains, a chapter of the Shobogenzo by Zen Master Dogen. The poem speaks of how nature ‘speaks’ when we are full ready to hear. This is possible because of the Buddhist teaching of the fundamental non separation of ear and sound, mind and matter.

It dawned on me why I was so caught up in the film about the Giant Hornets and the honey bees the other day. I remembered a short poem I’d written early in life which started, Bee and me we are One! Well, it was a start! I had no religious context through which to understand the sense of unity I experienced while watching a bumble bee one idle summers day. The impression however was a lasting one.

It’s not unusual for people to speak of a profound sense of unity they felt with existence while out in the wilds, or elsewhere. Very often people spend their lives trying to find an explanation for such experiences. Some take up a formal religious practice and realise a window onto the way things are opened briefly. They can then let go and move on.

It’s always cheering to see that another person is attempting to establish a regular meditation practice. Just sitting may be simple however it is not easy. And especially not easy to keep up a practice alone.

Well done, keep going.

It’s amazing how the heart sings when you’ve done something right!

Ever since I’ve been back here at Throssel my brown hat has been lost and found many times. Other people have walked off with it, I’ve walked off with similar looking hats only to find it belongs to somebody else. If a hat goes missing I seem to be first on the list to check with. Did you take my hat by mistake Rev. Mugo? I’ve got a bit of a reputation for walking off in other peoples coats too, they all look much the same in the gloom of the evening cloister after meditation.

Sometimes I’ve wondered if the hat I have now is really ‘mine’, but that has all changed. On Tuesday, while fending off a cold, I occupied myself sewing in name labels. My brown hat was top of the list. All those items I least want to loose track of, socks for example, are now labeled as well. Now I can reast easy knowing my hat will return to me, eventually. Why, only this very morning it went walk-about and returned in under eight hours. It’s a record!

So, when my hat went missing I broke out into silent song:
I’ve not-got that sinkin’ feelin’, now you’ve gone, gone, gone! But looking up the song I thought I was alluding to I find the lyrics are not even close. Ah well…

I’m reminded of a birthday card my dad once sent me of Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit, in the wrong trousers. Wallace had such a look of dismay on his face and I guess my dad empathized. Perhaps he’d put on the wrong trousers at some point in his life.

Once a week we watch TV on our ‘renewal’ night, this is our community recreation. Last night we watched a film about the Giant Hornets which wreck havoc in Japan by decimating the domestic European honey bee population. The female workers, loyal to their Queen, feed the growing larvae and for that they need ‘meat’. So the workers go and raid hives for their larvae then feed them to the ever growing population of avaricious hornet larvae.

The local bee keepers destroy Hornets nests. In the film a Buddhist monk, who harvests honey each year by attracting wild honey bees to his hives, does not do this. Interestingly enough the wild bees were better adapted to protecting their hives than the European ones. They simply smother the scouting Hornet by swarming all over it and flap their wings to raise the temperature. Hornets can’t take the extra heat and are thus effectively cooked to death.

One of the monks remarked how interesting it was to watch ones mind while watching the hornets wrecking havoc killing the honey bees and the general death and destruction depicted in the film. With my renewed audio awareness what I was noticing were the sounds. You could hear the munching and crunching and buzzing. I was wondering how on earth the film crew managed to catch the sounds, or were they sound effects…

I’m not sure why in particular these hornets, and the film, grabbed my attention. I do however now remember that the monk in the film had been attacked by a swarm of the Giant Hornets as a child and survived. Now each year he seems to seek out the all important Queen who, early in the season, feeds on tree sap and is easy to spot. He could have been afraid of them, he could at least keep his distance but actually he appears to loves them as he loves the wild honey bees too.

Interesting the choices we can make in life, and how choices in the natural world are few.

This afternoon I watched and, most especially, listened to the film Into Great Silence. An award winning film in 2006 apparently. Probably most people who watch films have seen this one however if you haven’t it’s well worth the time, it’s a two and a half hour meditation period with visuals. Many thanks to the long time sangha friend and fellow blogger for sending me the collector’s edition. I’ve yet to look at the ‘extras’ on the second disk.

The German documentarist Philip Groening waited patiently for 13 years before the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps near Grenoble invited him to make a film about their lives, laying down the conditions that there should be no artificial light, no music (other than their own Gregorian chants), no interviews, no commentary and no accompanying crew. The result is the 164-minute Into Great Silence, a meditation on lives given over to poverty, prayer and solitude. It’s an experience from within a repetitive, spiritual existence, rather than an explanatory, exploratory documentary. Groening lived in a cell of his own for a total of four months, covering all seasons, communicating with the monks through letters, shooting 120 hours of material, and in an almost God-like way working as director, producer, scriptwriter, cinematographer, sound recordist and film editor. Read more…

With heightened awareness in the audio department I went for a walk after the film finished and heard such squawking from the bushes. A nest of tiny orphaned birds, most likely destined to die very fast. We think the mother has been eaten…probably Smudge our cloister cat. Spare a thought.