Watch out for posting some time after 24th October.
Even though we are wearing these formal robes we can still know True Freedom.
Paraphrased from Not Always So, by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.
While at San Francisco Zen Centre last week I had the great good fortune to offer incense and make bows to the memory of Shunryn Suzuki at his memorial shrine. He wrote Zen Mind Beginners Mind a book which brought many to Zen practice, including me. The opportunity to express gratitude was a gift in itself.
Walking up the lane in the windy darkness this evening, the trees thrashing around wildly. Attempting to bend into the wind, but it’s coming from every direction at once. Then I thought This is like being on an island in the middle of the sea. And then I realized This is an island in the middle of the sea!
Thanks for your well wishes. Now I’m going to have a looooong sleep.
In San Francisco it is easy, as a tourist, to look up. In a certain sense we are all tourist. Here for a brief time…
This is an up-in-the-clear-blue-sky day. San Francisco to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam to Newcastle. It’s been a good five months abroad.
As the time comes closer to leave North America and return to the North of England my mind has been turning to the green uplands, especially the fells of the Lake District, Cumbria. So it was especially heartening to receive an email from my monastic walking companion who’s been awalkin’ where I first saw, and fell permanently in love with, high rocky places.
I look forward to traipsing the moors with you again, which will probably be even more fun than the dream walk I made yesterday. I climbed the 4th (correction – 18th highest) highest mountain in England!! – in the Lake District. It was blummin’ foggy up there (2800 ft) but well worth it (the climb).
Tomorrow is a traveling day. First sliding down through the verdant mountains to Redding and then slithering through the liquefying heat of the Sacramento Valley to the Bay Area.
Before that journey there will be goodbye’s to the community here at Shasta. It’s customary when visiting a Buddhist ‘establishment’ to offer incense and make (three) bows at the main altar and again when leaving. The formality of such occasions helps to bring to the fore the beginingless and endlessness of practice. And the endlessness of bowing, of gratitude.