Silence. SILENCE! shouts the teacher at the excited throng, Silence I say!…OK, hands on heads…If this chatter doesn’t stop, you’ll all be kept in after school.

That was the dreaded class discipline in my first school. Being quiet was a punishment for talking, laughing, chatting. A punishment for being a full of energy child with not enough to do. Of course we found every opportunity to defy teacher, crawling under the desks after imaginary dropped pencils and the like.

We have an introductory retreat going on this week-end which I’m helping with. We make announcements: Please maintain a contemplative atmosphere? Please keep talking to a minimum? Please maintain silence from now until after morning service? Since strictly enforced silence only leads to furtive chats in corridors and whispering in corners we ask for peoples cooperation and generally that works, but not completely. After all it’s not easy, at first, to be around others and not talk to them, for a whole week-end.

I sat down beside a chap this morning, he appeared a bit stressed. How’s it going? Uwrrr, this not talking is getting to me, can’t handle it. Sitting eating breakfast and not talking, I feel like I am the last person on earth! By the last meal of the day he had turned a major corner on eating in silence. Good for him for persevering*.

Persevere: Quietly and steadily persevering especially in detail or exactness.

As I was about to recycle this envelope the stamp caught my eye. Now here’s an image of an older woman that does not attempt at disguise the fact, in my view, a good thing. People grow old and they look old and there is nobility in that, even when close to death or seriously ill. Why cover over the wrinkly neck and the wispy white hair? She looks out at us in her wide eyed way. What has shaped her life? What has she shaped in her life? Well, it turns out she was another remarkable woman pioneer, in the field of hospice care for the terminally ill.

An Obituary for Dame Cicely Saunders, July 2005.
St Christopher’s hospice, which was founded in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders, who has died aged 87, is a beacon for the supposedly terminally ill and their families. Situated in the London suburb of Sydenham, it led to the founding of hospices around the world employing her principles.
By using drugs scientifically to manage pain, and by allowing relatives to spend a great deal of time with her patients, Saunders altered the bleak concept of death for thousands of people. To her, dying was part of life; her creed was Living Before Dying. Read more….

Over in Canada a woman is getting ready to die. Here are some reflections on visiting her as well as reflections on life and death.

I did a load of laundry this afternoon in a bit of a rush and accidentally left a tissue in my laundry. It is truly sickening to open the machine door and see ones dark brown robe flecked with soggy white tissue.

The silent conversation went something like: ‘Who left a tissue in the machine’? Then, ‘this is a horrible situation, it will take a long time to make this wearable again’. And latter remembering the tissue I’d tucked in a tee shirt sleeve, ‘Oh, it was me! We have probably all done this at one time or another, ay? It’s socks and sweaters that suffer most, and brown robes in my case.

When something like this happens I tend to move quickly to being ever so grateful it was my laundry that got wrecked and not somebody else’s. Being on the sharp end of blame can be distressing, be it blaming oneself, blaming somebody else or simply blaming the situation for ones current unhappiness.

In one of our writings there is a phrase which goes something like, ‘by accident the course of karma was started’. I’d read this every day and gradually I noticed how angry I was becoming. ‘Just who was it who started the course of karma’. ‘How could somebody make such a stupid mistake!’ How very personally one can take life!

Now I’m off to deal with my robe…

When the Buddha was absent from Jetavana devotees naturally missed him, so Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, asked of the Buddha what in his absence might be reverenced and in answer the Buddha mentioned bodily relics, things reminiscent of him and things that he had used, in particular the great Bodhi Tree under which he had attained Enlightenment. Ananda then had a seed of the Bodhi Tree brought to Jetavana and planted so that it would be, as the Buddha himself said, as if the Buddha were constantly present at Jetavana. To this very day, that tree is known as the Ananda Bodhi Tree. Text borrowed from here.

It is not easy to grow one of these trees, especially from seed. However one brave person is growing one in Germany. Good fortune with the fledgling tree, as you say, it’s probably related to the one the Buddha sat under. And should it get sick, they are prone to disease when grown indoors, here is the place to find out what to do.