For Meetingbrook, winter ended at Sunday Evening Practice when we'd moved zafus and zabutons from Merton Bookshed Retreat (winter zendo) over to Dogen & Francis Chapel-Zendo. It wondered where we'd been. The reverberation against pitched rafters of the wooden fish (Japanese, Mokugyo; Korean, Moktak) during chanting of The Heart Sutra gave strong resonance to welcoming us back.
In Catholic tradition, Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, and Corpus Christi had wandered the esoteric fog of our psyches and settled on cushions as equinox twirls, stops, and rewinds both the planet and our thinking.
All in silence, all in quiet practice.
Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the world’s purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit’s final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication. It is the lesson in which learning ends, for it is consummated and surpassed with this. It is the invitation to God to take His final step. It is the relinquishment of all other purposes, all other interests, all other wishes and all other concerns. It is the single desire of the Son for the Father.
The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared, but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ’s face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness, apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it.(--from, What is The Resurrection, Manual for Teachers, ACIM)
The women-of-the-flowers dig and prod and plant in various garden spots at the hermitage. The ne'er-do-well of the books finds table reading from Norman Fisher's
The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path -- love at center of conflict, impermanence, patience as empty of patience -- during soup and bread we ponder these pointers sipping cheddar-veggie spoonfuls.
This morning, Gregorian chant from French monastery, day-old coffee, sunlight and road-noise along bamboo wind chime and mewing cat, I hear Kingsley say:
"Theres nothing more dynamic than lying down." (--Peter. Kingsley, on sacred incubation, dying before you die).
These days I practice regularly this napping meditation alongside upright shikantaza. Sleeping and wakeful states intertwine like interrelated vines on climbing trellis. I'm offable in an instant, dreams are my alternate breaths, dissolving alertness into who-knows-where, drifting.
I see a man on hospice several times a week. The brooding incubation toward new hatching!
The little tyke at Hospice House in Rockport was leaving as I arrived on Saturday. His recent surgery and new shunt visible at top of head. He is called little angel, miracle, sweetheart by those attending his visits these eight months.
Joy Harjo is Poet Laureate. Three people read her poems at Friday's Poetry, Tea, and Thee at the Nursing/Retirement Quarry Hill. I find this beginning of her poem "
Becoming Seventy" (for Marilyn Kallet):
We
arrived
when the days
grew legs of night.
Chocolates were offered.
We ate latkes for hours
to celebrate light and friends.
We will keep going despite dark
or a madman in a white house dream.
Let’s talk about something else said the dog
who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill:
a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks —
I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris —
it was impossible to make it through the tragedy
without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?
Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into
love.
(--from, Becoming Seventy, by Joy Harjo)
The men inside who drop into Friday morning meetingbrook conversations at Maine State Prison continue their bodhisattva persistence to awaken us into a useful practical knowledge and wisdom about what it means to be lovingly attentive to one another, to listen, and to laugh face to face. Last Friday we read from Richard Rohr's new book
The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. "The Christification of matter" resonated in our cinder-blocked room, through our fond hearts. Everything is the manifestation of body in God, with and as.
Saskia will be posting a GoFundMe page for her project
Meetingbrook Healing Respite Sails. (What do people our age have any business doing something like this?) Same, I suppose, as the 98yr old planting a tree on a hill overlooking a wide and irrepressible vista. Something seen cannot be unseen.
A practitioner at sitting practice asks if we will foster-care the Han he had made in Japan. Will it reside awhile on the porch of the zendo, he wondered? I'd seen it once. It is beautiful, and sharp-loud. If it comes, we will announce with it the completing of each sitting and the sending out both blessing and the admonition to wake up, stay awake, life is short, benefit all beings!
Looking back over this piece, it occurs that if I had a dharma name it would probably be ne'er-do-well. It would serve as good reminder that here is no originating person, nothing special, nothing to see, no being of any merit -- but only that which is given and received, with humility and gratefulness.
And so -- Itadakimasu -- everything is received from on high! A soul-friend taught me that -- for which I am profoundly grateful.
Gassho!
Trusting in your well-being --
Saskia, Rokpa, Panta, Chitta, Bill &
all who grace Meetingbrook Hermitage
24June2019
