EXCERPTS
Small Boat, Vast Ocean

Expressing Our True Nature

Explaining Buddhist retreat to the outside world comes with challenges. Does one adopt the polite stance, the retreatant’s version of How are you? Fine, thank you…? Actually, for a three-year retreater there is no polite version. Once you let the cat out of the bag, the very idea of spending three and a half years away from society in religious retreat provokes automatic eyebrow raising of one kind or another. I heard one person, in explaining it to another, emphasize that my retreat and silence were self-imposed. I wondered if they were looking for the ankle bracelet. Especially in our time, instead of desert pole sitters, we have dessert pole dancers. People hardly know anymore why someone would choose to become a religious recluse, a silent hermit, devoting their life’s hours to meditation, contemplation, and prayer. It’s unimaginable—to most, but not to all.… Full excerpt

Tree of Life

Starting a new journal leads one to reflect on time, the passing of stories, the present moment, and the mystery of what is to come.

At the moment, holding this book in my hands, a treasure even empty, because the symbol on its cover is a Tree of Life. This one, while detailed, is actually quite simple. Like the trees outside my cabin windows, it’s natural without added ornamentation. Branches on a trunk, with many leaves, radiant with flowers. Healthy, proclaiming existence, drawing energy down from the heavens to the earth, standing guard, witnessing.

I find myself in a place called Williams, a corner in the Siskiyou Mountains, at 1800 feet. This cabin is on the edge of three hundred acres of private land devoted to Buddhist practice. Not many of us here at the moment, so it’s quiet, as retreat is meant to be.

Sometimes, though, such solitude is the thing you wish you hadn’t wished for.… Full excerpt

Meditation of Heron

As a little gift on this second year completion day I found a rather large agate on the beach. The bright sun at winter’s low angle made it glow against the more mundane beach pebbles. Still cold, barely above freezing—but the unobscured sun’s rays warming. Lovely.

A lone heron for a long time was standing in shallow water, fishing. I stood nearby, a lone yogini, hands resting on staff, meditating. A pair of beings, looking out together, to the sea and the eastern sky.

I’ve been thinking of the little boat out in the middle of the ocean, on this voyage…. Full excerpt