There have been moments during the last couple of retreats when things open up. They open wide. Things on the outside, things on the inside. There was an encounter with a leaf that was in the yard curled in the greening grass of spring. The leaf was tattered at the edges, holes throughout, a grayish brown after months off the tree. The sun hit it just a certain way. An ant crawled across the expanse of the fallen foliage. My foot was in the air headed to land on the leaf, but I sent a message to control central and found a new landing area and then looked at the leaf. Just looked and loved it.
Was it a special leaf? Certainly, but without a doubt it was not. Opening can happen at any moment. We are told there are possibly wormholes in the universe where we can travel instantly over vast spaces, perhaps slide from dimension to dimension. Who knows? But there are such things right here where something opens inside and the the world in its naked beauty slides on in.
Why do we sit in meditation? On these retreats we sit quite a bit every day. We also talk some. In the morning, we usually talk for about an hour and then get around to the cycle of sitting and walking meditation. We usually have about three half-hour sits in the morning and two walking meditations in between. We eat lunch and combine the time for food with a break of about an hour at midday. Sometimes we eat in silence, sometimes we talk. Then the afternoon is before us with some conversation to start the time and three to five meditation sessions and walking in between. Pam offers yoga during one of the walking periods.
The afternoon unfolds with more silent time to encounter leaves or the trees that were shimmying magically in the wild wind one day, and more seeing if there are portals between this thing I call me and that space I call the world.
It is not just the natural world one can meet during retreat. There are the people as well. New people show up. People Pam and I only know through an email saying they are coming. By the end of the day, I can feel more connected to these new humans in my world than many people I have known for years. The groups are small. Small enough that we can sit in a little gathering at the start of the day and ask, “What brought you here? What is your current practice?”
We have time and space to listen and to let people find and express answers. Just in that first hour we can know people pretty well because they answer these simple questions honestly. Honestly and deeply, sometimes with tears. Well, you know me and tears. These are members of my tribe.
People sometimes ask why in the hell a person would spend a whole day mostly meditating. My dear father would have asked that question and his language would have been more colorful. His language would have had more hues of expression if asking why a person would sit most of the day for three or five or ten days or for months or years. There is no way to answer. It is absurd. It is luxurious. It is indulgent. I have also come to find these largely silent days essential for the life I wish to live.
The days are not all blissful leaf encounters. One can fall apart just as likely as fall in love with the world. Many portals are open and the mind can be transported through time and space in surprising ways to sometimes shocking destinations.
I consider myself an old man. I love the role, especially so since oldness comes with grandchildren, the companionship of a wife I love and admire, and the amazing good fortune I experience in so many corners of my life. The other day, I told Pam that I have more meaningful relationships with people in my life now than at any other time in my life. That is shocking and wonderful. Not many can say that as they get old.
My great gratitude flows out to the place we call Sangha House and the people that make up this community. When I look around after meditation on a Tuesday night, I see all these people. Most are people I know in some way. There is love for them and at times I can see some of these people in the way an old leaf in the new grass of spring can be seen.
There is so much that I cannot explain about the gratitude I feel at this stage of life. This dream-like existence is manifesting in very pleasant ways. Very pleasant. I wanted to do retreats in my old age, but I really didn’t want to travel. Much of my life consisted of traveling and being together with people for short spells and then saying goodbye. I didn’t want more of that arrangement of coming and going. There was a vague notion inside I wanted to sit a lot with people in a different context. Well, that vague notion seems to have taken shape.
I use the “four thoughts that turn the mind to the dharma” many times most days. The first thought is considering the precious nature of a human life and the good fortune of one’s own life. Second is impermanence. Third is karma. Karma is all we got, baby. Our actions of body, speech, and mind travel with us day into day, year into year, life into life. The last thought is the hardest to explain. It is about the unsatisfactory nature of samsara. We are in samsara. A realm of life and death, getting and not getting, pushing and pulling, success and failure, etc. As the great John Prine sang:
that’s the way the world goes round
half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown
Most of us are caught in samsara most of the time. Painful place. Frustrating. In this fortunate life Pamela and I have lived, we had opportunity to haul our kids off to New York for a family retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. We went on retreat and encountered a man who seemed to be on a lifelong retreat that I bet continued right through his departure flight from LaGuardia. Thay, as he was affectionately and respectfully called, never seemed to hurry. He was content here, he was content there. Content with a tree, content taking a pee. I’m sorry, that just came to me.
There is the mistaken notion that one can just decide to be mindful all the time. Even though Thay seemed to be in a state where the circumstances did not alter his peace, contentment and radiance, he had trained himself over hundreds of thousands of quiet hours of actual retreat to be living something like an ongoing, all circumstances retreat. Perhaps a person can just wake up to life in an instant and be in a profound state of openness for the rest of one’s days. Perhaps. Maybe it could happen.
But, my friends, the surer way is to put yourself in the conditions where eyes and hearts have opened for thousands of people over the years. It's a condition of being together while being alone, being focused on a thing as personal and intimate as one’s breathing and at the same time, touching the profound nature of the world all around us.
We have this place. We have each other. We have these teachings. It is not just the nature around us that touches my heart during retreat. There are all those books that were donated. There are the shelves they sit on and the place itself that was purchased and refurbished and is maintained and loved. Starting it all, there is Tammy with her commitment and vision carried forth with her partner Jack and that little clan of people who got this going. At times, I see this place is the people who made it and now maintain it, and gratitude lifts up in my mind and heart like mist rising off the water in morning. We are somehow a part of a long lineage of compassionate mindfulness that goes all the way back to the Buddha. That is something to bow to.
Poets always say things better. Let me get some help from a couple great pieces recently referenced at Sangha. One was quoted in a talk by Drew not long ago and another that Pam quoted.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver, from The Summer Day
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
“I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
- Mary Oliver
Perhaps this is just all a long invitation to a retreat. Please come if you wish. Whether or not you attend a retreat here or elsewhere, please, my friends, find ways to be idle, see leaves, kneel in the grass, and to hear what the river says in this one wild and precious life.
John Steinbach
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