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Teacher's Greeting - July 2009
Dear Dharma Friends,
Recently I had the opportunity to go on retreat for a couple of nights alone in a little cabin tucked away on a hillside at Hidden Villa, an environmental education center and farm in Los Altos. I arrived in the early evening, when the sun was setting and the air was starting to feel chill. After deciphering the directions and making my way with my suitcase and bags of food across the dry creek, and up a steep small path that led up a hill through a patch of oak trees, I came in sight of a small one-room cabin of weathered wood, the trim painted in a surprising light green-blue. People called this place Josephine’s Retreat. I unlocked the door and went inside. The room was simple: a double bed with a quilt, a small refrigerator, a sink and toaster oven, a small table and a couple of chairs, and a desk. “Perfect,” I thought.
Sitting on the top of the desk was a small black-and-white photograph of a young woman dressed in a kimono, kneeling at a small round table, pouring tea. In faded ink at the bottom someone had written, “Josephine Duveneck, Japan, 1913.” On the wall up above was a framed piece of paper with something she had written:
Life on two levels was uneasy…. I was convinced that it should be possible to achieve a sense of unity between the inner and the outer motivation, provided that the inner was in command and undergirded and dictated the action.
I was fortunate to have a husband who, in spite of not entirely understanding my inner compulsions, was generous enough to accept the urgency for me. He built me a charming little cabin high on the hill behind the house where I could overlook the valley and the mountain and open sky…. It was a beautiful sanctuary and it served me well through some difficult years.
I found myself moved by her words: her wish to nurture and integrate both her inner and outer life, and her husband’s responsiveness to her needs, though he didn’t share or fully understand her contemplative leanings. And the sense of urgency….the intimation of the importance of listening to the voice within, and the realization that our time is limited. Sometimes in order to hear that voice, to fully appreciate our life, we need silence, time apart, a sense of spaciousness. “Do not be submerged by the things of the world,” the Metta Sutta says.
I had been feeling pretty submerged. So when I got into the cabin and sat down on the bed, what I did was….nothing. I just sat. Not meditating, not reading, neither thinking nor not thinking about anything in particular, just sitting there. I let myself really test out the proposition that no one would ask me to find lost homework, or get the dishes out the sink, or answer an email. I half-expected my inner task master to jump in and tell me to get on with it, whatever it was. But no, just silence, and I kept sitting there. There was a physicality to the experience, like pushing my hands out into space to see when they would meet resistance. They never found any, and the openness of the time stretching before me made me feel a bit giddy, until I was able to settle in—to the ever-present, but usually unrecognized, vastness of Now.
Like the fields where crops are grown, the mind needs fallow time, to relax and recover. The spaciousness is with us always, but sometimes we need to step aside from our usual patterns to open to it. In Tibetan lojong, or mind-training slogans, the first two most fundamental reminders are to try to
1. Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life.
2. Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.
Probably Josephine Duveneck never heard of lojong teachings, and I don’t know if anyone ever taught her to meditate. But I suspect she knew their message, and she had her own form of meditation. She honored the sense of urgency she felt, to be present in her life, to not waste the precious opportunity of being alive, of waking up.
In May each year, people from small sanghas all over the country take a rest from their usual obligations to gather at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for Sangha Week, a chance to feel the support of each other, and the many forms of the monastery—the sound of the bells, the meditation hall, the numerous small altars placed here and there, and the vastness of the mountains and valleys themselves—to step again into the Here and Now. When they return to the routines of their daily lives they may be more able to remember to be present, more able to integrate what seem to be the inner and outer expressions of their lives.
I hope that you, too, are able to step back, to meditate, to be with others who share the path; or to be alone, and for a time to simply, consciously do nothing, and emerge restored in body and mind. This is your life. Please be here for it.
Wishing you well,
Meg