A dream for Norfolk from Juliet Taylor

A dream for a rural spiritual hub in Norfolk, England — a vision contributed by Juliet Taylor

There is a beautiful house for sale set in a wonderful location in Norfolk, England, that I am dreaming of turning into a housing cooperative with the aim of creating a spiritually focused community. The house comes with 26 acres of meadowland with a running stream, a lake and a pond. It also has the remains of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in the grounds, as well as an outdoor swimming pool.

There are two detached bungalows, as well as a coach house that could be converted into three apartments. The house could be divided up into two apartments and a communal Zendo/meditation/group workshop room, and a communal kitchen, all together creating seven residential units. There are lots of outhouses, stables, and a barn that could be converted into studios for creative work.

In my vision the community would come together for daily meditations, mindful workdays and days of silence. Accommodation could be made available in the form of caravans for people from around the world to come and visit and do practical work with a spiritual focus in exchange for accommodation. The property could be used to host workshops and events that are spiritual or have land based focus. I imagine the community would grow their own food and some meals would be shared.

I like the idea of the property as being owned by the community as a cooperative ensuring that all residents have equal say and responsibility for up-keep and management. I am still in the process of drawing up a business plan, but I hope that the cooperative could be a low risk ethical investment opportunity, that has a spiritual direction. I am hoping that other people might be interested in developing this project further with me. I do not have the finances to make it happen yet, so am currently waiting to see what happens and who might appear…

 

 

 

A tree of life from Myoki Stewart

Awhile ago Myoki Stewart and I got exhilarated for a few days as we found common ground in visioning this growing greening zendo-based arts retreat center possibility.

Although in reality we seem to hope to land in different regions of the country, who knows? The dream is imaginary for now, so entirely without geographic limit or boundary.

Here Myoki shares her visionary drawing of a layout — a beautiful tree of life. She writes:

Reading Catherine’s blog and hearing of her vision for a Zen inspired artists’ retreat center inspired this sketch. It’s based on some basic permaculture design elements and honors zazen as the taproot from which our practice flows.  

Although the image above is brighter and truer to Myoki’s original color, I’m also fond of the drawing as I first saw it, in its amber evening tones:

With thanks to Myoki and hope for a flourishing of these visions—may many zendo gardens bloom.

With a single blade of grass build a sanctuary…

In February I spent two weeks in residence at Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, New York, and gave several talks there on the koan, Ling’s Question. Two of those talks are available at the EHZC website, on the EHZC audio dharma page.

As I listen to this talk, months later, I begin to hear throughout it the ways my dream of a small zendo-based creative retreat center might express this koan in the world, bringing together the wisdom side of silence and meditation and the compassion side of community, language, activism, and arts—a range of responses to the calamity of being human.

My hope for such a center would be that residents and guests could realize together in daily life that the practice of zazen and ritual and community work need not be separate from the practice of an art, solitary study, or activist engagement with systemic social, economic, and ecological challenges—rather, that these practices mutually support one another, just as wisdom supports compassion and compassion wisdom, endlessly.

***

The second of the EHZC talks on the koan is framed with this poem from Emily Dickinson …

Emily Dickinson, #937

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor.

The second talk also makes connections between the koan and Dogen’s Tenzokyokun and his commitment to vow. Vow as the answer to the question was not yet fully evident to me. But it begins to show itself.

***

Somewhere along the way in teaching with this koan I began to recognize that for me studying Ling’s Question has not been separate from working to envision a zendo-based creative retreat center. By then, the logistics of bringing people together to engage in visioning, let alone planning, had become an obstacle to moving forward—so many people interested in the idea, so few able to give time toward realizing it, and those ready to work drawn toward a significantly different idea—

With this sense of hitting a wall the conversation stalled.

With this post, then, and this WordPress site, I would like to begin the conversation again–a leisurely conversation, an occasion to reflect, and an invitation to others to participate. Other visions may arise from this one, and other conversations may branch off and begin in new and other directions. All possibilities are welcome. But for me the core will be expressed in the intimacy of the koan—to embrace the silence and its wisdom, and to know and express and respond to suffering—both.

May it be so …

Dharma words and poetry

Following is a collection of quotations, words from dharma masters and poets and prose writers that speak to and illuminate some of the concerns of the koan Ling’s Question.

Enjoy! And please offer your own.

 

Bai-zhang, from the Sayings and Doings of Pai-chang, tr. by Thomas Cleary

True words cure sickness; if the cure manages to heal, then all are true words—if they can’t effectively cure sickness, all are false words. True words are false words insofar as they give rise to views; false words are true words insofar as they cut off the delusions of sentient beings. Because disease is unreal, there is only unreal medicine to cure it.

 

Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path

It is said that in the course of his long training for enlightenment over many lives, a bodhisatta can break all the moral precepts except the pledge to speak the truth. The reason for this is very profound, and reveals that the commitment to truth has a significance transcending the domain of ethics and even mental purification, taking us to the domains of knowledge and being. Truthful speech provides, in the sphere of interpersonal communication, a parallel to wisdom in the sphere of private understanding. The two are respectively the outward and inward modalities of the same commitment to what is real. Wisdom consists in the realization of truth, and truth (sacca) is not just a verbal proposition but the nature of things as they are. To realize truth our whole being has to be brought into accord with actuality, with things as they are, which requires that in communications with others we respect things as they are by speaking the truth. Truthful speech establishes a correspondence between our own inner being and the real nature of phenomena, allowing wisdom to rise up and fathom their real nature. Thus, much more than an ethical principle, devotion to truthful speech is a matter of taking our stand on reality rather than illusion, on the truth grasped by wisdom rather than the fantasies woven by desire.

 

Marilynne Robinson, “You Need not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True,” in A Public Space, Issue #1.

“At the most fundamental level, narrative is how we make sense of things. That is, our experience of ongoing life is a story we tell ourselves, more or less true depending on circumstance. I believe this narrative is the essential mode of our being in the world, individually and collectively. Maintaining its integrity, that is, maintaining a sense of the essentially provisional or hypothetical character of the story we tell ourselves, is our greatest practical as well as moral and ethical problem. Fiction is narrative freed from the standard of truth, a standard over against which every other kind of narrative falls short. In effect, it is the mind exploring itself.”

 

Emily Dickinson, #1472

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee—

 

from Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis tr. 

“… as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.”

“… speech is a rolling press that always extends one’s emotions.”

 

Alan Shapiro in Los Angeles Review of Books, “On Convention,” December 1, 2014

How to translate the irreducibly subjective into the objective norms of expression without either losing the integrity of feeling, or the social world beyond the feeling, which the feeling depends on to be recognized, if not exactly shared, is what makes writing so necessary and difficult.

 

From Ends of the Earth, Introduction by Francis Spufford

“Being in Antarctica is also a constant reminder of language’s secondary status, a descriptions’ belated appearance on any scene. Nowhere else on Earth is it so clear that a place has an integrity apart from what we might say about it. Nowhere are words so obviously ineffectual a response to what just, massively, exists, whole and complete and in no real need of translation. Words, Antarctica teaches us, are not what the world is made of. Stop listening to me, then. Step aside, and sit down on that wind-carved boulder. Sit for a while: there are mountains in the distance to which the best response is hush. Take a long, silent look at the treasures of the snow.

“But remember to get moving again while you can still feel your toes.”

 

Emily Dickinson, #1212

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

 

From poetryinternational / February 5, 2015 / Letters From Paris /by Margo Berdeshevsky

LETTER FROM PARIS IN FEBRUARY 2015

 And again and again, we must ask ourselves: Will there be singing in the dark times? “Yes,” Brecht told us after one war… “There will be singing about the dark times.”

 And the freedom to be a human who walks in safety is questioned now, and now, and now….  As it has been always. We just forget. we just pretend that maybe it is not now… Not the first time. and likely, not the last. For everyone. Not for one race or one people. For all of us.  If I ever doubted that in my lifetime I would know what other wartime civilizations have “night-mared”  … or wondered or tried to un-imagine …  I do not doubt it, now. I think about it day after day. One hides. One steps out, to be human. One retreats. One is alive. One considers how being alive is temporary. One has zero tolerance for hatred from any quarter. From any policy or leadership or religion or race. And one tries like hell to remember to love.

TU N’EST PAS SEUL: YOU ARE NOT ALONE…

 

“Everything is plundered…,” Anna Akhmatova (translated by Stanley Kunitz)

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
 
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
 
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breasts for centuries.

“If a true word can’t be spoken, no matter how hard you try, how will you teach?”

This is Ling’s question to Master Fubei. After some friendly back and forth in which Fubei gives silence for an answer Ling concludes: “To be a human being is to live in calamity.”

In the movements of this koan (quoted fully on the About page) I see the polarities of emptiness and form, wisdom and compassion, playing with one another in a little drama created together by two Chinese adepts of more than a thousand years ago.

And still the question is my own.

I don’t think of this as a question about teaching in the usual sense—here is a teacher, there is a student, or here are the students and over there somewhere is the teacher—but as a question about the teaching that is embodiment and manifestation of practice, the teaching that each teacher and each student are called upon moment by moment to be.

Yes, how?

Following are two links to talks given in Norfolk, UK, in May this year, sitting and drinking tea with Ling and Master Fubei.

Norfolk 1 and Norfolk 2