Home Again Home Again Jiggity-jig

This past Monday, we arrived at JFK at 5:50 am. Our wonderful friends Rob & Lisa picked us up at the airport and made us a yummy breakfast. If they hadn’t helped us out, we’d still be trying to figure out how to get from JFK to Connecticut and home. Thank you, Rob & Lisa!

Then, with only a few hours sleep, we drove home by mid afternoon. I was so happy to see the Catskill Mountains. I love where I live. Everything looked fresh and new to me, including the dusting of snow that was on our deck when we got home. Less welcoming was the freezing rain that greeted us on Tuesday morning. After a month of clear blue skies and warm temperatures, freezing rain was a bit of a shocker.

So now we’re back at work, entering into the next stage of our lives here at Shalom Mountain. I’m working on the brochure and Alistair is working on maintenance things. There’s always lots to do around here. It’s the cool season now, so I’m firing up the wood stove and feeling grateful for all the wood that Alistair chopped and I stacked back in the summer.

It’s now a time for integration. In our morning meditation, Alistair and I are discovering how much we miss the sangha at Kanzeon. When we meditated together as a dharma community, we created a collective samadhi wave that we all rode upon, making my meditations less distracted and deeper. Meditation with Roshi was a treat because I piggy backed on his samadhi, making my meditations seamless and profound. Now Alistair and I have to do it on our own and I miss the support of the sangha and our teacher.

We’re also learning what it means to speak to people about our Big Mind experience and to say what is true for us. We have been through an experience that has been life changing. Since I know Roshi and the Big Mind process to be the real thing, I also want to let other people know. I’m learning how to speak of this, simply and directly. I’m also feeling my self-consciousness of speaking about this, simply and directly. I keep making the mistake of thinking that people want me to entertain them with my stories, rather than speaking clearly from my heart.

I’m also discovering that my time at Kanzeon opened me quite deeply. This discovery surprises me because there were many times when I felt very, very ordinary. I kept expecting to feel all swoopy as I do on the Sunday morning of a Shalom Retreat. I did, sometimes, but often not. I think that this is one of the beauties of Roshi’s teachings. I was gradually opened and altered in a very profound way but without all the hoopla. Roshi might say that I am manifesting Maha Vairocana Buddha – the cosmic Buddha that gives birth to Buddhas. I’d say that I was learning to let Buddha out and doing it so slowly that I hardly noticed the shift in myself. That’s why I feel altered but quite ordinary. My ego never even had a chance to feel frightened.

Returning home is bringing home to me the absolute necessity as well as the inevitability of accepting my life just the way it is. No bells, no whistles, just radical acceptance and responsibility. I feel like water that is being poured into sand. I just pour out and absorb. This is very different from feeling fatalistic. I can hear my teacher’s voice inside me saying, “this is a quality of the Non-Seeking, Non-Grasping Mind; it is one of great faith and great trust.”