thank you

We completed our April silent retreat last Sunday.

Many in the group were returners. It is a warm feeling to sit again with faces by now familiar to you and share another period of practice in this sanctuary called Karuna that has become homely, if not home, to some of us. Home to those among us who don't quite know where home is and who have become themselves the open questioning of the whereabouts of home. Seeking home not knwoing not just where or how to find it but no longer having clarity as to what home is or could be.

' And you, you live where?'

If you don't know where you are coming from, said the great Chuang-Tzu, you will find home wherever you go.

To find home we must first become a home leaver, a wanderer. No one wants to become a vagabond out of vanity, you don't decide for that, it's something you fall into. We continue not even knowing that we are continuing, the essence of being a wanderer, I think. On one of the journeys we are told that to tread the path we start by learning how to sit. Learning to sit still. The sitting that isn't about transforming you into anything particular but simply invites you to learn over and over again how to just sit is zazen.

Zazen does not aim to take you from here to there. Rather, it helps you to come back from wherever you are to here while leaving the questions of what is there, what is here and who is the one who comes and goes into the open. Zazen does not answer our questions, zazen throws our questions out of the window. We need to be thrown again and again out of the window to begin to see the world outside the frame of our own mind. Then alone do we come to realize that us seeing the world is no different than the world seeing us for the two are one as the one is two.

" The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." - Meister Eckhart

Returning to Karuna in the Serra de Monchique hilltops is to continue on a pilgrimage that begun we cannot say when. We forget, it was a long time ago. We are still now, as we were back then, what seems a long time ago, at the beginning of the pilgrimage.

When we can no longer tell when the pilgrimage started first we intuite that the pilgrimage must be unending. What in the pilgrimage has no beginning and meets no end is the wonder that the journeying aakens in us.

To be on an unending pilgrimage is to recognize the wind, the frogs croaking in the pond and the ring of the night sky with its glitters as one's travel companions. The journey to nowhere is at once the joureny of vastness into us.

The pilgrimage that doesn't end is the unborn and undying within us. And, what is in us is in everything and is an expression of everything.

That is the beauty and that is the promise of the journey; to simply continue. What continues becomes our home. The opening words from Narrow Road to the Deep North echo in this starry night.

As to what purpose this pilgrimage, we don't know. Ancient master Daizan once told his student Fayan : " the journey is one of gaining intimacy with this not-knowing." You are encouraged to continue treading with a light heart the path of: I don't know where this path is leading me to but continue walking I will.

Many who joined us this time were young and had not taken part in a silent retreat before. They brought with them levity, curiosity and an open mind.

The gift the beginner comes with is to remind us that we are all beginners on the pathless path. Master Dogen: When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

For the first time, we followed a trail that lead to a brook running over cascading rocks hidden in the bushes. There was an abundance of water due to the blessing of recurring rains that not unlike dreams kept returning over the winter months to bring back to life a vanished watercourse that continues its flow in the memory of those dwelling these green mountains.

We refreshed ourselves with crystalline water rushing over mountain rocks. We were cleansed and had the dust washed from future's face. "J' ai lavé le visage de ton avenir." -Henri Michaux. Again, this opening; the future cleansed is chance to engage with practice now..

'If there were water

 And no rock

 If there were rock

 And also water

 And water

 A spring

 A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees.'

T.S.Eliot - The Wasteland / What the Thunder Said

Thunder speak of the unspeakable yet its murmur can be heard everywhere. The tradition calls it the Buddha's tongue tirelessly expounding the dharma through all beings, sentient or not.

Flowers some vibrant in color, others too little to be seen by a passing eye,

were sprouting among hedges and by the side road. Too little to be perceived until we heard Basho's words remind us:

when I look carefully

I see the nazunia

blooming

We initiated the evening talks with this poem by Johannes Bobrowski which opened us to the vastness of space and allowed us to glimpse into the magnanimous mind, daishin. The mind Suzuki Roshi called big. Big not as opposed to small. Big as beyond big and small and their comparison. Beyond what can be compared and opposed lies the mind whilst what is compared and opposed is also happening within the mind's scope. We are startled and stumble on words when we face what has magnitude come to our encounter.

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Summer Evening

See far, very far, there above the last Red!

There over the Forest, the blackish Walls. One

Water still gleams white. Silence lives there,

Keeping-Secret and Cooling long.

And you, you live where? Is the Earth not

enough for you, the Unspeakable, that

offers Uncounted-Space in front of you,

Space, abundant for both Joy and Death!

And see, above it all the Clouds even float!

And Stars stand! How do I say that to you, how?

Oh Earth, Earth, not too cramped,

too, too abundant; you are too kind!

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And hearts opened to receive with gratitude the abundant kindness of the earth.

In our footsteps what still echoes is the silence of these woods.

On the hillsides, eculapti leaves waver in the warm wind. Dreams of the living, dreams of the dead, mingle in their scent.

To drift across a thousand valleys, brushed away by erring clouds.

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If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, it will be enough.

-Meister Eckhart

photo credits: @alina.lisnevska