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 and to 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.

' 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 and wanderer. No one wants to become a vagabond out of vanity. We continue. To journey starts with us learning to sit. Learning to sit still. The sitting that doesn't transform into anything other than learning just to sit is zazen.

Zazen does not aim to take you from here to there. Rather, it helps you to come back from there to here.

Returning to Karuna in the hilltops of Monchique is to continue on a pilgrimage that seems to have begun without us knowing when.

When we can no longer tell when the pilgrimage first started we can intuite that the pilgrimage is unending.

To be on an unending pilgrimage is to one day recognize the wind, the frogs croaking in the pond and the night sky 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 in 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. Words from Narrow Road to the Deep North echo in the 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 our future's face. "J' ai lavé le visage de ton avenir." -Henri Michaux.

'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

Thunders speak of the unspeakable yet you can hear its murmur everywhere.

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.

----------------------------------

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!

----------------------------------

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. Something of the living, something of the dead, mingles in their scent. To drifts across the thousand valleys, brushed away by erring clouds.

‐--------------------------------

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

-Meister Eckhart

photo credits: @alina.lisnevska