Hello!
We have a reflection by Garrett Allen below. Before we get there, a few items of housekeeping.
We will host a meditation and dharma sharing as usual this Wednesday at 7 pm. Find the details on our website.
We started an Instagram account, so if you’re on IG, follow us there.
Here is our update from last week on settling into the house.
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I went camping this past weekend on Palomar mountain outside of San Diego. Called Serenity Ranch, it was a private campground with a mindfulness aesthetic. As Liz and I arrived on the property, at the end of a rocky, bumpy and beat up gravel road, we passed a yellow construction sign that said “SLOW”. Waiting in its wing was a hand-painted sign reading “Your body has more wisdom than your deepest philosophies.” When we pulled up to our site, I saw another large hand-painted sign, leaning against a tree, that said “kissing ground” in cursive letters. Perfect, I thought playfully, for our romantic weekend getaway for Liz’s birthday. Only as I got closer did I see there were other words that weren’t immediately visible. On closer inspection, the sign actually read “Walk like your feet are kissing the ground — Thich Nhat Hanh.”
An immediate reaction was that the sign is blasphemous, a bastardization of a spiritual message and a misrendering of sacred text; the miracle of mindfulness warped beyond recognition into “kissing ground”, nearly “breeding ground.” But it slowly dawned on me, what could be more fitting, tasteful, and suggestive? We live ever between high and low, profound and vulgar, sacred and profane. Just like romance, the sign reels you in, first appealing to the senses and titillating your fantasy, then revealing its deeper content. You have to approach the sign, linger on it, look deeply, before it fulfills its purpose and surrenders its message to you. This is life. As Richard Rohr says, we need the “temporary costumes of the egoic self” to get started — the fantasy of romantic love or children or fame or success, some grand object that completes us. We need these shiny objects, these motivating delusions to get started on the journey. They provide the initial umph. But there is something — a lesson, a teacher, a journey — quietly resting beyond them, waiting to be uncovered. By the time I drove out, I knew the sign as an unassuming witness to the spiritual path.
Recently we held our inaugural Wednesday evening meditation, a happening we intend to make a weekly occurrence, even a ritual. My housemate Sean McCollough facilitated a Seven Homecomings ceremony, a contemplation practice he learned from Lama Rod Owens. In the ceremony, you traverse seven rings of support. At each station you pause, witness and thank a class of benefactor: teachers, texts, communities, ancestors, earth, silence, yourself. The station that caught my attention, both in the initial passing and in the days since, was silence.
Oh, wonderful, deep silence! There is merely not talking, and then there is silence. You might not speak without being silent, and you can well carry silence in your speaking. Silence is beyond concepts, thinking, and discursive reason. Emerson wrote, “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.” I am grateful to have found living spiritual communities with silence practices at their center. In sitting meditation, we sit in silence. In walking meditation, we walk in silence. In Dharma sharing, we bow in from silence, bow out to silence, and enjoy the silence between shares. Silence obliterates distinction. Silence is the source and envelope, the space between and around our little plans, constructs, and delusions, which we come from and return to.
Since moving in together as a house, we have had many opportunities to connect: meals, meditations, tea ceremonies, house meetings and more house meetings. These are planned. Deliberate. Part of our concept as an intentional community is to use structure — crafted norms, forms and rituals — to intentionally cultivate a life together. But this week I equally appreciated the community and intimacy that can come into unstructured moments. The unplanned, the unintentional, what grows up in the gaps. Somewhere, in his sci-fi books, CS Lewis writes about a species you can’t look at directly. If you look directly at them, they remain invisible. You can only see them with your peripheral vision, by looking in their vicinity and then catching them in the corner of your eye. Maybe it is this way with familiarity too. Casiana and I drove together to the grocery store, and did our shopping in tandem. Somehow, in my car, sitting comfortably together in the lulls of the conversation, resting in the silences, I could hear the tires kissing the pavement.