After enlightenment, the dishes

Just a month ago I spent six quiet days at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in northern California — the oldest Japanese Buddhist Soto Zen monastery in the United States.

Meditating twice daily in the zendo with the monks and nuns while also quietly soaking in their hot spring tubs and gratefully dining on their world famous cuisine, it was relatively easy to drop one’s personal and global anxieties behind.

(Concerning the thoughtfully prepared vegetarian food, intriguingly, the traditional name, ‘Tassajara’, is from an indigenous word which means “place where meat is hung to dry”.)

I was surrounded by peace and rest.

My mind didn’t race.
My thoughts didn’t fly high.
My body slowed down.
.
.

This Press of Time

We set the pace.
But this press of time —
take it as a little thing
next to what endures.

All this hurrying
soon will be over.
Only when we tarry
do we touch the holy.

Young ones, don’t waste your courage
racing so fast,
flying so high.

See how all things are at rest —
darkness and morning light,
blossom and book.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 22
(translation: Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)

This poem comes from the newly published book “A Year with Rilke” and is the daily poem for today’s date: August 25. I find its message continually important; even more so despite not being a “young one”.

In the river below the Tassajara hot tubs, the three stacked rocks were done one contemplative morning and they suggest to me what Rilke was writing about. The stone figure has hands in pockets, silently enduring, eternally pondering the age old question of whether or not one can step into the same river twice.

Now that I’m not in such a conducive meditative “environment” as Tassajara, I have to look elsewhere for the quieting of my restless soul. And that elsewhere, for the moment at least, can only be Windgrove.

My grey haired webmaster Allan Moult, standing on The Point, could be doing Chi Gung as he quietly tarries — touching the invisible holy?

And my shadow? It seems up in arms — either in celebration or frustration. You choose. But to me, certainly the former. Or, I would hope so. If I need a confirmation that my life is on a decent path (and, yes, occasionally I do need a supporting loving hug), I can go to the inscription Joanna Macy wrote for me in ‘A Year with Rilke’:

“For Bear — in gladness for your life at Roaring Beach and around the world, kindling love and reverence for Earth!”