MWA Newsletter, -  Jul 06, 2024

MWA – Reflections, and July and August schedule

It’s a magnificent summer day and I can’t bear to be indoors at the computer. So I’m sitting on a bench outside in the shade, warm breeze, scent of trees and flowers and grasses, sounds of insects and birds and squirrels, wondering what to say to you.

I’ll start with announcements.

July 19-21, Earth Apprentice Retreat: a combination of meditation, community time, and work with the land guided by the land itself. You can come for part or all, give financial support or ask for a scholarship, stay in the house or camp or commute. We have three people coming so far, and could easily include several more. Depending on weather and inclination, recreation might be hiking, swimming, bonfire, talking about Zen, playing in the kitchen.  Music? Star-gazing? Please register now, or give a hint if you’re not sure. It’s two weeks away.

August 16-18, Sesshin: basic sitting meditation for several hours a day, in the cool basement, with flexibility about breaks for outdoor walking and such.

Dharma talks July 28 and September 8, Hokyoji, Sunday morning online.

Study group continues Monday evenings through August, then returns to Wednesdays. If interested please email me.

Reflections

The book is written and almost ready to seek a publisher.  I have a description:

The Shape of Reality Is Open: Walking Together Through the Polycrisis speaks to the world behind and underneath our daily collective trauma. It offers creative support for today’s vibrant and multi-dimensional movements for environmental regeneration, spiritual healing, and peace with justice.  Looking at how today’s dominant hopeless narrative was created, the book opens possibilities for moving forward into a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as working partner.  The new narrative is based on history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as current psychological, spiritual, and activist experience.

Stopping: After six years focusing on writing, ten living at the farm, eight creating Mountains and Waters Alliance together with an incredible group of advisors, and nine earning a living in psychotherapy – while my grandchildren moved through their teens – and facing another year of post-surgery partial disability (shoulder surgery) – I find myself stopping, reflecting on what I’m doing, before plunging further into more actions, more teaching, etc.

I’m doing more of going to retreats, less of organizing them, and still happy when people join me. During this time, until the way is clear for me, you won’t hear from me as much. That’s already happening, and will continue for at least the rest of the year, maybe until the book has come out. I dream of long retreat time, of spending month walking across the country, of reading voraciously, and of course of lying on a beach in the sun. I’d like to retrieve the vigor of my body, beginning with the shoulder and continuing to tennis, basketball, and all of that. And more time with children, grandchildren, and friends. (Today my truck died, leaving me with one less thing to take care of – and one less thing to use.)

There’s a kind of panic in the world these days, that I have to mention. I would like to be saying more here, but not until I can speak from the calm place. Thus, I will just encourage you to find your own calm place, and I offer you this poem by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Notice that he wrote this in 1980. We were worried then too. Now we’re living through it and, perhaps, can feel the beginning of the next phase – whatever that is. And the world is still there in its beauty and grace.

I  offer photos from the land, from this day, and some from actual farm work.

Love to you all.

Warmly,

Shodo