Here are some discoveries of things to do while on a meditation retreat at Birken Forest Monastery. No internet connection, no inquires for
Journey Oracle cards or new drums to prepare for the webstore, so now what?
Celebrate mud? Glorious mud!
Sticky, slurpy, muddy slurry that glues itself to
everything it touches.
Precious start to spring and seeds lucky enough to
drift and drop
into its wake-me-up matrix of softened soil and life-blessing
water.
Celebrate doing just one thing at a time.
It is hard to just do one thing; to cultivate a moment
free from all distractions.
There is only this cup of tea...no book, no
journaling, no conversation, only this cup.
Celebrate just sitting. For hours a day rather than
minutes. It is not easy to be only in the company of one's inner voice as it
expresses a constant stream of likes, dislikes and delusions. Especially when the intention of such sitting
is to come to inner peace and quiet.
None of this is easy.
Perhaps this is the deep illness of our present times—we want everything
to be easy. To quote David Suzuki, we worship the great god Relief From Inconvenience. AI makes it
easy to have information about, well, just about everything but what is the
advantage if we have no wisdom?
Seems like the device is now our significant
other. On a meditation retreat one's
direct inner experience is the significant other. Not an easy partner to warm up to. But just like the transition from winter to spring—when
we discover rigidity and so let our surface opinions soften, we let go of some
of our preferences and prejudices.
The inner struggle to hold onto focus, and achieve
concentration,
can at times feel a lot like mud.
Glorious mud.
May my practice enable me to be
one of those lucky enough seeds.
