I have one goals this summer and I’d like to invite you to join me. It’s to simply meet zazen and the natural world like having just arrived in this land, a newcomer, or perhaps like greeting an old lover. Having been immersed in grad school and “town life,” how much I appreciate the return to the seamless rhythm of practice on the farm that awakens all the senses. The quality of meditation changed radically this past year as I spent my days within the world of conceptual thought required when you’re in school. Although I was sitting, there was a new presence of static in the quiet, like TV in the old days before the channel came on. And despite the expansiveness and inspiration one finds in reading brilliant writers, a strange taste of flatness emerged this last year that was rather curious. How we train the intellect in universities without attending to the body is an odd experiment – the mind is free to play but has no ballast.
The grad student experience has given me an appreciation for what it means to establish practice amidst the hectic overloaded lives many lead in the contemporary world that occludes access to our natural wisdom. It has renewed my commitment to make space for myself and others, to meet zazen amidst the cultivated fields anew and see where the stream leads. I hope to see you there, which is here, in the not-knowing, in this moment, in deep silence, in this garden, with this very body – this perfect place of possibility born of a clear blue sky.
Palms together,
Seido
