Tomorrow morning, 8 of us are going to begin an Urban Retreat, right here in the middle of Bristol, in the middle of our everyday lives. We’re going to practise together at the Buddhist Centre in the mornings, at home and in our places of work with the particular emphasis that comes with being on retreat. One way of defining a retreat is “practising for an agreed period of time, within a held and created space. A retreat can be a mandala (sacred space) in time.”
I’ve been inspired by the idea of practising in the heart of the city for years. For almost 6 years I lived and worked in Croydon with Buddhist friends, living a kind of “semi-monastic” lifestyle right in there among the highrise blocks and flyover. I’ve always loved the idea of the extraordinary happening in the midst of the ordinary.
A couple of books fed me with images for living this kind of life in the city. The first one I came across was a biography of Issan (Tommy) Dorsey who became Abbot of San Francisco’s Zen Centre – the one founded by Suzuki-roshi. There was an image in it of him, right at the start of his Buddhist path (and having been a drag queen, junkie and alcholic, as the book blurb says) when he and his friends decide to go the Zen Center….
“Tommy had been to Sokoji Temple once before, accompanying Grant on an inspection of San Francisco’s spiritual high spots. He’d heard Joel’s tale of Suzuki-roshi and the magical Heart Sutra; he’d done sessions of what he thought of as meditation, and he’d even seen Suzuki-roshi at the famed Haight-Ashbury Human Be-In, but he’d never put it all together.
“So off I went barefoot, patched pants, long hair. We got up an hour before you were supposed to be there; me, Mickey, and James used to come with us sometimes too. We’d get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, smoke a joint, and go off to the Sokoji Temple to sit. We were living at Mickey’s house in the Haight then. It was a long walk, and it was freezing cold, but we’d get up and walk in the cold. It was like we were flagellating ourselves. We probably could have figured it out better.”
Mickey recalls that even after arriving, there was more figuring to do: “We went to the temple, and we went in there, and went up along the little balcony. I says, ‘Well, what do we do?’ I’ll never forget this – Tommy says, ‘Well, let’s do what they’re doing.’ I said, ‘Well, they’re just facing the wall,’ so he says, ‘Well then, let’s face the wall.’ I said, ‘Okay, seems simple enough to me,’ That’s how we started with Buddhism.”
But the reason these two shriven yet unsavory hippies were whispering at 5:00 am about a practice that neither of them knew – the reason, in fact, that anyone at all was sitting in the balcony of the Sokoji Temple facing the wall – was a quiet, humble and extraordinarily potent Zen teacher called Suzuki-roshi, who himself rose at that hour to sit with his disciples in the meditation known as zazen.”
(From “Street Zen, The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey” by David Schneider, pub Shambala)
The other book is also a biography and of another Zen practitioner, the famous
American writing teacher, Natalie Goldberg. Her experience of retreat in the city wasn’t a week – it was a hundred day training period…
Every fall and spring Zen Center offered a hundred-day training period, which meant being at the zendo every morning except Sunday at four-thirty A.M.. The students who signed up took turns each morning to talk from fourt-thirty to five on a given topic. Then we sat for two periods, chanted, cleaned the zendo and left by eight A.M. to go to our jobs in the world. We returned at seven P.M. for two sitting periods before we went home to sleep. The training also required being at the zendo every Saturday, all day, sitting a weekend sessin once a month, and at least one seven-day sessin during the hundred days.
After being at Zen Centre a year and a half, I signed up for a training period in the fall. Getting up at four A.M. every morning to get to the zendo by half past was one of the hardest things I’d ever done and one of the most secretive, deep, wild and scary. I’d rarely wakened at four except to turn over and go back to sleep. And there I was doing it every day. I found a pocket o fdarkness I’d never known before and it felt like it was all mine. The people in the houses I walked past were all asleep and therewas rarely a car on the street. The traffic signal blinked red, then gree, then yellow for no one. Down the alleys I’d grown to love, behind people’s houses along their backyards, I’d walk on solid ice in weather well below zero as we moved into late November and December and I was wrapped i nmore and more clothes against the wind chill that was no longer just the news announcer’s term; I was experiencing it with everything in me. During that training period, I entered another part of my life, something that was always there, but usually I was asleep when it was happening. Now I and fourteen other Zen students carried our unconscious minds still raw from having wakened in the middle of our dreams and sat on black zafus in the white-walled room lit by a candle, the smoke of incense wafting by, watching our minds and feeling our breath.”
(from “Long Quiet Highway, Waking up in America” by Natalie Goldberg, pub.Bantam)