The week has been going very quickly… albeit punctuated by lovely things. We did our last early morning meditation at the Buddhist Centre this morning, chanting the Refuges & Precepts and hearing the reading about the Buddha from the translation of the Ti Ratana Vandana. Yesterday we had one of Manjusvara’s poems (“Ghazal (Buddha)”) which includes the line…”A golden thread/ of sympathy connecting us through all darkness.” This line had come into my head when I was awake on Monday night after our shrine dedication ceremony at which Manjusvara read a poem he’d written specially for the occasion.

By Wednesday evening I was finding that my joy of earlier in the week had changed into a feeling of sadness, grief even. Or maybe sorrow. All sorts of reasons including the approaching 10th anniversary of Mum’s death. It was interesting to notice that I was less keen to report this on this blog than my earlier joy. The line of Blake’s came to mind “joy and pain are woven fine, clothing for the soul divine”…. so here it is. The Urban Retreat has encompassed highs and lows. I have been especially enjoying meeting up regularly to practice and have found the (considerable) number of things I’d planned to do alone haven’t all materialised! There is a limit to how much I can fit into a dinner hour (so planned walking and reflection got a bit squidged out!) and today I decided to stay in Bristol and see friends rather than head off to Bath for an “Artist’s Date” (a la Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron).

I’ve done a bit of knitting today (yes, that was in my retreat plan!) tho perhaps not as much reflecting as I’d planned! (And not sure at all where the spontaneous need to have my shaggy mop of hair trimmed fits into being on retreat….. Oh, OK, it doesn’t at all!)

So the “sorrow” mentioned earlier did lead me to early-morning reading of Rilke whilst I drank my mug of tea in bed before heading off on Miranda to the Buddhist Centre. I tend to feel it’s a bit of a sin to quote disembodied chunks of Rilke, but will do it anyway….. (from the Tenth Elegy)

“How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year -, not only a season
in time-, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.”

Well, my “winter-enduring foliage” seems to be turning again and I’m looking forward to our second day retreat together tomorrow…