Satyalila.cx

Well, I was jolly excited on Monday to discover that a little piece I wrote for The Spark magazine about Urban Retreat (see below) got published!

Cold, dark January mornings and I wind my way up the Gloucester Road on my bike to arrive by 7 and sit before lighted candles and smoking incense at the foot of the Buddha. Five of us are spending a week on “Urban Retreat”… not far away in the mountains, but here in the heart of Bristol. We meet together for a day, plan and dedicate our week, set some aims..(meditate more… surf the internet less, in my case). I hang golden stars on my PC monitor and in the toilet at work to remind me I’m on retreat… creating sacred space within time. I read poems and reflect on following a golden thread through the dark: Blake, the Buddha, the American poet, Stafford, are my guides. I walk an ancient, sacred path through Bristol in midwinter….. (see www.satyalila.cx for a blog and www.bristol-buddhist-centre.org for info on future Urban Retreats).

I really enjoyed doing the retreat and very much hope we can run more of them in future, in difference ways and with different themes, but still with the central idea of coming together in the heart of the city for a week of our lives, spending a day together at the beginning and the end, to set intentions and to reflect, to intensify our day-to-day practice in our everyday lives in between and (optionally!!) to come together early in the mornings to meditate at the Buddhist Centre.

A sub-theme of the whole Urban Retreat was “the golden thread” – the idea that spiritual practice can be like a golden thread we can take hold of at any moment that will lead us towards freedom. It was an image originally, I think, from William Blake (see earlier post) but the more the week went on, the more the image of the thread kept appearing….

There were a couple of readings I mentioned in my last post which I wanted to include, so here they are. The first is from Thich Nhat Hahn and it’s about the breath as a kind of thread: and it comes in a passage called “Every act is a rite” in his book, “The Miracle of Mindfulness”:

“Suppose there is a towering wall from the top of which one can see vast distances – but there is no apparent means to climb it, only a thin piece of thread hanging over the top and coming down both sides. A clever person will tie a thicker string onto one end of the thread, walk over to the other sideof the wall, then pull on the thread, bringing the string to ther other side. Then he will tie the end of the string to a strong rope and pull the rope over. When the rope has reached the bottom of one side and is secured on the other side, the wall can be easily scaled.

Our breath is such a fragile piece of thread. But once we know how to use it, it can become a wondrous tool to help us surmount situations which would otherwise seem hopeless. Our breath is the bridge from our body to our mind, the element which reconciles our body and mind and which makes possible one-ness of body and mind. Breath is aligned to both body and mind and it alone is the tool which can bring them both together, illuminating both and bringing both peace and calm.”

I also wanted to quote in full the poem I mentioned earlier by Manjusvara (David Keefe):

Ghazal (Buddha)

Surely this is reason enough to smile?
Trust in our goal; let things happen as they should.

So now it’s Sunday and we finished our Urban Retreat yesterday, the five of us. We meditated together, discussed our week, explored making precepts and carried out a final ritual together when we made offerings of our intentions going forward from the retreat.

There were a couple more readings I wanted to add to this blog but they’ll have to wait til after Wednesday as my books are at Kamalamani’s.

Meanwhile, another nice synchronicity has happened. I’m just starting an Alexander Technique course for a few weeks on a Monday night and am reading the course book (”Whatever you’re doing now you can do it better!” by Anthony J Taylor). I hadn’t read very far into it when another wonderful “thread” story appeared (well, it’s string, but you know what I mean!)….

“I had often walked across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, spanning as it does the deep Avon Gorge, and wondered how they ever managed to build it. For the bulk of the bridge seems to hang in mid air; there appears to be no way that during its construction if could have been supported from below. ‘How did they do that?’ I wondered.

The answer, I discovered, was with a kite and a piece of string. So legend has it, the cunning Brunel attached a thin piece of string to a kite and flew the kite high in the air. The kite was eventually caught by someone standing on the other side. And from that single piece of string spanning the gorge, Brunel was able to thread across another, and another, and another, till he could finally send across a rope. And from a single rope came two ropes then three ropes, till finally they had to so may ropes going from one side to the other, he could tie them together and hang them from mighty brick towers built on either side. These ropes were so strong that he could attach to these ropes heavy steel ropes, and from these heavier metal ropes suspend the first girders. In this way, from a single piece of string, he began to construct a might bridge of stone and steel.”

I loved this story – especially because it connects the bridge, which is very dear to me and the “thread” theme….

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…

A hasty blog before scooting off with Sal for our weekly study group at Jvalamalini’s. Well, we’ve had two early morning sits so far… the morning has felt very early (esp today when I overslept, and although staying nearby had to rush down the hill and round the corner!) but it’s been lovely to gather before it’s light – five of us yesterday, six today… to meditate. And yesterday evening we had the added bonus of the dedication of our beautiful new ash-wood shrine at the Monday night class. The shrine has been made to accompany our big painting of Shakyamuni by Aloka and they look really beautiful together. As part of the dedication, we chanted the Shakyamuni mantra, which resonated with our Urban Retreat, as Shakyamuni is our “companion” for this. Sitting in the full shrine room with the Sangha last night I had such a feeling of warmth and contentment and connection.. I had the image of being like a spirit level whose bubble is in the middle at last.

By this morning and my hasty nip down the hill, the feeling had changed (of course!) but it was great to be together again practising, so soon after the night before. On Sunday, Vandika had reminded me of another William Stafford poem which again evokes the theme of following a thread (see below), so that’s what we had as our reading this morning:

The Way It Is

William Stafford

Another enjoyable highligh of the Urban Retreat for me, so far, has been walking to St Georges on Sunday night and chanting Shakyamuni mantras and counting off the beads on my mala as I walked. Half a mala there and half a mala back. Very satisfying and the combination of chanting, walking and mantra seemed to evoke Shakyamuni very strongly for me…..

Anyone reading this who knows (and even those of you who don’t know) my dear friend Amarapuspa, please send her metta. She’s at home in New York looking after both her parents who are very sick – and her father now critically so. I invited her to be with us in spirit on the Urban Retreat.

Well, we began! Chittamani, Pranjamati, Debbie, Hannah and Satyalila spent Saturday exploring what it is to be on retreat and exploring what we’re each going to do this week in order to manifest “retreatness” in ourlives. We looked at “The Five Forces” (The Force of Motivation, The Force of Familiarisation, The Force of the White Seed, The Force of Destruction and the Force of Aspirational Prayer – email me if you’d like an info sheet!) and completed retreat diaries, ending with a dedication ceremony to dedicate the week, including winding golden thread around our wrists ritually, as a reminder that we’re on retreat this week..

Each morning Chittamani, Pranjamati and Satyalila will be meditating at the Buddhist Centre from 7 am and anyone is welcome to come and join. We’ll aim to finish by 8 am and have a spot of breakfast before heading our various ways at 8.30. We’re planning to be at the Centre on Monday evening for the dedication of the new shrine, too.

I really enjoyed the first day and came home tired but inspired and re-made my shrine with a lovely piece of sky-blue linen I found in an Oxfam shop for 30p, installed a golden candle and flowers to remind me about following the “golden thread” of the retreat. I hung some prayer flags outside my door and inside my flat and put some little reminders around on mirrors and windows about the retreat. I also painted myself a rainbow-coloured plan for each day (taken from my diary) to remind me about what I was intending to do.

So far (day two, Sunday) I’m really enjoying it. Chanted when I woke up, wrote some “morning pages” while I drank my tea and had a longish meditation. Later I went for a walk round the docks.

When we were talking on Saturday, we were exploring the dimension of “aspirational prayer” (something some people find quite challenging on account of its christian associations). One image we used was of “aspirational prayer” as a kind of grappling hook which we put out in the direction in which we want to travel… the golden thread can link to this and it can help us to move forward in the way that we want to.

While we were talking I remembered a poem of William Stafford’s which is in the collection of his poetry which Manjusvara published, called “Holding onto the Grass”. There’s an essay at the front of this by Robert Bly about William Stafford’s own “take” on the golden thread and he says, “[Stafford] believed that whenever you set a detail down in language, it became the end of a thread… and every detail – the sound of the lawn mower, the memory of your father’s hands, a crack you once heard in lake ice, the jogger hurtling herself past your window – will lead to amazing riches. William Blake said,

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

“I asked Stafford one day, “Do you believe that every golden sthread will lead us through Jerusalem’s wall, or do you love particular threads?” He replied, “No, every thread.”

I love this. It may sound like it’s all getting even more christian, and what’s that got to do with a Buddhist Urban Retreat… but I do think that Stafford’s take on the golden thread applies to

all

our spiritual practice. It’s most commonly and familiarly expressed in Zen, but engage fully with any detail of everyday life and it can lead you to freedom….

So I wanted to put up the poem I mentioned a bit earlier, which is kind of about this and the whole aspirational prayer/grace aspect.

Grace Abounding

William Stafford

Must hop as have to eat my tea (slowly and mindfully, of course!) before going to steward a jazz piano concert at St Georges with Uri Caine.

Do post comments and additions!

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.

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)

Slumberdown Quilt
99 Tea
Mc Vities Rich Tea Biscuits
Hovis
Anchor Butter
Robinson’s Marmalade
Marmite
Camay Soap (or was it Lux?)
(Steradent on the shelf)
Sure
Clarks Shoes
M & S Knickers
(Persil Washing Powder)
Kleenex Tissues
Adidas Bag
Peter Storm Kagoul.

Roberts Radio
(12.00 News)
Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pud
99 Tea

Marmite Doorstep
99 Tea
(Newsround,
Blue Peter,
Crossroads,
6 0 Clock News)
99 Tea
(Emmerdale Farm,
Coronation Street,
World in Action,
Panorama,
9 O Clock News)
Nescafe
Mc Vities Ginger Nuts
(The Sweeney,
News at Ten)
99 Tea
Colebright
Lux (or was it Camay?)
Slumberdown Quilt

Jostled in a mug with other spoons,
This one – of hall-marked silver – came to hand.
I felt the fine-boned curves,
Its crazed bowl, bright with years of use,
The bottom flat, the edges thin as sharpened knives.
It was delicate as the form of a tiny bird.

Tonight, as I sat chanting,
I brought my palms together, cupped,
My bent thumbs touching, space for air inside,
and felt the memory of that shape arise.

It was as if it then took wing,
rose gently on the shining waves of sound,
and lifted, changing, skimming out of reach.

Full Moon Day
January 2007

All the wet diamonds of Wales,
slung like light along the hedgerows.

Plaited rivulets of water
glossing down the road,

they splay out, spread and twisted
by twig and mud and lichen.

The Constance Spry arrangement
in a fallen, rotting log:

green moss and fern
and brownshine fallen leaf.

Wet chestnut leaf-mold
rotting by the road

And strings of pearls,
of fairy lights

hanging from bare twigs, bright
against the misty grey December hills.

29/12/06

Amused to find this in the “Wordplay” bit of the Guardian yesterday:

Wordpool
In each case find the correct definition:

LILA
a) Middle Eastern hammock
b) cosmic Dance of the Supreme Spirit
c) lilo for ladies
d) liqueur made from barley

I rather like “lilo for ladies….”

Thank you Ananda (and Vijayasri, without whose crossword-enthusiasm I’d never have been looking at that page anyway!)