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Dear Sangha,
This week, following our regular Thursday evening sit, we will welcome Spring into our awareness and our hearts, as individuals and as a Sangha. Winter is a time for rest and repose. We find ourselves spending more time inside during Winter, away from sunshine. At times, cobwebs and inactivity settle in as well. Spring arrives with much energy and movement, which at times can be frenetic and painful and at other times joyous and refreshing.
In the tradition of mindfulness, emphasis is often placed on the process of beginning anew. In the Beginning Anew Ceremony, as described in the Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book, we ask as practitioners that “the balm of clear water [be poured] on the roots of our afflictions.” By coming together as a Sangha, we can create this balm, for ourselves and for each other, thereby fostering clarity and renewal.
So, please join us in a celebration of the process of reawakening and renewal that comes with Spring, through guided meditation, poetry, song and sharing.
A poem by Mary Oliver and a snippet from a 1998 dharma talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on Beginning Anew follow.
Lotuses to you, Buddhas to be.
Hugs,
Patti Murphy & Scott Schang
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her -
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
~ Mary Oliver ~
The Buddhist teaching on Beginning Anew is very clear: "The unskillfulness comes from our mind, and the unskillfulness can be transformed by our mind. If the transformation happens in your consciousness, then the unskillfulness will disappear as a reality in the manifested world. The mind is like a painter." This is the Buddha's teaching, that the mind is a painter. The painter can paint anything, and the painter can erase everything. So if in the past you have painted something you don't like, and if you are determined not to paint it again, then you erase all of that. It depends on your mind, your consciousness. If there is light, there is enlightenment in your consciousness, there is a strong determination, the awareness that "This is something negative, this is something harmful, this is something not beneficial, and I am determined not to allow it to happen again," and then the mind is transformed. And when the mind is transformed, liberation is already there for you and all your ancestors, and if you are still caught in that feeling of culpability, that is because you have not done the work of Beginning Anew, it means that you have not practiced looking deeply into your clumsiness, your lack of skillfulness. If you had, then you would see that many conditions had come together for that action or that sentence to become possible. And now, with your enlightenment, with your determination, you will never allow these conditions to come together again in order to repeat the same thing. Your awareness, your enlightenment, is the element that will prevent these conditions coming together again.