When Was Then, When Is Now

Rendezvoused with NF and KF at the airport in Portland (PDX) on Sunday morning. They had been at the Soto Zen Buddhist Association's National Conference held at Great Vow Zen Monastery, out in the country near Clatskanie. This event was immediately followed at Great Vow by the meeting of a different Buddhist organization whose acronym I must have written down wrong because I can't find a link...

OK, so we're having coffee at the airport, and K says, "DR is giving a talk (1)(2) about okesa at Great Vow this afternoon to the people attending the next event, do you want to go hear her?" Well of course, sez I. Aiiii, I have nothing to wear, sez I. N gets a samue out of his suitcase and lends it to me. We wave goodbye to N at the security gate and drive down the Columbia River on the Oregon side, to Great Vow.

BH was there, and PP. They were at both meetings, I think. I had just missed JB. The only other people I knew were DL and MW, though some of the names were familiar.

So suddenly I was sitting in a Zen Monastery in rural Oregon next to PP and behind BH, listening to DR (the god-mother of my own okesa, she brought the fabric to New Mexico, measured me, cut it out for me, and got me started sewing, stitch stitch stitch, but oh my decades ago).

Great Vow itself is in an old school. An elementary school: the bathrooms have these tiny low toilets and the partitions are low: grownups can see each other over the tops :-) Our stay at Great Vow was so brief, literally all I saw of it were the bathroom and the (former) gymnasium where D gave her talk.

Anyway, we arrived just in time for the talk, suddenly there were D and B and hugging in the hallway and so on. They were surprised completely, I had had about an hour to get used to the idea that suddenly I would be seeing them. Then the talk. During the buzzing around afterwards we realized that someone from Great Vow was immediately driving D to the airport in Portland, so K volunteered us to drive her, we were on our way back into Portland anyway....

I had become completely exhausted (and hungry) by then, and was somewhat horrified at lengthening the time before we could get to the motel so I could lie down. But as I told Dr. Pommier last month, I am still well enough to always do what I am supposed to do; and that includes both work commitments and arrangements involving friends. After multo goodbyes and group photos of the five of us— me, D, B, K & P ("a San Francisco Zen Center reunion," said the monk who wielded the camera for us; yes but no— and so on, we got on the road. So there I was in the back of the car as we pitched down the highway to Portland, luckily there was a pastry to consume which helped restore my energy. K and D shared a chocolate bar. It was sunset and then dusk, and it was very beautiful up there in the country along the Columbia.

Dropped D off at PDX, one last round of goodbyes, then K and I found our way from the airport to downtown, found the motel, found some dinner. The next morning early, we went together to the medical center for my monthly appointment with Doctor Pommier, my clinical trial doctor, which was supposed to have been the focus of my trip to Portland until we suddenly unexpectedly ran off to visit ever so briefly with dharma siblings and a whole other part of my life.

A Sangha on a Mountain

Kit Carson and Challenger Peaks, Colorado. May 12, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

So I went to Crestone for DW's Mountain Seat Ceremony. Or for a long weekend in Colorado, depending on how you look at it. Current and long-ago Dharma- brothers and sisters. Thirty years of personal history has passed like a dream, and the bonds are still there.

Here is a little movie:

And (this is an experiment), I put a handful of unedited photos up in Dropbox.

Later: David Chadwick has several posts about the event on cuke.com, including a wonderful photo of several carloads of ceremony-visitors at Steve Allen's Dragon Mountain Temple, the morning after the ceremony.

Canoes Arrived Yesterday

They will have paddled away east at first light this morning. Story from this morning's paper.

The first canoe to land was from Quinault (Click for larger image.)

I almost didn't go to watch the landing. Since I was planning not to help out in the kitchen, I didn't feel that I ought to. But when the landing time began to approach, I couldn't stay away. I love the scripted ceremonial. I could listen a dozen times over (and get to do so) to, roughly, 'we have come from far away and are tired and hungry, may we land and share stories and songs with you' to which someone, perhaps a barely audible tiny child, replies in English and Klallam, 'Thankyou for coming to our territory. Come ashore, come ashore.' I thought on and off all afternoon about the other scripted ceremonial I am familiar with, the shuso ceremony at Tassajara and at Crestone, like this one no less moving for being prewritten.

Tlingit canoe, from Juneau, Alaska (Click for larger image.)Ahousat (Click for larger image.)

This all happens not out on the rez but right in Port Angeles Harbor on the beach in front of the Red Lion Inn. It is the tribe's annual reminder to the town that the last Klallam were displaced from the townsite and moved out to the present rez only about 80 years ago, and it was once all theirs. (The temptation is great to try to frame the photos to leave out the city dock, the motel, and so on. It's hard not to romanticize. But it ain't romantic. It is the restoration of the continuity of culture.)

On the beach (Click for larger image.)

The canoes spend the night on the beach below the motel, and everyone goes by van and car out to Elwha, where their support crews have set up camp and the festivities begin. They dance and sing much of the night, then climb back into the canoes in the morning, early if the tide says so, and pull away to the next landing. Day after day. A hundred canoes will arrive at Swinomish, this year's host, on July 27.

The landing schedule map. It's really complicated this year. (Click for larger image.)

PS It was warm mild and foggy, later colder and came on to drizzling...

PPS Mural on the Feiro Marine Life Center, showing the very same beach some time before about 1860. HistoryLink tells about the early days around 1850 when settlers first arrived to live among the Klallam, and descriptions of the village of I'e'nis.

Reading News

I have lately realized that though my tagline on twitter and on my homepage itself is 'Librarian, reader, watcher of ships, denizen of beaches', here I mostly only address the latter two pieces of that description of my life. And nowhere address my present relationship to my life as a Buddhist monk, except in the context of journeying to Crestone Mountain Zen Center now and then.

Here anyway is my reading life at the moment. The widget being live, even when this post is no longer current, it will show what I'm reading at the moment you look at it.

Meanwhile I am contemplating what to do about my dusty cobwebby web pages about the Cerro Gordo Temple in Santa Fe, and whether I should construct a blog post here about the continuing struggle to restore my smallest oryoki bowl from the accident which befell it in November two years ago, while I was on my way home from Crestone from an occasion for which I needn't have brought the oryoki at all— no formal meals— but a proper monk always travels with her robes and bowls, now doesn't she...

Dusting Kannon

This room is called the Kannon-Do. A couple of times a day it's my job to vacuum and and dust and set up cushions for thirty people. In between times the cushions are picked up and tables set up for thirty people to eat.

View Corridor

When you make a right turn from Colorado Hughway 17 and proceed east on County Road T, this is what you see. It's nearly infinity. (In the planning world, this is called a view corridor, and other bureaucratic phrases even more denatured.)

Kit Carson Peak, Challenger Peak, Crestone Peak. All Fourteeners, as they say in Colorado. Over 14,000 feet.

The Next Place Will Be Really Cold

It's sure enough going to -11F on Friday night, the exaggerated number I was telling everyone but hoping against. If it's that cold, what snow there may be won't melt, right? The Guest Manager at Crestone Mountain Zen Center says there is no snow on the ground now, but maybe I better get snow chains for the rental car in case there is difficulty getting out of there on Saturday, right?

Journey, with Personal Tech

My car is waiting patiently at the PA airport, and I'm about as far as I can be from there. After a family visit here in the opposite corner of the lower 48, to Santa Fe and then Crestone Mountain Zen Center. Blogging will be sparse, not least because writing is frustrating on the iPad.

The south-facing cam at Fairchild Internatioal Airport, Port Angeles

Blame It On The Daylight (Absence of)

We are within two minutes of the sunset being as early as it gets. Yesterday and today, it set at 4:22 PM. From December 7th to 15th it will set at 4:20 PM. And then will begin the creep to longer afternoons. Thank the heavens.

I have a whole flock of blog posts lined up in my mind: about my week luxuriating in connection at Crestone; geographic meditations about the journey home; about the astonishing clear weather this week and how far you could see from up on the hill in the college library... but all I want to do at any given moment is lie around blasting through piles of library books one after the other, and at every given moment all phone calls, errands, blog compositions and floor moppings are postponed until tomorrow and tomorrow.

Heading for Crestone

Travelling remote to remote. Crestone Mountain Zen Center takes longer to get to from Denver airport (or Albuquerque either) than Port Angeles from SeaTac. With worse winter-weather worries. Mountain driving. But I haven't seen Roshi for a long time.

Happy to report however that wireless is finally free at SeaTac. Google paid for it 'for the holidays' and SeaTac surrendered to the logic of the situation by announcing it will continue 'free forever'.

Going Into A Wild Field, Not Choosing

Crestone Mountain Zen Center, October 9-14, 2008.

Looking Up at the Mountain, Very Light Snow
Teisho Drum
After Morning Service
Morning Light in the Kannon-Do

En Route

Travelling remote to remote: from PA to anywhere is a production. From there to somewhere hard to get to is an epic... Boulder at the moment, headed to Crestone.

The salmon are jumping, and I'm not there.

It's Never True That We Don't Understand

July 13-14-15. Seminar in Johanneshof.

Yesterday N. said, "It's never true that we don't understand." I wrote it down. Roshi wrote on the easel,"Four Functions of Self: separation, connectedness, continuity, context." I wrote those down too. He says he's given us that list many times before, and I'm sure it's so. He pretends to be surprised that most of us don't remember, don't recognize when he says something he has said more than once before...

more pix on flickr .

In my room I am reading Desolation Angels. Usually I dutifully read only Buddhist books during stays in a practice place, but here on the page is poor old Kerouac alone in the firewatch shack on Desolation Peak: trying to write and to do Buddhism, and mostly failing to rise to the occasion. Been there, done that; in fact, doing that right now.

The schedule, the flavor of the practice--we could be any place that any of Suzuki Roshi's descendants are practicing and it would feel the same. Except that here the household language is German. Or not. I'm on the coffee-and-tea crew. I have only English, Claus has only German, and Dominique has mostly French but enough English to smooth our working together. K.F. points out that here we are, quite a number of us, thirty years later and mostly our same selves except with grey hair. This is not exactly what the teaching has to say about change, but there it is...