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.

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.

Flatirons, Boulder, Morning

Click for larger image.

Seminar over, storm moving in. Fly home tomorrow. Had good connections with various people. Waved my map of Washington State around a lot. Hardly anyone seems to know where the Olympic Peninsula is, or for that matter where Seattle is, or Victoria, or or or...

Arapahoe Avenue scene, Boulder, Colorado

Heading for Boulder

Heading out at 0-dark-30 tomorrow for a weekend seminar in Boulder with Baker-roshi. Staying with G.H., hanging out with the sangha, listening to Roshi for three days. Then back again on Monday. Talk about really cold — looks like it will go down into single digits. But unless the forecast changes, no blizzard to trap me there, or keep me from flying out of Denver on Monday.

The Boulder seminars take place in the Community House at the Colorado Chautauqua, right next to the open hills leading to the Flatirons. Very very Boulder, and absolutely beautiful when I went to seminar there one April. Which this is not. I hope they have good heat...

Yeah, a lot of flying this month. Don't have to do it again until Tucson in March.

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...