Great Vow Zen Monastery

Sometimes it's time to sing and dance and sometimes it's time to sit.  It was time to find refuge from life on the road and join the sangha of Great Vow Zen Monastery for a week of mediation.  They spend one week every month in a Zen Buddhist retreat called sesshin; each one with a theme.  I first visited here with Mikwa last summer while evacuated due to fire and were offered refuge until we could return to our community, Tassajara, another Zen Buddhist monastery near Big Sur (part of San Francisco Zen Center).  Their practice really resonated with me and I considered moving there for this calendar year.  Instead, I am answering the call to return to my homeland of Texas for a time.  

 

Prayer flags in the Jizo Garden

Before leaving the West Coast, it seemed fitting to return to Great Vow, the place where I had decided it was time to leave Tassajara which led to a great many adventures.  It may be the biggest adventure of all to return home after eleven years, quite a different person from the one who left to follow a fiance to Colorado.  Each sesshin at Great Vow has a theme and the theme for January is Life Vows.  It was great to spend a week sitting and allowing my deepest intentions to rise to the surface and to make some concrete vows while feeling embodied and unafraid.  Now, I just have to keep coming back to the body and just keep doing the next right thing.  I don't have to know where it will lead.  I can trust the process.  I can trust that the universe is friendly and that I will always have all that I need.

My two friends on the front lawn.  

I sat under them last summer and wrote the song, Freedom.