Gratitude, Refuge and Shades of Green

written Oct 3rd:

Look out the window
Sunflower graveyards pass by
Winter is coming

Before anything else, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has given me feedback on the blog since it´s hard for me to know whats going on with it sometimes.   Ive gotten a wave of very positive emails recently and they have all brought sunshine into some of the shadow moments and given me a little more motivation to keep it moving along.  It was a kataññu (gratitude) day yesterday so it worked out quite well.  So thank you.  Oh and I will continue to upload photos onto facebook as long as I can so just look under Mobile Uploads. 

Its warm and raining here at La Lombarde Ouest.  The Southern wind brings with it the Spanish warmth but I know it will not last long...back to the Northern winds and one degree above freezing at night soon enough.  But its nice for now.  So Ji and I had the weekend off which was nice.  Three days ago we took a donkey named...well actually I´m not going to try to spell his crazy German name...I just call him Wershy...into the woods to collect pine-cones (yes, I also had many a thought of Winney the Pooh).  I also gave Ingrid and Ji a guitar lesson which was nice.  Yesterday we went to the farmer´s market in Sainte-Foy and today the four of us went to an Organic food fair in a town called Villeneuve about an hour and a half South of the farm.  While the three of them went off to do their thing, I went to a basket making class taught entirely in French haha...and no, for anyone who doesn´t know, I don´t speak French.  On the bright side, Ingrid now has another surface on which to put hot pots since we only had enough time to create what looks like a 12 pronged starfish made of reeds.  Ji and I explored the town some after lunch...everything was closed and it had the feel of a ghost town. After a few hours of wandering we made our way back to the fair to wait for Wolfgang and Ingrid and I ate the best crepe I´ve ever had in my life...it was made from Spelt flour and had butter and cherry jam on it...so someone get on that.  I found Wolfgang afterwards and listened to a little conversation on bio-Diesel in French which didn´t do so much for me but Wolfgang and I talked about it a little afterward and now I understand a little bit about the difference between the engines and the whole process.  They had a machine in which you just put a bunch of sunflower seed or whatever kind seed you want almost and it spit out the oil, which after one more step was ready to put in the truck behind the booth to run it, and the "waste" of the seed in solid chunks which you could feed to the cows or what have you.  The petrol and bio-Diesel (by which I mean the one mainstream company which seeks a monopoly on the product) lobbies are so powerful here that there is actually a law which states that one cannot make their own bio-fuel even though there is no danger in the process, it is completely environmentally sound, and it does less damage to the engines than the industry made product.  Its hard for me to see anything there except that the law is decided by money and little else in matters of the environment and fuel.  But this isn´t a whole lot different from what happened with the electric car.

The drive home was beautiful.  I don´t think I´ve ever seen so many shades of green in my life as I have in the countryside of southern France.  Just trees upon trees and fields and gardens and more trees.  There were sunflower fields filled with dying or dead sunflowers, still facing the south, leaning their heads down as if in prayer.  The French call them "turned to the sun" since no matter how you turn the pot or stem, they will always turn toward to the sun (the south is where you get the most exposure to the sun in the northern hemisphere, which is why moss usually grows on the north of trees for anyone who was around when I was trying to figure that whole thing out).  I just wanted to keep driving...despite the fact that Wolfgang drives like a bat out of hell sometimes...I think he was excited to have his car back from the shop, but on those 12 ft wide country roads with all those turns...I guess its prep for India. 

Alright, there´s a lot more but I´ll get to it tomorrow or another day cause I´m tired.  But before sleep, a thought regarding the practice.  A couple things have become a little clearer for me and I thought I would share them with you.  As always, what follows is what I have found to be true in my personal experience thus far, but everyone has their own path and I make no assumptions that what works for me will work for everyone.  That being said...

Creating a sanctuary in the present moment, within the framework of the body, vis-a-vis the breath, and cultivating pleasurable sensations within that sanctuary has been extremely helpful lately.  Passive observation and non-reactivity have their niche within the practice and within life, but not at the cost of neglecting active engagement.  The first formal one engages in on the path is to take refuge in the three jewels.  Taking refuge in Buddha (the quality of awakening which exists in each of us), in Dhamma, and in Sangha (the community of wise and virtuous people whose company we seek to guide us and give us strength along the path).  I realized that taking refuge in Dhamma does not just mean taking refuge in the teachings or in the concepts or philosophies of Buddhism, it means taking refuge in the practice of meditation and in the path itself.  It means creating a sanctuary in the present moment, within myself, where it cannot be taken away by anyone or anything. 

In one´s meditative infancy, one begins to examine the mind and the body, action and reaction...there is a gradual recalibration of the faculty by which we interact with reality and one of the side effects, at least for me and many others I know, is that there is an increased sensitivity, emotionally and psychologically, to various phenomena from world events to sensory objects/perception to relationships, etc.  I went through a phase where I wound up more stressed out, jaded and closed off than I had been before and took it out on people close to me, because I woke up (just the tiniest bit) to how disorganized my mind was, how violent the world is, how much arrogance was behind my opinions, how unable I was to express what I was experiencing to the few people I hadn´t chased off at that point (by the way, the use of the past tense here is not supposed to imply that I am beyond these troubles, it is meant only to give a temporal frame of reference for the events I am describing haha).  Being in an environment now where I have a certain level of tension (physically in my body after weeding and moving firewood all day, psychologically with Ingrid due to one misunderstanding or another, one premature judgment or another, emotionally when I think of those that I miss or when I get concerned about my future travels) on a daily basis, I have been obliged to search for a sanctuary.  It is the first noble truth, that the unenlightened life is conditioned by suffering...I am not meditating or walking the path because I think everything is perfect and I´m happy all the time.  I meditate because I see that there is suffering in life, much of it unnecessary and most of it, maybe all of it, exists within the mind alone.  I do it because I believe the causes can be discovered (2nd noble truth) and eradicated (3rd noble truth) by practice (4th noble truth).  Which finally brings me to my point...that when we face difficulties both internally and externally, we need a refuge, a retreat, a base camp, a place to feel safe, and that there is nothing wrong with cultivating the pleasure of samadhi (meditative concentration) and utilizing it to build said refuge.  This sanctuary I have been constructing has given me 1. more motivation to practice, 2. a place from which I can view the situation from another angle, 3.a fall back point when I am looking at something unpleasant within myself or the world and it gets overwhelming, 4. more energy to continue with my day, and 5. just an overall sense of well-being which very often turns into effective metta practice.  We all need a strong foundation if we are to help each other.  We all need a point of reference if we are to navigate.  Yes, upekkha (equanimity) is of the utmost importance in the struggle to live in a world where cruel and unpleasant things happen everyday and you feel helpless to do anything about them.  But what about in the meanwhile, while we are cultivating that upekkha?  What about when we have a bit of balance but then we discover a new level of observation bringing with it a new method of detecting stress?  I say, and of course I stand on the shoulders of my teachers when I say this: BUILD  A REFUGE.  Objective observation is essential to any meditation that will guide one to transformative pañña (wisdom, insight), but refuge is fundamental to the ability to observe objectively, to cultivating upekkha, to living a life of peace, to the practice as a whole.  We must know that there is somewhere we can go when it becomes too much.  I have chosen the breath because it unites mind and body and is always in the present moment.  I am aware that this refuge, along with all conditioned things, is marked by aniccia (impermanence), dukkha (stress/suffering), and anatta (lack of intrinsic essence/self), but it is a bridge I can dismantle when it is time to do so.  In the meanwhile it is an extremely useful tool.  So build a great fortress within yourself and within the present, call it home and explore the mind and the world from there. 

Wow, I´m glad I finally got that out there, even if I´m the only one who reads it and/or if I´m the only one to whom it makes sense haha.  This project (blog) has to be personal and relevant to what I am doing if I am to stay motivated to continue writing it.  Anyways...goodnight, sleep tight and Breathe