Back from Retreat

I'm back from 10 days of meditation. I've discovered that I excel at doing nothing, er, meditating (which is not to say that I excel at nothing, although I do excel at that, too). Here's a revised version of the poem I put up on the last post:

On Retreat at Spirit Rock (2005)

Emerging from the dining hall
after tea one evening, we see
the bright circle of a full moon
edging over the hillside.

A crowd of us gathers in silence--

everything depends
on just this moment.


*This above poem is partially influenced by William Carlos Williams and his famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow (note use of word "depends"):

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

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Going on a 10-day retreat

I'm going on a 10-day retreat at Spirit Rock. Here's a poem by the Japanese Zen poet Ryokan (trans. by John Stevens) that Jack Kornfield loves to quote:

Begging

Today's begging is finished; at the crossroads
I wander by the side of Hachiman Shrine
Talking with some children.
Last year, a foolish monk;
This year, no change!


And here's a poem I wrote based on an experience from my last retreat (exactly one year ago):

On Retreat at Spirit Rock

Emerging from the dining hall,
a crowd of us gathers in silence--
the bright circle of the moon
is edging over the hillside.

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Brief Video of Noah Levine at Spirit Rock

If you click on the title above, you should be able to watch a short, very commercial video of Buddhist meditation teacher Noah Levine talking about retreats at Spirit Rock. The cool part (to me) is that I shot some of the footage featured in the video, including the spinning dharma wheel near the end, two women walking on a grassy hillside, shots inside the retreat hall, and other random stuff.

Here's the URL, too, if you need it:
http://current.com/items/76354722_dharma_punx

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Elephant Article in NYT Mag

If you didn't catch the article about elephants in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I highly recommend reading it. You can click the title above to go to the article. Jack Kornfield sometimes tells a story about the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, but his is about the happy reunion of Shirley (an elephant) and another elephant Shirley had known in the circus 22 years before--they remembered each other after all that time and gleefully reunited as old friends when Shirley was brought to the Elephant Sanctuary. The NYT article tells a much darker tale about the plight of elephants and their clashes with man. Here's an excerpt:

"Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and retirement facility situated in the state’s verdant, low-rolling southern hill country. The sanctuary is a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that the people who profited from them were eager to let them go. Given that elephants in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviors that were long observed in captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive working model for how to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown can be found in captivity.

Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the biggest hard-luck story is that of a 40-year-old, five-ton Asian elephant named Misty. Originally captured as a calf in India in 1966, Misty spent her first decade in captivity with a number of American circuses and finally ended up in the early 80’s at a wild-animal attraction known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, Calif. It was there, on the afternoon of July 25, 1983, that Misty, one of four performing elephants at Lion Country Safari that summer, somehow managed to break free of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to make an escape. When one of the park’s zoologists tried to corner and contain her, Misty killed him with one swipe of her trunk."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

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