Good evening dear friends
The heirloom rose bushes in our housing co-op back yard smell so beautiful! Both pink and yellow bushes with birds flickering in and out – how can anything be so beautiful to so many senses! This is such a season of delightful changes….
For the month of June we will move on to the second of the Five Powers: ENERGY. As we move through the Five Powers we will acknowledge their interdependence, not leaving the first – FAITH – behind but seeing how they spiral together.
Our first Thursday we will recite the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing. Our discussion will center on the energy generated by identifying our aspirations for deep practice. The second Thursday of the month, Thay will offer a talk on how the commitment to water positive seeds can fuel our practice – and what better way than truly seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting all the multi-coloured manifestations of spring.
The third Thursday, we will recite and explore the recitation Nourishing Happiness – and there will be a practice song to learn. The fourth Thursday, we will continue our deeper investigation of one of the Contemplations on the Five Mindfulness Trainings: A New Paradigm for Racial Justice and the Global Pandemic developed by Marisela Gomez and Valerie Brown.
Mark your calendars: on Sunday July 18th, we will gather at Mountain View Cemetery for three hours of mindful practice and joyful togetherness! More information to follow.
In September we hope to offer a Transmission of the Five Mindfulness Trainings. If you are interested in receiving the Trainings, we would like to know as soon as possible.
From our practice in May, we are sharing the following:
The song Christiane presented: “Earth my body”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpdn13HL9vI
The reading related to FAITH that Louise presented from
Thay’s book: Love Letter to the Earth
Intimate Conversations with Mother Earth
Modified from the original in: Nhat Hanh, Thich. 2013. Love Letter to the Earth. Berkeley, California: Parallax Press.
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With great respect I bow down before you Mother. You are a planet, you are the mother of all species, including our human species. Your children number millions of species, each with its own way of expression. Because you are the mother of all of us, you understand all these ways of expression, including the human language. So we feel perfectly at ease to have a conversation with you and we offer you these words from the depths of our heart.
Mother, you are a green-blue planet, a Bodhisattva that purifies and refreshes all that belongs to the earth. I bow down before you in the clear awareness that you are present in me and that I am a part of you. You have brought me to life, you offer me everything I need for nourishment: the air that I breathe, the clear water that I drink, the food that I eat and the plants and herbs that heal me when I am sick.
You are the great earth, Terra, Gaia, the Green Planet, the Pure and Refreshing Bodhisattva. You are very fragrant, very refreshing, very beautiful. You have the capacity to receive, preserve and transform everything; including filthy and foul-smelling things, poisonous air, radioactive waste. You embrace these things and transform them. Sometimes you have to give yourself a long, long time to
do this, if necessary, millions of years.
Many of us humans out of greed, arrogance and ignorance fail to recognize that you are our mother and have done terrible things to each other and damaged your health and your beauty. We know that you have enough strength to embrace and transform our mistakes, but because we are and have been foolish we continue to compete with each other to exploit you, tiring you out.
Your infinitely great patience and endurance are what have made you a great bodhisattva, an infinitely solid place of refuge for us all. Whenever we are unstable and lose ourselves in forgetfulness, in selfpity, hatred or despair, we should return to ourselves and practice touching the earth.
Then we find a place of refuge in you, so that we recover our peace of mind and revive our confidence and our joy in being alive. We know that we are all your children and although we have made so
many mistakes you forgive us.
Dear Mother, there are times when we suffer greatly because of natural disasters. We know that at those times you are also suffering greatly. Sometimes we turn to you and ask: “Can we trust and count on you?” You do not give a direct answer immediately.
Later, you look at us with the eyes of great compassion and say: “Dear children, of course you can count on me. I shall always be there for you. Though, please ask yourselves the question: “Can your mother trust and count on you?”
Dear mother, we have stayed awake many nights with this koan and now with our faces bathed in tears we come and kneel at your feet and give you this sincere answer: “Dear compassionate, good
and holy mother, you can count on us and trust us.”
