When I left you last I had just gone to bed in the cob "Castle" at Wattle Hollow. I woke at 6:00 am. I had set my cell phone alarm to wake me - figuring that I am not used to getting up in the dark. The person who had signed up to sound the gong did so at 6:30am. It was a strange break in the silence of the morning.
I brushed my teeth on the little porch outside of my room, quickly got dressed, and made my way to the main hall. We sat, silently, outside on the deck, benches, or chairs littered around the pond. The sun had peeked up and was silhouetting the trees - a perfectly quiet morning only becoming undone with the burst of gunshot every now and then.
At 8:00 we ate, silently, a beautiful meal of hot cereal, toasted nuts, Greek yogurt, muffins - really more food than needed. After our meal we sat for 30 minutes and then walked for 30 minutes - followed by sitting for 30 minutes (I think you are getting the hang of how this went.)
Joy, the teacher, asked us to write about a part of our body that we had divorced (my stomach), someone we weren't sure loves us unconditionally (some of my friends), and a yucky situation (family stuff). We then explored our Persona/Mask with the three following ideas: What are we defending, promoting, or augmenting? Our ego is constantly working to do one of the three.
Then: yoga, lunch, hiking, sitting and then the open dharma question and answer period - one of the few moments where we talked.
During the Q&A I was physically irritated by the airy fairy bullshit that was being tossed around - my chief debater wanted to come out. I had known that I should not have stayed for this session, it was optional, but I know that sometimes people ask a question that you are ruminating. That isn't what happened though. When the members of the group started speaking about their affinity for this new age practice, or that new age author I was just ill. Granted, there were two in the group that I immediately did not "like" when we met at our arrival. They just rubbed me the wrong way and I was trying to avoid being near them - and as is the way of the universe they were the most vocal during this session.
Finally, I spoke that, in my home, we believe that Buddhism is just a practice to being here and that the religion - any religion - is only a story that we tell ourselves to understand the practice. There is no afterlife, no god, no great redeemer, just us telling ourselves stories to make sense of what is happening around us.
Joy then asked me questions about my beliefs and said my version of Buddhism was more akin to Zen - just the practice to practice. She then asked how I felt about sharing that, and I said quite fine.
And I was until that evening. More later.
