Dear Friends,
What’s stirring in the year’s beginnings?
This year’s first days, which seem to begin with the Winter Solstice, with a sort of shedding and dive into wonder—wonder of light in dark, wonder of connections and disconnections—and to continue with a brand-new-time feeling when we collectively celebrate a start time for a year’s cycle around the sun—this time of first days seems even more pregnant than usual, here in 2021. There’s a stillness and a spaciousness in stopping more, allowing for a bit more winter mind-drift, feeling lostness and love as tight together as crossed fingers. And inside that spaciousness, there’s a sense of things rearranging themselves. Old connections are dissolving, new ones are being made. So much is happening under the covers, under the layers of our knowing, under the surfaces of earth and water. It’s alive. Its aliveness is palpable, there inside the stillness, and we can’t see it.
So it’s a divine time for meditation, and lucky us, we have a sangha to support our practices, all the kinds of meditation.
Here’s a bit of what’s occurring this week.
Tomorrow, Monday, our evening meeting will include a sutra service led by Kel and Susan Rogers. We’re finding that with the sound challenges of Zooming, it’s really great when two people can lead together, adding some harmonies and simply the textures of two voices to support our at-home muted voices joining in. Oddly, even though we are muted, your joining the sutra service palpably adds energy to the sutra singing. The sutras are screen shared so you can follow easily.
Wednesday morning a hardy group of early AM sitters meet on zoom in the time where dark rooms gradually fill with light and we can enjoy each other’s company in the ease of meditation. Usually not much conversation after. 6:30 to 7:30 AM.
This Wednesday evening, we begin a series of four evenings with Open Source teachers, exploring the territory of Dark Enigma. You should have already received a reminder about that, with some words from Megan about what she’ll be doing.
Saturday morning’s sessions continue to be a gorgeous combo of some good solid sitting time from 6:30 to 8:00, and then a conversation kicked off by a short talk from someone—from one of you.
And this Saturday afternoon at 4:00 we’ll begin our winter Dharma Study series.
We’ll be reading David Hinton’s China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen. Since the book has three sections and we have six sessions, we’ll plan to read a section for each two weeks, but this is not designed to be a book study. Rather, as we travel through winter time with this text, we’ll let selections from the text be the accompaniment for our meditation and exploration each time. So, you are encouraged to read the text in the way that you do, not worrying much about whether you “get it” or not, like it or not, just meeting it as it meets you.
If you would like to be on an email list for any materials sent out before or between sessions, please write to me at sembender@gmail.com .
Happy New Year! May we enjoy the gestational quality of winter time, together and individually, and may we find comfort and strength in the Way that we travel together.
Hoping to see you soon,
Sarah Bender
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