November 1/2 day Zazenkai

On a cool November morning with little snowpellets followed by alternating sun and clouds, practioners gathered on Sunday, November 19th at Shao Shan Temple for a full morning of intensive practice.

The Zazenkai program included opening and closing ceremonies, zazen (sitting meditation), kinhin (walking meditation), and dokusan(individual meetings) and a Dharma reading/talk. 

The Dharma reading was from Zen Master Hongzhi. An excerpt of which is below.

"Here you can rest and become clean, pure and lucid. Bright and penetrating, you can immediately return, accord and respond to deal with events. Everything is unhindered, clouds gracefully floating up to the peaks, the moonlight glitteringly flowing down mountain streams. The entire place is spiritually transformed, totally unobstructed and clearly manifesting, responsive interaction like box and lid fitting or arrowpoints meeting."  

- Zen Master Hogzhi (Cultivating the Empty Field, Taigen Dan Leighton trans.)

Gratitude & trees - family program

For the children's portion of November's in-person Family Program, we enjoyed exploring the themes of gratitude and interconnectedness. 

We first shared our names and things we've been noticing in nature, including the colder temperatures, shorter days and longer nights, ice floating on top of grass, emptier gardens, fewer leaves on trees, and the recent snowfall. 

We then read the book the tree in me by Corinna Luyken, which explores how eating a single apple with mindfulness and gratitude can help us experience our connection with all things. We practiced being trees ourselves and then made a gratitude tree with decorated hanging leaves illustrating things we feel grateful for. 

We also made gratitude journals and used an apple peeler-corer-slicer to prepare our snack of apples and cinnamon, using apples from the trees Taihaku Roshi planted perhaps forty or fifty years ago! 

We concluded by gathering with the adults outdoors and offered bows and bells to the earth, sky and everything in between.