Leaf Covered Path

I spent the weekend at Southern Dharma Retreat Center (SDRC), teaching at the Fall Clean Up Retreat. Eighteen people came from Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina to rake leaves and shovel rain-washed gravel out of the ditches and back onto the narrow mountain road leading to the retreat center.

Driving to the center, I crept my car along the leaf-covered one-lane road, which looked pretty similar to the nearby woods. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish exactly where our path is. In the steep Blue Ridge Mountains, a wrong turn can head you terrifyingly downhill.

As meditators, we try to follow the Noble Eightfold Path, which at times may seem to have more folds than path. How do you respond with kindness in a difficult situation? Is your livelihood harmless? Is your (and my) retirement portfolio harmless? The path is not straight-forward, after all.

I arrived safely at SDRC. The Eightfold Path leads us to safety of a different sort--safety of heart and mind.

Climbing Rhododendrons

The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are thick with big old rhododendrons. When i stopped in Blowing Rock, a woman told me that she and her sister used to climb rhododendrons as kids. What a great place to play!

I don't spend enough time outdoors, and i don't spend enough time playing. My do-er likes to be doing something in the garden. That's my adult form of play--rearranging and neatening up the flower beds, trimming branches off shrubs. All to make a more beautiful landscape, which will soon enough revert to its wild state when i can no longer care for it.

Rhododendrons grow tall. Children grow up. And i grow old.

Shopping for a Shirt on Retreat

I'm wearing gardening clothes! For the first time this year. The season has finally changed. Mud season ended yesterday. Spring clean-up begins today.

Today I'm wearing purple velour pants that i got from my mother when she died in 2000. I had packed these pants when i went on retreat, because i was leaving the retreat to fly to North Carolina to teach a weekend Spring Clean-Up retreat at Southern Dharma Retreat Center.

While meditating here in the frozen North, i realized i had failed to pack a gardening shirt. Oh shoot, i thought. I'll have to stop at a thrift store in Asheville. I wonder if there's a thrift store in Hot Springs?

A couple of sits later, i remembered: Down in the laundry room, there's a wall of shelves with lost, forgotten, and donated clothing, available for free. During the next period of walking meditation, i headed down to the out-of-the-way laundry room. The selection was much thinner than it used to be. But there was a pale purple long-sleeved cotton shirt with an embossed purple velour leaves on the chest. My color, my size. My "shopping" trip was done. A free shirt! Wow!

This unexpected gift of a shirt is an example of what happens when we slow down, take some solitude, and calm our minds. The gifts of Life are all around us. First, we have to notice them. Then we can feel the gift-ness of them and feel deep gratitude for Life's offerings.