Community: Week 7, Princess Lake Campground to Corvallis, 122 miles
On Thursday we landed in Corvallis, where we lived for the entire 2024 calendar year. How wonderful to spend the past four days immeshed in our spiritual community there. It’s amazing how much easier day to day life is with friends around. How wonderful to have so many people who want to hold Sabina, help with meals, lend a hand, and encourage us in our practice. Sabina sat with me (asleep) for four formal zazen periods this week!
After spending eight years living in full time organized spiritual community at the monastery and now spending much of the past 5 years as a single couple (and now parents) traveling alone, we both are so happy to be returning to the support of a larger community. Community helps us in so many ways to be our best selves. So why do most people in our culture seem to live isolated lives? It is so common for families to live in different states or even different countries, and for neighbors not to really know and support one another. Individuals, couples, or small nuclear family units live cut off from the human beings around them. What isolates us from one another? Is it fear? Desire for privacy, comfort, or freedom? An inability to connect at a heart level, to feel relaxed and get along with others? An inability to reconcile differing views?
Many of us also live cut off from the natural world, spending most of our time walled off from the fresh air, natural light. trees, plants, animals ,and weather patterns outside. Within these climate controlled boxes we inhabit, we perhaps feel safer and more comfortable but at what expense? Is this a symptom of the the same disease that separates us from one another?
Returning to Bells Mountain, we want to help create a a place where people are encouraged to come out of isolation from one another and from the greater earth, to unplug from the stories and habit patterns that keep them feeling cut-off and separate and re-enter their roles as genuine and joyful participants in this together-life. How can we encourage ourselves and one another to authentically connect to and feel care for those beings around us as we move though each day.
Having a newborn around is one way. Sabina has very much opened my heart. I find myself often looking at grown adults now with the recognition that they too were once someones’s precious little baby. How sweet and lovable each of us are; at our core still resides a little child, open, vulnerable, dependent, and in love. More and more I feel that nothing in the world is more important, more healing, or more satisfying than fully inhabiting and resting as this most basic and simple energy of openness and love.
If you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.It’s from
-The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila
