Home: Weeks 5&6: Carson City to Princess Lake Campground, 398 miles
Last night we officially entered the PNW which has been my primary home for the past 36 years, since I was 7 years old. I have a memory of driving up to Oregon from California at that age in the back of my brother-in-law, Owen’s, car. It was just before the seatbelt laws came into place so I was lying down on the bench seat looking up through the windows at the giant green trees with speckled morning sunlight shimmering through the sturdy branches. How beautiful. This place, my home, with her magnificent trees supported by so much rich soil and clean flowing waters, holds a special place in my heart. And not just in my heart, I feel this returning home in my whole being as I breath it in through my lungs, skin, and eyes and a sense of safety and joy fills my veins.
Our minds and hearts have been turning more and more towards Bells Mountain. Each week getting closer. Each week another person reaches our about the possibility of living and practicing there with us. We’re starting to schedule events for 2026 (they’ll hopefully be up in our website this week) and map out residential guidelines. Tonight the current residents there will start the first sesshin (meditation retreat), “sesshin-in-a-circle,” a peer led, small private event. We’ve been on the phone with many people these past few weeks making decisions and discussing things from running electric to the barn and removing a culvert and building a bridge on our driveway for salmon habitat to compiling our mailing list and writing our first newsletter. (Sign up on our website if you want to receive our monthly newsletter with updates about what’s going on there and news about upcoming events).
When I think about enacting our vision at Bells Mountain, it feels huge, daunting, impossible and, knowing human beings, inevitably messy! But, as Hogen Roshi’s poem says, moment by moment there is nothing but THIS. Right now standing amongst the trees by the lake with Sabina sleeping on my chest, writing these words with sounds of water, birds and the distant highway in the background. In reality, there is never actually anything more than what we are experiencing at this present moment, if even that. Everything else is imagination. To be able to release the imagined, however useful or compelling, is something we learn in Zen practice. To move between what we call the ‘relative’ world of story and subject/object dichotomy and the ‘absolute’ world of pure unified being.
The relative world depends on a common illusion that we human beings carry. The illusion is that we’re going somewhere, that we are a person in time going somewhere, that this moment is going somewhere. From the absolute perspective, it’s simply not true. It is always here, there is no separate ‘me’ and this ‘me’ never arrives anywhere else. If the illusion drops, it’s sen that nothing has ever happened nor is happing and we are free from every imagined problem. Free to fully become and appreciate this fleeting and precious life in all it’s messiness!
-Shinei
