On Tuesday I logged on to this Monkey Mind blog to discover the clock had indeed rolled & I was now listed in the bio details as fifty-nine. Sort of an off birthday, not a major marker like, say, sixty (which, does, of course, now loom). Our family observations were modest. We went out to a nice dinner. Jan and auntie presented me with some very nice cuff links. And when we get back from sesshin, Jan & I will decide what new laptop I’ll be getting as the “big” gift. And that was it. A couple of friends noted the date & sent an email. I got a card. Like I said, all low key.
But, also mortality thoughts do pop. I still recall as a youngster thinking about the year 2000 and realizing at fifty-two, if even alive, I’d probably be too old to appreciate the turn of millennium… Now, I’m officially facing sixty. Itself an interesting marker, when according to East Asian custom, one officially becomes “wise.” So, among other things, I realize I better get on it…
And so, as it turns out, this evening we take off for sesshin (literally “to touch the heart-mind”), a Zen retreat. This one is seven days, my favorite length. Having been habituated to thinking sesshin when using the word retreat, I’m often confused when friends say things like “I’m off to the beach for a retreat” or similar language. I’m thinking staring at a wall for nine hours a day, they mean lazing about reading a murder mystery. Don’t get me wrong, I love such things. But for me retreat usually is serious business, it’s about facing things like the ever more apparent fact that I’m going to die.
This is going to be a big one for our community. With thirty-seven enrollees, it is the largest sesshin yet for our Unitarian Universalist Zen Buddhist hybrid community, the Boundless Way. It also includes a couple of important events, a batch of people taking the precepts (in a ceremony called jukai) officially claiming Buddhism as their spiritual path, and we’ll be ordaining the fourth person a Zen priest within our community.
As regards Zen ordination, exploring what that means for us has been an ongoing, difficult, and powerful experience.
In solidarity with the priest nominee, Ed, the others of us who are also ordained will all be shaving our heads. While I’m in the camp that thinks Zen is about finding our true ordinary, and so it is generally good to eschew signs of the special like shaved heads and robes; I freely acknowledge they do have a place. And in seeking that place it might be shaping up as a tradition for us within the Boundless Way that if we’ve taken priest’s vows, we normally shave our heads for the Summer retreat, the, as we call it Dai-sesshin (Great Sesshin).
Well, there’s some serious scurrying about to do, so I probably will not be checking in for a week, or so.
In the meantime, world, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do…
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