It's been four days since we arrived here. When we first got here, we were invited to stay where Annette lives, a Buddhist community called Oasis before eventually moving over here to Eleusis.
"What is Oasis?", Damian asked.
"It's a place where people go and live to die," was my short reply.
So, we stayed in a place where there are living quarters ready for people to practice Buddhism until the end of their life. Always focusing on death, or impermanence. Outside of our living quarters is a stupa and a statue of a Buddha. And with that as the main focus it makes everything more precious. The whole point of our visit, to see our teacher who was in hospital, becomes even more meaningful. An opportunity to practice gratitude for everything that we have received in our meagre lives. Has the moment to say, "Thank you," come, or will it come again and again? And will I? Or will I just take things for granted like I do most of the time?
This morning, the sunlight shone through the window welcoming us to another beautiful day. Beautiful in many ways; a happy community, a warm kitchen, a teacher gaining strength, and lots of new shoots poking out of the ground.
Dharmavidya is walking a little bit further everyday. It is good to see how quickly he is recovering. We drove to the hospital to settle the bill yesterday and met the daughter of the grandparents involved in the car accident that has already been written about in a previous post. What a small world it is. We also went to the pharmacy to pick up a new pair of compression stockings for Dharmavidya and again they knew exactly who he was and what he had come for. Some of the benefits of living in a place where people know who is who and thus get treated with familiarity. And then today we dropped the car off at the mechanics to get repaired.
Today was the first day that I was able to go out for a walk with the children without getting too cold or too wet. We started off at a rose garden, new to me but maybe they have been in the ground for a while. And then we walked towards the meditation hut and around to the different shrines now dotted about the place, with new growth visible everywhere I looked, amidst death or impermanence, of course.
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