Its been a good while since I have been here at Eleusis and in that time, as you can imagine, there have been a good many changes. Dharmavidya has faced the challenge of some quite serious medical problems that have kept him from travelling, as you will be aware, and this has led to Adam coming and, in a way, setting up base here. Also Order members like Modgala and Susthama have come to stay at a time during the year when usually people would stay away. Elja, whilst currently in the Netherlands, is now firmly part of the community. All have left something of themselves, reminders of their presence. This has primed me to notice things that I associate with the different people who have stayed over the years. Furthermore the response to a posting about the Autumn/Winter retreat at the end of the year suggests that more new people will be visiting so as to spend time with Dharmavidya, and perhaps to get a more direct experience of living in this developing community. I have little doubt that the interest reflects the rich writing and descriptions of life that we have been seeing on the Eleusis website. Later today Mo and Peter will be joining us as they travel back home from the Loire. Adam is busy making mushroom pate, hummus and bread for lunch. Quite a change to see his ease and confidence around the kitchen a year on, the smooth almost imperceptible transition as he moves from one task to another. Not an insignificant change given that he wasn’t the most eager of people to embrace the role of tenzo. I suspect that he wouldn’t be unhappy to learn that the literal translation of the word “tenzo” is something like “heavenly person”.
So I have been asked to write the daily today. There was a joke this morning that I should write about everything that I have been doing since the last time I penned a “daily”, somewhat Nei quan style. Well, coincidently, on my timeline this morning the Facebook team, would you believe, posted my last Eleusis diary entry, 14th May 2013. 2013 incidentally was a year in which I spent a lot of time here on my own.
This is what I wrote back then: “A small moment of delight as stand still looking down the track towards the road, the sharp light of the fading blue sky, the sweet smell of flowers in the air and the little pipistrelle bats - two or three - flying up and down around my head. I say to myself, I wouldn't at all mind if I died right now, right at this very moment.”
why can't I
stay here
forever
And at the end of my first day, on Wednesday, when the three of us gathered for a sharing I relayed how earlier on in the afternoon, as I paused for a while and had a break from the strimming, I thought something similar – ‘why can’t I stay for ever’
Its good to be back despite the somewhat wet, cloudy weather – well in fact as Dharmavidya reflected this morning this is just part of the beauty at this time of year, the sun when it does show its face bringing the green lushness created by days of rain into sharp relief. “I pray the sun above gloom, will make a lotus open now”[1]
I feel embraced and warmed by the soft belly of this place. And like the flow of nature, a wisdom co-created, emerges in the words, thoughts and interaction between the three of us, and the threads of the worlds that we hang onto as well as reaches us through books and the internet. This morning at breakfast Dharmavidya talks about the text he has just discovered and that is currently drawing his attention, apparently picked at random from the shelf in his room. Last night, he explains, he was reading about Kumarajiva the famous translator from the 5th century China and his abduction from the area where he then lived (to the South of the Yangtze river) to the North, circumstances that almost certainly lead to sutra’s and commentaries being translated that have shaped Buddhism in unique ways right up until the present day. Kumarajiva’s legacy is hard to over-estimate, particularly if we think about the central place that the Lotus Sutra occupies in the Mahayana. “I open my heart to you, gurus of the Lotus lineage….and all the other precious teachers who have revealed the lotus Samadhi”[2].
These were turbulent times and it’s a wonder to think how the threads that hold the Buddhadharma together in the way we now understand it, have in the past depended on the lives of individual masters and ordinary priests whose lives often dangled on fragile threads, vulnerable to the rapidly changing political shifts that characterised the times in which they lived.
Yesterday, after a lovely gathering at Oasis, with Annette, Patrick and Odeille, we retuned to Eleusis and each got on with various different tasks. In my case after answering some emails I set about clearing grass and weeds from around the two fig trees that live behind what was once a pond. It was good work, good to be out with my hands in the earth, using my body again and encountering the multi-faceted natural world – the smells, facture, sounds and visual stimuli. In time Dharmavidya emerged from upstairs – continuing his study of Dogen – and joined me outside, clearing weeds and planting the flowers he bought from Sancoin market on Wednesday. In no time Adam called from the kitchen to tell us that supper was ready.
The fig trees now have space, no longer suffocated by bind weed, nettles and the high grass. When I think about the time between the last time I was at Eleusis and now, and coming back, I feel how I imagine the fig trees must feel.
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