Mythical Spokane

We had snow and power outages for the last couple weeks.
The snow brought bright skies and stark white peaks.
Also cold feet and stomping through the softness to the meditation hall.
We had a guest arrive late on Tuesday evening. She made it into the house in the dark without a flashlight.

I woke up in a chill the morning of our departure to Spokane. 2am in the Hermitage. I looked out the window to snow softly accumulating outside. I stepped down the ladder of the loft to turn up the heater. No warm breeze as I turned the knob. I flipped the light switch. No light.

I thought of my sleep options in an power outage. There are fireplaces in the house but I didn't want to disturb Eileen, Jack and our guest. The zendo has a gas heater but it takes two hours to get the heat to a reasonable temperature. I looked around and picked up my -17 degrees sleeping bag and padded back up the ladder with it. Snuggled deep inside with blankets on top I fell deep into a undisturbed slumber.

The rest of the morning was a dazed flurry of inexact randomness to get Jack and I to the airport on time. I got my car stuck in snow coming down the hill. Jack brought the tractor up and helped create a path far enough out the lane to get me to Mosquito Lake road. In total the travel took a two hour drive through snow and ice, a five block walk from the Seattle Practice Center, a half hour light transit ride to the airport and a half hour delay for the flight and an hour in the air. I could have driven to Spokane in the time it took me to get myself there by plane.

Half the struggle of this Zen training is the travel it takes to get there. My life of practice is always a life of journey.
This is not new to me or these times.
Zen students throughout space and time have been sent from monastery to monastery to inquire of one or another teacher. I have read about it frequently in the histories. Why should we be any different?

Our guest remarked on how surprising it was that I was leaving a retreat center to go on retreat. Indeed. It might be different in a retreat center that is running a full schedule but we are still cobbling things together from around the region resulting in the teachers (and thus the students) traveling from local sangha to local sangha for retreats.

Spokane is a mythical town for me. I've watched their television in Calgary since a child and always wondered what it was like. A huge metropolis it is not. Less than the size of Red Deer it has a little airport with only a few gates. I couldn't quite get my mind around the geography. It is rocky and hilly with long tall pine trees standing seeming independent of each other in the white snow fields. Almost like a mountain landscape but with no mountains. And certainly not the smooth plain and rolling hills of Calgary. I suppose they call it foothills but a different kind than I'm used to.

We were only three days on retreat but I found myself moving in a deep quiet place. I enjoyed the silent companionship of the lovely sanghas of Spokane and Idaho. Two elderly Catholic nuns run the retreat centre and much of the space has well kept atmosphere of the 1970's. There is great diligence in taking care of ones living space like this. I held and honored their unaltered spirit as I walked their paths in the snow and turned up the heat (Electric Living) in my very own bed.

The nuns put out a lot of bird seed in both the front and back of their house so there are many birds of all kinds of colour on view from the dining hall. Two little black birds with a forehead plumage bobbed their heads amidst the many chickadees. A large thrush with red touched wings played in the bird seed. Back and forth the birds shared space and food. On the morning of the last day the thrush was found dead- hit the invisible window. Always our relationship with birth and death hauling itself before us. And yet somehow we are always surprised.

The meditation hall is in a converted barn. Very dark with soft carpet. In early evening I stood in the snow under the starlit sky waiting for interview (dokusan) with the teacher. The air was cold- even by Calgary standards. In order to get to the interview room (Jack's hut) it was necessary to walk half way up a short hill. I waited for the bell to ring. When the person ahead would come out and I could go inside.

My face got chilled by the wind so I turned to face the ease of the hill behind me. I stared up at the large boulders hanging on the hill. It seemed a space out of time. I remembered the second ancestor in China standing outside Bodhidharma's hut in the snow. I am not that brave.
Still I stood in the chill and met my wandering mind. I heard the bell and the crunch of the snow as I hurried up the hill.

We are not living in a mythical time but sometimes myths arise before us and we just walk through them.
To misquote T.S. Eliot: History is now and Spokane.