A beautiful week here in New Hampshire. The paddle board season is slowly coming to a close as temperatures begin to find simplicity in single digits. Until then, the moving water will remain my teacher.

This past week’s meditation an opportunity to know the way that experience continues to flow, even more so in the absence of a character-driven self.

Happy trails and here’s to letting Life have its way with us.

High Noon at Daybreak

Did I mention the devastating power of Beauty?

Did I tell you what tried to kill me yesterday morning,

paddling the currents of Lake Sunapee?

The mist was unlawfully delicate,

the morning light obscene.

The water practically pornographic in its playful love of the pastel sky.

 Shameless is the truth.

Merciless is the way of Knowing.

Standing there on my board, I was drowning.

Life ripped through me,

Rendering naked each resistant cell.

It shattered any hesitation of breath.

And fed me tirelessly.

It was me or the Beauty.

There was only room for One.

The gathering last night for meditation at Proctor Chapel left me feeling ‘in love.’ Those were the words I used as my friend, Sue, and I drove west, heading to our respective houses. Not in love with something or someone. Just In Love; love, in itself, as itself. Home.

A colourful month it has been. I’m well into the CPE course, moving through the world of Havenwood Heritage-Heights retirement community as an intern chaplain. I frequently have the sense of having been cast into a territory that is intensely new and unfamiliar. I have never before spent any notable amount of time in the presence of the very old. Before this program, I had never visited a nursing home facility. I’d hardly ever stepped into a hospital except as a visitor. The rhythm, the smells, the sounds, the sights and the demands of the circumstances feel like another planet compared to the relative solitude of my usual existence. Add to the environment the role of a traditional chaplain in a Christian-based facility and there have been moments of deep contraction, overwhelm, and tension.

To honour the role and to respect the belief systems of the residents whom I serve, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the basics of Christianity. I’ve been making myself more aware of the impact of societal and family conditioning on my mind. I’ve become more acutely in contact with the agitation I feel when words such as God, Jesus, prayer, blessings, faith, trust, and hope get tossed around. I’ve been doing my best to note the way my breath becomes tight when the conversation turns in this direction and I feel swept up in a wave that threatens to drown me. I don’t want to go with the wave but the only option in these moments seems to be a hardening of myself in a defensive and self-preserving posture. I frequently come home with exhaustion and a headache.

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. – Confucius

But this is just the rougher part of the tale. The true breath of my experience as an intern chaplain arrives on the breeze as I connect with the residents and staff. My favourite moment, maybe, is arriving in the morning. Walking down the long corridor towards the CPE office, I am swept up in waves of light appearing in human form. Most move with the assistance of a walker. All have grey (or no) hair. Some might be pushing a vacuum. Others pushing a wheelchair. In this early part of the day, I am still emerging from my sitting meditation practice which begins in the darkness each morning. I am still shining and open, awash in love, light of the conditioned self. By the time 8 hours have passed, I will have encountered thick residues and habits of mind; imagining myself a separate entity who is tasked with responsibility and weight, stretched across the impossibility of time, depleted. By the end of the day, I just want to get home. I want to see my dogs. I want to be alone. I want to have a glass of whiskey in my hand. I want to be done.

I haven’t spent much time in a church. About as much time as I’ve spent in a hospital. But I wonder if churches weren’t originally conceived as a place where the depleted could come to remember. Re-member. Re-turn. Turn away from the endless forms which give rise to the sense of being a separate self and turn back to home. Church as a symbol of lucidity; a container which momentarily insulates its visitor from noise so that one is reminded of their true identity. Congregants arrive as seemingly separate beings but, in the luminosity of understanding, depart with a clear mind and a shining heart. In Love. Whole. Perfect. Complete. Holy.

Meditation is my church. It’s a powerful experience to sit together and to turn away from noise towards understanding. The mind is opened. The body is emptied, The world shines brightly as it is. Meditation is a formal practice of returning to pure, uncoloured presence – a presence which gives birth to all forms. Sharing this understanding as a collective is celebratory. In group meditation, we come as many and depart as one. Of course, as a symbolic form, the meditation circle or the church, is intended only to be a temporary placeholder – the awakening is meant to travel beyond the doors of containment. The understanding is never to be held in space nor limited in time. Eventually the knowing is embodied. The church or the sangha are revealed to live inside.

And home is no longer a place, but a placeless space of being.

A lovely gathering of sweet souls last night. The recording can be heard here. Happy trails.