Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.
Why it's relatively quiet around here is I'm doing my first Ango. It's a three month retreat, ninety or one hundred days traditionally, dating back to the rainy season retreat of Buddha and the arhats 2500 years ago. I suspect I'm not physically up to doing such a thing in a monastery, and anyway most of those are in other countries, and I have travel and stay concerns, some relating to my identity as female.
Also the part-time hermit life was excellent preparation for Ango, because nearly all of what one commits to was already on my docket. But there's always that last bit -- to escape from between the millstones of one's preferences. If you love solitude and your little hut too much you will find that you're really just hiding.
Fortunately for the likes of me, there are alternatives.
One is Treeleaf, an online zendo based in Tsukuba, Japan, with adherents all over the planet. I can sit with sangha members from Ukraine, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Brazil, New Jersey, New York, Virginia and North Carolina. My teacher here in Oregon suggested I look into it, and this has gone well. Treeleaf's "summer rains retreat" is in the fall, ninety days leading up to Rohatsu in December.
Treeleaf, which holds sittings and zazenkai on Zoom, is well suited to persons somewhat isolated (check), differently abled (check), socially challenged (check), and best of all for me, the very nearly deaf (check) (headphones). It's a match.
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| Photo by Hondō Kyōnin, used by permission. 奔道 協忍 |
In their Ango one undertakes to intensify practice, sitting longer and more frequently, reporting one's activities to one's Ango partner (mine lives in the Midwest, so the time zones are not too much of a stretch) and attending online meetings about practice, the precepts, zazen, and how it's going. It's useful to have the online forum to go to with frustrations and concerns, and to be encouraged by so many others. So much for hermit life!
Time is divided between zazen, Ango meetings, sewing (which is certainly part of a Treeleaf Ango)
and Samu (work time) -- much of which is whatever I was doing on the farm anyway. Today it was chimney repair and roof sealing. The rest has been house interior painting, harvesting, and putting foods by.
What has been different about the work is that I've learned to pause just before setting to, putting my hands in gassho, and repeating a "work gatha:"
May this work be done in a spirit of generosity,
Not driven by ego, greed, or delusion.
May kindness sustain us and prevail,
And compassion guide us and lead us to understanding.
May we rejoice in the success of others.
And remain unmoved by praise or blame.
Doesn't, so far as I can tell, hurt to do this. Seems to help. In my case, anyway. _()_
