This haibun was buried in a much earlier post. I decided to retrieve it and add a pic of pine trees. The best pic I could find was from my visit to Egan Chutes Provincial Park last spring.
Festival, especially the the involvement of so many poets who were
willing to bare their souls at the reading on the Marmora dam. The
highlight for me, though, was our picnic with Al Purdy at his
gravesite in Ameliasburgh.
I've been involved with Buddhism for over forty years, especially
with haiku and haibun poetry, but you never know how seriously
you are taken by more experienced practitioners. I took two of our
visitors to the Purdy Festival to meet Thay, the Buddhist monk who
oversees the Zen Forest Buddhist retreat in Actinolite north of
Tweed.
I showed Thay some photos of my neo-Buddhist retreat, ZenRiver
Gardens, with some trepidation. Thay is an extremely venerated
Buddhist monk, the descendant of generations of Zen masters, and
I was concerned he might consider my efforts silly. Thay smiled
while looking at the photos, commented that ZenRiver needed more
trees, and offered to give ten pines from the Zen Forest to the
ZenRiver!
ten pine trees
march through the night
Zen Forest to ZenRiver
Last weekend I visited Toronto to care for an old friend recovering
from a breast cancer operation. On Saturday I visited the Snow Lion
Buddhist Shop by the Pape subway station. The steward of Snow
Lion is Theodore, and again I was concerned that the neo-Buddhist/
shaman conversation I had previously shared with him might have
seemed silly. Theodore hugged me when I arrived, showed me their
new Zen garden, and told me that holding a picnic with the dead is
very much in the Buddhist tradition. He then gave me an incredibly
valuable bronze Buddha statue for ZenRiver Gardens.
So the dharma road is wide open and ZenRiver Gardens has
apparently been accepted as a valid retreat among fellow Buddhist
practitioners. The positive follow-ups to PurdyFest have manifested
themselves in so many unexpected ways, for so many people, we'll
definitely have to do it again next year.
more rare than the cougar
snow lion comes to water
at ZenRiver
from ZenRiver: Poems & Haibun
from a breast cancer operation. On Saturday I visited the Snow Lion
Buddhist Shop by the Pape subway station. The steward of Snow
Lion is Theodore, and again I was concerned that the neo-Buddhist/
shaman conversation I had previously shared with him might have
seemed silly. Theodore hugged me when I arrived, showed me their
new Zen garden, and told me that holding a picnic with the dead is
very much in the Buddhist tradition. He then gave me an incredibly
valuable bronze Buddha statue for ZenRiver Gardens.
So the dharma road is wide open and ZenRiver Gardens has
apparently been accepted as a valid retreat among fellow Buddhist
practitioners. The positive follow-ups to PurdyFest have manifested
themselves in so many unexpected ways, for so many people, we'll
definitely have to do it again next year.
more rare than the cougar
snow lion comes to water
at ZenRiver
from ZenRiver: Poems & Haibun
Hidden Brook Press, 2008
that's spray and mist, not an out of focus lens
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