Kris,
Yow, za.
We used to sit at a kindly lady artist's sprawling adobe ranch house before we
bought a building to convert to a zendo, here. This was after a slew of
transient rental situations.
She painted huge canvasses in rural Mexico, mostly interiors, showing families,
roosters, children, revolvers. Wonderful colors, amazing styling (not high
realism).
We set up an altar with a Buddha statue in the room we converted and rented as
a zendo. She removed the statue and put a bleached cow skull in its place. We
tolerated that more or less OK, although newcomers wondered what to make of us:
were we Wiccan?
A year further on, she replaced the cow skull with a large mirror, facing us.
I approached her and told her, "That's too ADVANCED, Indiana". She laughed and
we hugged and she went back to the cow skull, and so it remained. She trusted
my sense of the sangha. She also knew my shifu a bit. She'd owned an art
gallery in NYC in the 1960s, and once hosted Sheng Yen at her house here in
Tucson in a reception when Sheng Yen came to lecture at University of Arizona
for a few days. But our teacher in Tucson was Pat Hawk Roshi.
Then, ...we bought a place, and moved out, and she never forgave us. She knew
we had something irreplaceable there, and she was right. But we had to grow.
And grow we did. She never came to our zendo, alas.
Sad. She passed away a few years ago. Indiana Nelson. Novelist. I love her
book TRUCK STOP. It contains JUST her voice, her VERY speech. I read it and
weep, sometimes. Don't often revisit the book.
How we loved her. So, so generous. A deep practitioner. --Joe
> Kristopher Grey <kris@...> wrote:
>
> Surely a desert dweller has seen bleached bones, but likely not his own.
> Should warm the heart, while heart's still warm...
------------------------------------
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