A sanctuary
Buddha gone, bones left behind
Passing reflection
K
On 7/13/2012 12:22 AM, Joe wrote:
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...
