         |
|
WELCOME Dear friend,
Welcome to the on-line home of Hermitage Heart. You will find reflected here a commitment to keeping alive a spiritual life that is fresh and vital. Hermitage Heart nurtures a radical possibility: that each one of us is called to respond to the poignant and complex suffering of this period of history, and each one of us is, likewise, fully capable of living with the natural ease that is every being's birth right. This is the clarity of a realized human life, and the practice of Hermitage Heart. The motif of the hermitage, the small hut of sufficiency, points to the place where we return again and again to face our heart-mind in the barest of ways. Hermitage Heart's actual physical hermitage is in Garrison, New York, and is located in the community's historic gristmill. As teacher, I study, write and see Zen students at the Mill, hold small retreats and lead meditation with a local group, and conduct some of the liturgies associated with one of our primary practices, the 108 Bowl Water Mala. From every direction, Gristmill Hermitage is permeated by the sound of water: a waterfall we call the Little Niagra is loud as you arrive, the stream then falls from the mill pond into a curving hug over rocks to a second small set of falls. When the large door to the second floor zendo is opened, it sounds as if meditation is taking place midstream. The zendo also overlooks the large millstones that once transformed the community's raw grain into flour, and still serve as a steady reminder that everything and everyone is necessary to the work at hand. Set down what you've brought to be ground, be as you are, and the water begins to turn the wheel. The 108 Bowls: A Water Mala is a special project involving "giving attention to water." Each water mala is a group of 108 people who place a small, specially made and dedicated ceramic bowl in their windowsill and keep it topped up with water. Each bowl is shaped at the Gristmill, exhibited and dedicated as a body of 108, and then goes out with a number inscribed on the bottom to the person who will practice with it. The bowls from various editions of the water malas are now in practice globally, with surprising results. Projects have been born, art has been exhibited, illnesses have shifted, communities challenged and changed—but the less easy to point to transformations will perhaps remain quiet, deep, and ineffable. It is my hope that everyone will someday be part of a Water Mala, both as a personal practice, and on behalf of the world's waters. Water: our existence depends upon it. We are made of it; its crisis is our crisis. Its beauty is our beauty. As perhaps no other natural element, water's nearness is regarded as healing, restoring, uplifting: proximity almost always guarantees choice real estate. And now, water has become a language for the moral and ethical precepts, navigating the commons, resource sharing, sustainability, fairness, interspecies justice, and the creation of the conditions for true community. What is water? The question questions the very nature of the self and the other. It allows no hard lines. The wave is insulted by flowing, the ocean by stasis: and yet we are each and neither. Moving or still, doing or not doing: the question of water asks us to realize and be ourselves. Let the practice and teaching here support you in this: the hermitage is yours, and it has everything needed. There is a bowl waiting for you. Good company when and if you need it. Know it is appropriate to rest when weary, and that your offering is exactly what everyone has been waiting for. Welcome home. In gassho, |
|
 |
|