Summer Camp in Texas

By Terry Masters

One day at my  summer  camp for gifted children, MasterSchool, the children created different villages from around the world. Using their imaginations and whatever materials they could find around the ranch, they built villages in Mexico, India, Israel, France, and Japan.

In France, in addition to several houses and a lumber yard, there was a sidewalk cafe on the River Seine (a three-legged card table propped on a stump beside a dry creek.) A small protestant church, which was constructed mostly of imagination, stood between the café and someone’s cardboard box home.

There was, in Mexico, a large field of corn (rocks painted yellow) and pumpkins (orange rocks) on the outskirts of the village. On the plaza in town stood a simple Catholic church (a painted refrigerator box topped with crosses made by tying branches together with yarn) and a busy mercado.

The residents of Israel built a kabutz. A child brought his cello from home and played traditional Jewish pieces while his friends taught us tourists to dance.

The girls in India painted their hands with henna and wore saris made of old bed sheets. There were brightly painted Hindu gods perched in trees around the houses where the natives of India lived. Flower petals were strewn on the path leading to the village.

In Japan, next to a computer factory (old computer parts inside a circle of stones,) a child named Tommy designated the space between two trees as a Buddhist temple and announced that he was a monk. He hung lengths of blue yarn from a low branch to the ground, forming the door to the temple. Just inside the door, in a fork of a tree, he placed a Tupperware sandwich box filled with holy water from the swimming pool. Angie brought incense and a candle from home. Laura shaped a beautiful Buddha from mud. On a length of butcher paper, with a black magic marker, Jane copied from a Zen painting a tiny canoe in a calm lake, rimmed by huge mountains in the morning fog. A fisherman lay in the canoe, not fishing. Jane tacked her painting between the two trees in the temple. I told Tommy that I knew a Zen Master. Would he like the Zen Master to visit their temple? Oh yes, he said, he would!

The next morning I dug through the costume box and found a black high-school graduation gown with the zipper torn out. I put it on backwards, wrapped a man’s tie around my waist and walked slowly and peacefully to the temple. Several curious children followed me. I walked through the blue yarn door and bowed to the mud Buddha. Watching me, the children put their hands together and bowed, too. We sat cross-legged on the dirt, except for Joshua who lounged in the fork of the tree above the holy water. Tommy lit the incense and the candle. We sat together quietly.

Finally, I smiled and bowed to the assembly. I complimented monk Tommy on his beautiful temple. He smiled monastically. I said that Terry had invited me, the Zen Master, to come.

“I have come to listen to your stories and to tell you some of mine,” I said, smiling.

“When we students of Buddhism want to talk,” I continued, “We put our hands together like a flower and we bow. We use the same sign to say we have finished talking. But this offering of flowers is not just a way to get attention, because when we make our hands into a flower, we are also saying to our friends, ‘You are as beautiful as a flower; you are a flower and I want to hear what Flower You has to say!’”

The children sat still, listening respectfully, moving only to swat fire ants away. “Would you enjoy doing this while we talk today?”

The children said nothing, but they smiled and nodded their heads.

Looking around the temple, I nodded to Jane’s beautiful painting thumb-tacked between the trees.

“I enjoy looking at this fisherman’s special place. Does anyone in this temple have a special place like that?” I asked. Hands together, I bowed. The children bowed.

After a pause, Laura put her hands together and bowed. We all bowed to her. She told us about a place under her grandmother’s porch at her lake house.

“No one knows about that place,” she said, softly. “It is cool there, even in the summer time. I can see out but no one can see in. I can think there.” Laura paused, then carefully put her hands together and bowed. We bowed to her.

Each child, very quietly, very earnestly took turns telling about their special places: in a closet behind the coats, in a special chair in the living room, at the back of their yard at home, behind some trees, in tree branches, under the bed. After each story we bowed, honoring each child’s contribution. I then told about my special place, in the rocking chair on my front porch. The candle and incense burned.

After a while the bell rang for our camp to have our morning recess. No one in the temple moved. I smiled and rose slowly. The children smiled and rose. We bowed to each other. Then slowly and mindfully we left the temple through the blue yarn door.

A little teary with joy, I walked back to the costume box where I left my robe and sash, relieved in a way to be out of the hot polyester. When I walked back to the playground, Joshua called, “Hey Terry! I met a Zen Master that looks just like you!” “Really?”  I said.  “Yep!”  He grinned, putting his hands together and bowing. “Oh my,” I said as I bowed back, smiling, honoring the flower in him.

Terry Masters, True Action and Virtue, lives in Manor, Texas and practices with the Plum Blossom Sangha in Austin, Texas.