By Janelle Combelic
It is the first day of October
in a golden year.
Under Colorado sunshine
the abbot Thay Tinh Man –
your basketball-playing monk –
told us to practice love
as we walked together
among the pine trees.
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By Janelle Combelic
It is the first day of October
in a golden year.
Under Colorado sunshine
the abbot Thay Tinh Man –
your basketball-playing monk –
told us to practice love
as we walked together
among the pine trees.
Send the Four Immeasurables he said
loving friendliness
compassion
joy
equanimity
to the earth.
She needs your love.
We amble in procession behind him
at Compassionate Dharma Cloud
Monastery, all forty of us.
Love flows through the soles of my feet
down deep into the earth and miraculously flows back from
our original mother.
I step surrounded by sangha.
I see the green and golden aspen.
I smell the end of summer.
I breathe.
I try not to think of you.
I sink into this body
made of dust and ashes and miracles.
I am nothing.
But the mind will have its way.
In the brief bliss of emptiness
grief crashes in
like one of the trucks roaring up
Highway 285
like waves crashing on the beach.
How can I leave my loved ones behind –
family friends church sangha?
How can I leave house and home?
A silent cry wells into tears
and I gaze at the impossibly blue
mountain sky, the foam of clouds,
the green lace of oak leaves.
What can I do but turn to God?
Beauty grief gratitude joy
wrench my heart open wider wider
and I know there is room for all.
Just as I hold you here inside me
I shall as I cross the ocean
hold all my loves
inside me.
I am big enough.
My pain and my happiness
dance together,
weave a tartan on my heart,
a perfect pattern of wholeness.
I take a friend’s hand.
We walk under the ponderosas
where not an hour ago
while we sang songs in a circle
two mule deer bucks
grazed
watching
not watching
then scampered off
into the sun-drenched woods.
Janelle Combelic, True Lotus Meditation, practiced with Lotus Blossom Sangha in Longmont, Colorado and at Compassionate Dharma Cloud Monastery in Evergreen. She recently moved to Scotland to play with the Northern Lights Sangha at Findhorn.
