I am deeply grateful to all of you for your support of my ability to share the Buddha’s teachings.  It has been a joy to share these teachings and to know that many of your lives have been profoundly changed by learning and practicing what the Buddha taught.  That I could be a part of the dissemination of the teachings at this place and time in history has been a precious gift to me. 

My life has changed around me, has moved into a new phase. This happens.  You may recognize it.  One of my closest friends, an anchor for me and many others, is no longer in my life.  She has left a huge hole in the lives of her community of friends and we are all adjusting.  The waters flow toward the sea.  The truth of impermanence has temporarily stunned with its brilliance and clarity.  And I for one need to spend some time updating my understanding of my days that I can flow more easily on these waters.  

Just as the seasons of the year are suspended in the shortest days, the darkest nights before the light returns, just as each breath is suspended at the end of the out-breath in a stillness born of boundless space before the next in-breath begins, the seasons of our lives come to the briefest of standstills, the end of something, the beginning of something else.  Can we feel it?  Enter into it?  Suspend all thought, effort, struggle?  Listening, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says, on the rim of vast silence?

Has My Heart Gone to Sleep?

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped work, the waterwheels
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?

No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming - 
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence.

~~ Antonio Machado