My telephone service has been out for three weeks. Land line, not cell, thank heaven. Practicing the dharma while fuming at yet another customer service agent who is following the script to try to persuade me to wait patiently is a practice in itself. By the end of the process, I would pay my bills, get out my calculator and balance my checkbook, answer emails, and make lunch while waiting to speak to the supervisor and then the supervisor’s supervisor, and then the manager. By the end, multiple teams were conferring by phone, some computer person worked over the weekend programming something, the manager had given me her private line, and I got two phone calls on a Saturday (!) reassuring me that they were still working on it.
Then today, the phone rang and, for an instant, I looked around wondering what that sound was. Service is restored and I’ve had a number of very pleasant and interesting conversations with technicians, night supervisors, and the kind manager who gave me her cell phone number.
For the last year I have been meditating with the Clear Mountain Monastery’s zoom meditation group in the mornings. Clear Mountain Monastery was started by two monks - Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho. I found them through listening to a talk by Ajahn Kovilo on Dependent Origination that I shared with this group. They were working to buy land in the Seattle area to establish a physical monastery. They closed on the land in March and early in September they memorialized their transition to the land by making a walking pilgrimage from Seattle to North Bend where the land is located, a journey of three days.
Recently, I attended a program called "Encountering the Buddha as Teacher" at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. There I met a nun - Bhikkuni in Pali - named Anandabodhi. I mentioned her last week. She ordained and began her own vihara or abode for bhikkunis near Seattle and it turned out she had a close association with Clear Mountain Monastery and had walked with them the first day of their journey before she had to come to the program at BCBS.
The morning of the first day of the walk, Ajahn Nisabho, Ajahn Kovilo, and Anandabodhi met with the sangha to share their reflections on the journey they were about to begin. Anandabodhi and Ajahn Kovilo talked about walking - and how to walk in the dharma. Walking is something we all do everyday if we are so abled and blessed.
I recently read Trail to Kanjiroba by William DeBuys who chronicles his 5 week walk into the Himalayas with the Nomad Project begun and led by Roshi Joan Halifax, founder and guiding teacher of Upaya. Part of his purpose was to find a way to live and hold his own grief at the destruction of our world as we know it and loss of animal populations while continuing to make meaningful efforts toward preserving, saving, caring for our painfully changing world. Somewhere in his fifth week of walking as the journey neared its end, the phrase came to him out of the rhythm of his steps: “The right way of walking is the right way to carry the grief.”
Then he wrote: “When I thought about grief, it was not hard to identify. It was the stew of sorrows brewed from climate change and Petri Earth (his term for the experiment of humanity on this earth). It was the distress aroused by our planetary dilemma and by our failure as a society, even as a species, to assent to what we know.”
He goes on, “Grief wasn’t the riddle. Walking was. What was the right way? Our expedition had walked for five weeks. Life had contracted to the essentials of food and shelter, movement and rest, work and play. Every hour’s effort had been embedded in a stern geography. The requirements of place and mission asserted demands that none of us could meet alone. We had to cooperate, act together and so we formed a community. We served. We learned. We walked. We found a settled pace, literally and figuratively. For a time we were nomads. The trail became home.”
Although not a Buddhist, his words align with those of Anandabodhi as she urges us to be present for each step and Ajahn Kovila’s reflection that the Pali language word for walking meditation is “go go” and yet the paradox is how to walk in stillness. We are urged to practice in walking, to walk in stillness - our path becoming our home, to go somewhere without leaning forward to get there, to bring peace to every step whether we are scaling the jagged Himalayas, making signs and marching in protest, writing postcards to neighbors in other states, or simply talking with customer service.