by Jessica

(Photo: Flags at Dharmaloca.)

Interviews

Jaya will do one-to-one interviews of 10-15 minutes each via skype on Tuesday May 10, starting at 11 am her time (in Western Europe).

If you would like to schedule a time for an interview, please email Alison: interviews (AT) opendharma.org

Web news
There have been many new updates to opendharma.org, including additions to Dharma Child, more photos of Dharmaloca and a diagram of photo of Jaya showing some ways to experiment with lying down postures, snapped by Tom Riddle. 
 

 

 

by Jaya

(Photos: The retreat group; Carme, the manager of the retreat and the Open Dharma office manager, in front of El Castell, The Castle, where everyone slept. The place was built by an alternative community in the 70s on land that was leant to them for over a decade.)

Seven Months ago my entire life changed for the better when I received a call from my doctor informing me that I had Thyroid cancer.  Now I know this sounds like an odd statement; however, it is my truth.  This is not to say that I have not gone through Hell and High Water as well, and yet somehow the blessings of transformation that have accompanied this illness  far outweigh the struggles I have had.  

So here is a snippet of my story.  A few months after I was diagnosed with cancer I was taking a walk in North Carolina on a cold and sunny day, the barren trees outlined by the blue sky and crisp cool air.  What a blessing to be here and experience this earth.  While walking I asked myself a question that changed my life.  Although I had contemplated this question philosophically for many years, it had never been quite so real as on this day.  I asked myself, "If I died from this illness sooner than later, would I be content with my life as is, and specifically where I had focused my energy, attention and thoughts over my life time?"  As I reviewed my 30 years of life, I decided whole-heartledly, with great compassion and forgiveness for myself, that I would not be OK with dying because I was not satisfied with the way I had thus far walked on this earth.  What a shock to my system.  After 10 years of spiritual practice, what did I have to show for myself except discontent.  And yet, within this realization I experienced great peace and recognized the immense power I have as a creator to change my own reality NOW.  After all the years of hearing the Tibetan's teachings on Death as  Skillful Means to help initiate the waking up process, I finally had the teaching pay me a personal and private  visit.  Sometimes a good kick in the butt is evidently what I need to propel deeper levels of transformation.  

This realization changed my life and has empowered me to make different choices.  That day in North Carolina I became strikingly aware that I had focused my thoughts and energy into endeavors throughout my life that did not aid in my personal joy, health, and peace or that of the planet at large.  All of a sudden, my morning asana and meditation practice became a small part of my spiritual path, as I opened my eyes to every moment, every thought, every action, being  part of my spiritual path.  In this moment of recognition, it was as if the universe said to me,  "Kellie, you have a choice right now to change your life...and it is up to you. You are the creation and the creator.  You have the power to change your reality here and now.  You don't have to pray for it outside of yourself.  Be the prayer by living your deepest desires for love, peace, calmness, and joy out Right Now.  Stop waiting to wake up, and live this present moment fully.  What are you waiting for...another encounter with your own mortality?"   

Since this day my life has been different.  This does not mean I do not come up against my own walls, wounds, and sorrows at times.  However, they pass much more quickly and they have less of a hold on me.  Instead of only being OK, most of the time I feel pretty fantastic, even when I am in physical pain, crying, or experiencing tumultuous emotions.  I attribute this to knowing  that I will die one day…and it could be any day, so here I am trying to make the most of this day, this body, this consciousness here on this earth.  What is there left to do but to love and to serve, for all the other stuff is slowly fading into background noise as the songs of the present moment become more and more divine, passing, temporal, and eternal.  

 

 

(Photo: North Carolina clematis, by Julia.)

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~ Spring in Dharmaloca

(Photo: Branches growing strong at Dharmaloca.)

Up in little Himalayas of Sat-tal, bought there by Open Dharma (bless their cotton socks), I listened to the usually mellow Vijay, the estate manager, curse Lantana. He was looking through binoculars at the forested hills for any signs of a fire.

'Lantana's a devil. It runs riot over the whole of this pre-Himalayan belt, colonizing the ground between the trees and so becomes an effective fire carrier. Most of our work is spent taking it out. In monsoon when the ground is more giving, we can pull out the roots, but they are deep and Lantana always returns. We just do what we can.'

 

I gathered Lantana had more than this one diabolical side to it from an American, Annie (The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard), who came from a land and culture where Lantana is propagated in pots, and sold as an ornamental plant.  Unwanted weed and paid-for plant. 

 

Wryly acknowledging my English origins, Vijay tells me it was the colonising English whose garden loving people introduced Lantana to India, saw it flourish on the sub-continent into a healthy shrub, and nurtured it for the other thing the English like doing, demarking ownership of land: Lantana made excellent hedges. 

 

Ornamental plant and pest, propagated and purged, valuable commodity and expensive nuisance. Tame in one climate, rampant in another. Same natural system but viewed poles apart in divergent place and time. 

 

A view point. 'What is one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter,' I extrapolated while walking that gentle pace in a group walking meditation, seeing for myself how effectively Lantana 'colonised' the hillside, its pretty red to yellow florets, attractive and unflustered by being called the devil, or even its commonly called named 'Ham and Eggs.'  Did the English gardeners ever imagine the cause and effect of such an innocent action? 

 

Naturally, a 'weed' is just another human construct. A weed does not have an identity of weedness ('oh poor me, I am a weed,' or 'I WILL SURVIVE'). An organism exists for no other reason than it is able to, and can find an opportunity to do so. It has no I AM. 

 

Last Autumn, Richard Mabey published his book succinctly called "Weeds," and fulfilled my Lantana meanderings, magnificently with colourful 'weed' derivations and various attempts at defining this plant with a changeable reputation (a plant in the wrong place, for example).

 

His most poignant observation for me was the weed as a fellowship of humans. Not that we see it that way--for where ever we are, you can be sure, that weeds sabotage our human plans (for a herbaceous boarder, a field of wheat). 

 

But, as Mabey says, they have at least one behavioral quality in common. "Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren't parasites, because they can exist without us. But we are their natural ecological partners, the species along side which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil: clearing forests, farming, dumping nutrient rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battle fields, parking lots. They exploit our transport systems, our obsession with packaging.  They abhor an empty space and fill it with their effective seed spread, leaf growth or root establishment."

Finally, Mayby concludes, most probably they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding!

 

As I dig up a tenacious English weed called Ground Elder, in the same sense as Vijay does his Lantana -- knowing it will return and just 'doing what I can' -- I smell the perfume of celery, its original family. Recalling the Romans who originally bought the plant over here as an effective remedy for gout, any 'me and them' vitriol I once had towards the so called weed softens.

 

More profoundly, seeing a weed not as my enemy but as my behavioral partner, has changed my way of 'gardening.' I definitely do less, and deck chair more. Or even stand as a tree. 

 

Up on a hillside, Vijay's wife Varsha spoke to me of her Lantana, and I'll leave you with her words: 

"When we were young and hungry, we used to go to the fields and eat the seeds of Lantana. When we were young, when we wanted to look older, we used to pretend to eat pan. (She laughs). If you take a lichie and mix it with the green of lantana, you get the same effect. So I like Lantana."