Dear all. Greetings from Suryavana. Now we are dropping into autumn; the light changing, the days cooling down and shortening. We have been blessed with some rain so everything has taken on its last green coat. We have been back nearly a month now and I had a couple weeks tidying the place up and we have run a couple of events already. Suryavana Retreat Centre; “the Inn of 10,000 blossoms!”. 10,000 details! To flood the precious mind of the gracious caretaker and guest master, Sudaka.
Our annual Bodhiyoga teacher training is coming around. The last one we want to run in Autumn. Next year it will be a pre-summer! (For anyone who may be interested! This year, we have a select group of trainees plus a good handful of students that have trained with us before. Padmashalin is cooking which is a big plus! I look forward to the practice and discipline two weeks of yoga, meditation and teaching will afford.
The last few days I have been delving into readings and documentaries related to the Congo. “The Heart of Darkness” as Joseph Conrad described it, a century ago. This current dive was inspired by a great piece of writing by the journalist Siddharth Kara in “Cobalt Red”. It makes for utterly harrowing reading. He journeyed several times in recent years to the cobalt mining region in the far south east of the DRC where a large portion of the world’s cobalt is sourced. The cobalt makes up a large part of the batteries in our phones/ laptops and electric cars (if you are lucky enough to own one!). Ofcourse it’s a tale of terrible exploitation involving incredibly risky artisanal mining work (digging by hand with little more than a pick axe or iron bar) and children. It is sadly yet another one of those issues that you feel you can do nothing about! Credit to the tremendous efforts of the writer and I appreciate being made more aware of the issue.
All a lot of the fathers want is that their kids can go to school ($6/month) and have a better life than they have, where they can work with their heads and not their hands! I reflect how fortunate we are here in Europe! With free education, social welfare, minimum wages and so on.
Back to Suryavana. We come to the end of a six week course for Centre Chairs, led by Jñanadhara, which has been a delight. Principally it’s been great to be “seen and heard” by other “Chairs”. The responsibility of “occupying” the Chair of a Triratna Centre is so particular in this world. It bridges the gap in being both a mundane pursuit (paying the bills, keeping the place clean and in order) and the task of creating a spiritual space, open to those who want to deepen into the Dharma.
In the case of Suryavana, developing Buddhist “temple”, a retreat centre, where there was none. Creating something in a sense from nothing. The foundations are here so it’s not quite building from Zero. The physical structures were here before we (Triratna Buddhists) arrived and the desire to “go on Retreat” forms an inherent part of the Sangha psyche, and has done since the initial conception of our community. The momentum is there. Now it’s a question of harnessing and coordinating the flow of energy and vitality! So here we go.
I am once again grateful to my “partner in Crime”, my wife Jesu who is supporting me and the project both directly and indirectly on a day to day basis. She will have her work cut out managing the household which I am teaching this years’ Bodhiyoga trainees.
