Online Retreat: There is a Field
Day 6
Resources for Day 6:
Friday 8am
Welcome to Day 6, led intro to meditation
Rumi Poem
40 min unled meditation with bells marking 5 stages.
Out beyond ideas
of wrong doing and right doing
there is a field
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down
in that grass
the world is too full
to speak of.
Ideas, language even the notion
one another
makes no sense.
Rumi
Friday 10.30am
Talk by Paramananda
Led meditation (27 mins)
Lying down with drumming, poem and Vajrasattva mantra (1hr 8 mins)
Sitting (1 hr 33 mins)
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galwey Kinnell
Friday 4pm (pt.1)
Meditation led by Paramananda.
Risk
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.
Anais Nin
Friday 4pm (pt.2)
Q & A session with Paramananda and Bodhilila.
Officially the heart is oblong, muscular,
and filled with longing.
But anyone who has painted the heart knows
that it is also
spiked like a star
and sometimes bedraggled
like a stray dog at night
and sometimes powerful
like an archangel’s drum.
And sometimes cube-shaped
like a draughtsman’s dream
and sometimes gaily round
like a ball in a net.
And sometimes like a thin line
and sometimes like an explosion.
And in it is
only a river,
a weir
and at most one little fish
by no means golden.
More like a grey
jealous
loach.
Miroslav Holub
