Dear All,
To start the New Year ...
... Rev. Shodo Spring, Soto Zen Priest, social and environmental activist, and the author of the beautiful essay we are now visiting in our Treeleaf 'No Words' Book Club,' When the World is On Fire: Reflections on These Times (so appropriate for this New Year) ... is coming to Treeleaf as a Guest Teacher next Saturday, January 6th!
Although written in 2017, her essay is, alas, still poignant and even more important now in 2024. Shodo, as priest and activist, writes about being at ease with uncertainty even as she works to protect the environment in the places she can, and about conversations with nature and with each other. Please have a look: (LINK) She is coming here Saturday to talk about it. Please try to join us. I would really like to get LOTS of members of our 'Digital Sangha' to attend this event via ZOOM ... And even if you have not been joining in our readings! Come anyway! (And the chapter is available at the above link too.)
Shodo is the founder and driving force behind the MOUNTAINS and WATERS ALLIANCE, combining Zen practice with environmental and social concern:
More about Shodo:
Shodo Spring is a Soto Zen priest and dharma heir of Shohaku Okumura. Before encountering Zen in 1983 she had studied physics and social work, and practiced as a psychotherapist. She met the Dharma through Dainin Katagiri in Minnesota, studied at San Francisco Zen Center, and finally trained with Okumura Roshi. She was interim priest at Anchorage Zen Communityin 2010-11 and volunteered with Brahmavihara Cambodia in 2014.
In 2004 Shodo organized public sitting outside the political conventions and joined a group walking between them, from Boston to New York. In 2006 she walked the Texas-Mexico border with Claude Anshin Thomas in the American Zen Pilgrimage. After receiving Dharma Transmission, she organized and led the 2013 Compassionate Earth Walk, a 3-month spiritual walk along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route in the Great Plains. That walk began with a vision and has shaped her whole life since.
Currently Shodo sits monthly Antaiji-style sesshins in the tradition of her lineage, and has founded Mountains and Waters Alliance to work together with all beings for the welfare of the whole earth. She lives on a farm, apprenticing herself to the plants, waters, animals and earth, learning to be human. She spends time with her children and grandchildren.
List of Other Publications:
editor, The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo” by Shohaku Okumura. Wisdom Publications 2018.
“Finding Home in the Vow” in Boundless Vows, Endless Practice: Bodhisattva Vows in the 21st Century, Published by Sanshin Zen Community. April 2018
“Right Action” in The Eightfold Path, Temple Ground Press 2016.
Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World. Tuttle 1996
In 2004 Shodo organized public sitting outside the political conventions and joined a group walking between them, from Boston to New York. In 2006 she walked the Texas-Mexico border with Claude Anshin Thomas in the American Zen Pilgrimage. After receiving Dharma Transmission, she organized and led the 2013 Compassionate Earth Walk, a 3-month spiritual walk along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route in the Great Plains. That walk began with a vision and has shaped her whole life since.
Currently Shodo sits monthly Antaiji-style sesshins in the tradition of her lineage, and has founded Mountains and Waters Alliance to work together with all beings for the welfare of the whole earth. She lives on a farm, apprenticing herself to the plants, waters, animals and earth, learning to be human. She spends time with her children and grandchildren.
List of Other Publications:
editor, The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo” by Shohaku Okumura. Wisdom Publications 2018.
“Finding Home in the Vow” in Boundless Vows, Endless Practice: Bodhisattva Vows in the 21st Century, Published by Sanshin Zen Community. April 2018
“Right Action” in The Eightfold Path, Temple Ground Press 2016.
Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World. Tuttle 1996
Once I found an aliveness in the woods. Now I find it in the untamed space called zazen -- and in human community, and still also in woods, hills, starry skies, gardens and flowers and small beings. This receiving brings enormous gratitude, and also a desire to protect. I long to see humans relating to the natural world as part of it, as family, and not as something to use, dominate, or conquer. I want to share that this is a joyful and wonderful way to live. ...
... When we stop imagining that we are alone, life becomes possible. I am going to go out on a limb and say that to practice is to join the conversation, to live in the conversation with all beings -- with wind and stars, rivers and mountains, prairies and woodlands ...
... When we stop imagining that we are alone, life becomes possible. I am going to go out on a limb and say that to practice is to join the conversation, to live in the conversation with all beings -- with wind and stars, rivers and mountains, prairies and woodlands ...
It can also be viewed "one way" at the time, or later, at the following screen:
Even if you do not have the book, you can read a PDF version here from PAGE 240 (please consider to purchase the book if the remainder looks interesting to you):
Zen Teachings For Challenging Times - Second Half (PDF DOWNLOAD LINK)
There will be a Q&A after her talk, at which you can either ask a LIVE question, or email me a question which I will read (email your question to Jundotreeleaf[a]gmail.com)
I would really appreciate a BIG TREELEAF TURNOUT for this event, and I assure you that it will be worth your time to attend.
DONATION:
The event is free, but we ask those who can afford to make a voluntary donation, whatever you might afford and feel's right, to the group she has founded, the MOUNTAINS and WATERS ALLIANCE, which she works hard to maintain, via this link at their web page (please indicate that Treeleaf sent ya, and it is for this event
):Thank you.
Shodo's essay is part of an AMAZING book which I cannot recommend highly enough to all, a very unique collection of short essays by a group of women Soto Teachers, focused on Zen Wisdom and Compassion applied to real life problems. The book deserves to be better known, and is not to be missed. We are currently reading and reflecting on it in our "No Words" book club (LINK)
Gassho, Jundo
stlah
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