Dear Friends, Perhaps those words, from China long ago, are the simplest expression I’ve met of what it is to create sacred space. You don’t have to know what bird, what song. This evening, with such hard news of deaths…
April 2021 Newsletter
Category: Monthly Newsletter
Monthly Newletters
March 2021 Newsletter
Dear Friends, I woke up this morning gratefully warm under my covers (and a cat), and looked out on a world also under its soft white blanket. Feeling rooted, and grateful for the roots underground and in our Zen tradition,…
February 2021 Newsletter
Dear Friends, Right at the start of February comes a Cross-Quarter Day, February 2, which has been noted and celebrated by people from ancient times in various cultures, as it falls exactly halfway between the winter solstice and the spring…
January 2021 Newsletter
Solstice Letter Winter 2020 from Sarah Bender Dear Friends, Woke at 3:45 this morning, 43 minutes after do-si-dothe moment where tilt away turns to tilting to,a moment that is just a pointand so is imaginary, like everything else heldin the deep…
December 2020 Newsletter
A note from Sarah Bender: Dear Springs Mountain Sangha and friends, The first dedication we offer in our sutra service is an expression of our gratitude for the meditation, the companionship, the teaching of all sorts of ancestors and all…
November 2020 Newsletter
A note from Sarah Bender: Dear Springs Mountain Sangha and friends, Sangha members and friends have emerged from our first five-day online meditation retreat with a pervasive joy in the discovery that a meditation retreat held in the very little and very…
Springs Mountain Sangha October 2020 Newsletter
A note from Sarah Bender: Dear Springs Mountain Sangha and friends, It’s almost October, which sounds like itself, with two O’s sounding awe and Oh, and rhymes with over, last night’s freeze having finished off the tomato plants I forgot…
September 2020 Newletter
A note from Sarah Bender: Dear Springs Mountain Sangha and friends, The air here in Colorado Springs is carrying intimations of Autumn; sleeping with windows wide open is a luxury to be savored. The huge sunflowers, audacious and generous beings that they…
August 2020 Newsletter
A note from Sarah Bender: Dear Springs Mountain Sangha and friends, I’m feeling great gratitude for the many offerings of sangha members that are sustaining the vitality of our sangha in this particular time and place. Conversations on Mondays at…
July 2020 Newsletter
The storehouse of treasuresopens of itself.You may take them and use themany way you wish. Eihei Dogen A note from Sarah Bender Dear Friends, Here we are in the deep green of summer, the flourishing, earth full of sun’s summer…