Monthly Newletters
Dear Sangha and Friends, This morning I attended a monthly Repentance Ceremony at the Dharma Rain Buddhist Temple, where our friend Rev. Pho Khai is Abbot. It’s a very beautiful service, with chanting in Vietnamese and 108 bows. The chants…
Dear Sangha and Friends, Here we are, at the end of our two month practice period, which seems such an odd transition, given that many of us have laid down during this time patterns of practice that we’ve found supporting us…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…