Samu week

What a change in pace - for the third week of the August training period, the timetable of silence and zazen is overthrown by a routine of daily labour and friendly communion. There's a lot of work to be done each year to maintain the place, and 'samu week' has become an important fixture in the maintenance of the house, gardens and zendo.

At the start, it was all honestly a bit much - having spent two weeks settling into a steady, slow rythym, and a quiet weekend at first on my own, and then just with Sensei, the arrival of the babbling hordes on Sunday had me retreating to a bench in the far corner of the garden by Sunday evening, desperate for some peace and quiet.

I am by nature, though, a sociable being, and it didn't take long for me to realise that as much as I was present to the routine and calm of the sesshin weeks, I had to be present to the chatter, work and laughter of samu week. Soon, I got over myself, and joined in.

Disaster strikes - turns out that the floor of the 'shuso shack' is in bad shape. I'd heard a floorboard break when I stepped in last week - pulling the furniture out reveals the floor is damp through, with wet rot fungus growing all over it.

Andy Scott to the rescue...! With a surprisingly gleeful violence, the skirting boards and half the floorboards are ripped out, and a temporary ply floor fitted - a night on the sitting room floor for me as the timber treatment dries, but I'm back in the next day, very happy indeed that I've been re-homed so fast. Being shackless is a step below homeless!

My job is treating the outside of the shack, a biggish job but plenty of time for it. I also get curtains and cushion covers to the cleaners in town, while John and Karen paint the sitting room. Amazing what a fresh coat of paint will do to a room - and the sage trim on the coving is replaced with a bright yellow (the less charitable might say that it makes me want to move my car to a legal parking spot...). There's a grand unveiling as John & Karen remove the masking tape...

Given that it's the end of the week, perhaps we can be forgiven for the obsessive hilarity we discover in the jumble of yellow-edged waste masking tape that still as I post this sits like an idol on the sitting-room wood burning stove...

Sadly, we're easily amused.

Not sure that the 'idol' will survive this week - sorry John & Karen!

I'm afraid I didn't get good pics of other people working - will post in a few below in any case. Jez ended up doing all sorts - fixing plumbing, painting the chimney, sourcing some 'ridge tiling' for the long shed... and probably twenty other tasks that required more competence than most of the rest of us (Andy aside) could scrape together. Jo's work in the garden made a huge difference - she just seems to know what to do and does it humbly and quietly, and suddenly you notice a corner transformed, a tree pruned to within an inch of its life, or an oddly shaped bamboo plant. All the while, Isshin carries on with the samu tasks that would normally fall to four people - and of course finds a hundred other vital cleaning jobs that cannot remain undone...

I think for all of us the highlights were being called in to eat. Not that we're all greedy or insatiable in appetite (though I am!), but the food produced by Zaza and her daughter Jamilla was simply fantastic. Each breakfast was different (the home-made muesli my favourite), each lunch a banquet and each supper a marvel of culinary creativity. Home-made bread, and even brownies and home-made chocolate on the last day. Yum. Yum squared. Each meal looked as good as it tasted, and Sensei must have pictures of every single dish on his phone, he was so taken by its presentation! Zaza and Jamilla's tireless labour will be long remembered...

We ended the week with a bonfire in the incinerator, sitting around in the occasional drizzle, chatting, laughing, eating and making the very best of the last few hours before it was time to sleep, wake, eat and leave in fairly short order the next day.

Thank you all for a fantastic week. Now, a quiet(ish) weekend, and the pace slows down a bit again as we await the folk coming for the last week.

I'm knackered - the last week has taken a huge amount of effort from us all, so I'm catching up on overdue naps to make sure the tanks are full for the last push - sesshin schedule again next week, and I'll be surfing on the energy that the new participants bring with them. Hope I can stay upright until we leave on Thursday!

Can't believe this has all happened so fast.