Two weeks gone - half way already

How different two weeks can be, following the same schedule in the same place...!

For the first week of the training period, Sensei was here and there was instruction on the 'form', how to officiate at our regular Zen services. There were interviews with him, and essentially he was in charge. The buck stopped with the boss.

For the second week, Sensei returned to Liverpool, and the buck only goes as far as me...

It seems to me right now that this is a big part of the training, too - beyond when to offer incense and when to bow, beyond pondering my koan. How will I stand in my own shoes when the responsibility is mine. I think it went all right.

Each day, the valley reveals itself in a slightly different guise. This afternoon, after everyone had left and I found myself alone, a rainbow spread out across the sky. I stood in the soft rain and gazed at it. Seemed to hang around for ages - long enough that I thought to grab my camera.

It turns out that being shuso (head monk/trainee) is about far more than I thought. I'm still working on my koan, of course, and exchanged emails with Sensei with some reflections on it (really not as good as a face-to-face chat it must be said!), and I'm still spending heaps of time on my cushion, eyes fixed on the floor, knees pressed into the mat.

But I've had to be so much more - chief shopper, samu job allocator, deliverer of dharma talks, dish washer, laundry marshall, service officiant, sounding board in interviews, social soother, even disciplinarian. Sometimes it feels like I'm cheating, doing this while my day job is university lecturer - there's been some significant overlap! But here I've been aware of holding the space for others - loosely, I hope, and gently, kindly.

Doing interviews with all the practitioners here has also really opened my eyes to how much is going on even in a silent zendo. The silence itself seems richer, more pregnant with meaning.

And beneath it all is my own ongoing practice in the zendo. Two weeks in, and I'm still amazed that I've managed to avoid knee pain, my almost constant companion on retreat. I've not once heard the clappers announce the next period of meditation and felt the gut-twist of dread that the next two hours will be spent trying to deal with the stabbing pain of aching knees. There's been occasional discomfort, but nothing more than I might feel on a Wednesday night in Northampton towards the end of our weekly communal zazen. It's opened up zazen for me in a way I'd not been expecting - while I'm not going to tell fibs about wonderful serenity and profound realisations, each period is mostly more settled than the last, as I find myself more fully present, day by day. Mostly, the bell at the end of a period comes as a surprise, not as something I've been urging on with all my might, dragging each second past the next.

This Wednesday was fantastic. I woke before Jikido Jo came round with the morning bell, and stared out over the valley. I've spent ages looking over the valley these two weeks, but this morning was wonderful.

Thin mists banding knipe slopes
Dewey bleats hail cresting sun
Soft hiss of the M6

Such a perfect moment. During zazen that morning I sat in Joy, a stupid grin beaming across my face. It lasted all morning, through breakfast and a trip to the shops in Penrith. Total joy, unreserved, undiscriminating. Eventually of course it passed, as all things do.