Sunday, April 05, 2009

Buddha’s Birthday Celebration

Wednesday was fortunate for Doug. Doug is a fairly new guy at Zen and I don’t think he knows about chanting practice at 6:30 PM before the 7:00PM meditation practice. I say he is lucky because this was the first Wednesday of the month, and that means it was teachers meeting night. That leads to me chanting by myself. For those of you who (fortunately) don’t know, my voice sounds like a cat in a blender. We did the hour of meditation practice then went downstairs to help fold newsletters.

Jump forward to Sunday and we had our Buddha’s Birthday celebration. Doug did show up, so it was nice to see a fairly new person show up. The abbot performed his poem, with his brother accompanying him on a drum. One of the funniest things I have heard in quite some time. After that it was downstairs for some grazing.

The community room was pretty full of people laughing, grazing, and sipping coffee, Papua New Guinea in fact. Everyone brought in birthday presents for the Zen Center, so the place is stocked for awhile. Heck, I brought weather stripping for the door. Not good when the door is closed and you can see daylight! Especially in Wisconsin where we had a light snowfall today!

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