Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA
So now I'm thinking of not going directly to Plum Village after my brother's wedding; taking time off to clear up my monastic aspirancy. I rejected my first letter after one brother started asking a lot of questions that were intended to help, but just frustrated me. I wrote in my natural style which is rife with subtext that no one else knows, and is admittedly unnecesarily flowery. So then I wrote a second letter drawing on my legal training - plain language, straight-forward, and direct, getting to the point and leaving no room for ambiguity or interpretation. The simplest of monastic minds can grasp it! Just kidding. It's a far less interesting letter to me, but it does what I want it to do. Besides, I'm not writing it for myself.

Ostensibly, I'm taking leave from the monastic lifestyle to go back into material life for a few months with a focus on reminding myself why I wanted to enter a monastery in the first place. Get that direct experience to realize clearly that I don't want to live that way anymore. Once I focus the camera lens, I'll be able to go to Plum Village and declare unequivocably that I want to be an aspirant and I want to be a monk.

Unless, of course, I find a truer path while I'm out there, not to be confused with an attractive distracting path. The top three candidates for places to go are, in order: San Francisco, Nagasaki, and Taiwan.