Englewood Cliffs, NJ
So I follow my path. I'm not one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason, but there is a reason why I left the monastery. It might be to find my true path. It might be psychological, I might have unconsciously engineered it to be this way. It might be to find out that Plum Village really is the best community for me to pursue this practice. But it does seem fitting that I'm no longer there, it feels comfortable, it seems right.

I returned to New Jersey with little fanfare. I've been here so much in the last year, that it's no big deal. My parents are even giving a vibe of being a little fed up with this directionlessness and they're going totally hands-off. Good for them. They're getting old and all they can think of is keep making money. Any deeper wisdom about life eludes them.

I didn't come back here with the idea of immediately maintaining a practice, on the contrary, I've been thinking of pushing it a way a little to see how I react, to see if it's something I can push away, or if it's really something that's sinking in. Pushing away the Deer Park practice is no big deal. Even some of the monks there would comment that the practice there, currently, is too loose, weak. For me, the mental shift of being there and being out here is not that great, which could mean my practice is particularly weak, or particularly strong, it doesn't matter.

I have been feeling a pull to keep it up, but it feels like it needs re-tooling. And to the rescue, I received an Amazon order I placed just before leaving Deer Park. I chose the free shipping and didn't expect the shipment to come until the end of next week, but it arrived on the same day that I got back here. The shipment included The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism, The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, Meaningful to Behold, which is a commentary by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso on the Shantideva book, and I also received a 2-CD set that I won off eBay, The Monastery of Gyuto: The Voice of the Tantra for half the price. Never mind that the Amazon shipment also included a Peter Gabriel DVD, I think the hint I'm giving myself is to get some Tibetan knowledge under my belt.