The Italian center

I was happy to see my friends Ed and Junko from Japan were the Assistant teachers for this course. I arrived a day early, so spent some time doing some clean up around the center, and admiring the sensational view that, during the course, only the women are able to appreciate. (Once the course started I felt a tinge of jealosy, but it passed fairly quickly with observation :)

The Satipattana course is a special course for old students only, that involves comparing one's own meditation experience with a famous sutta the Buddha gives in the town of Kuru. The atmosphere is excellent and students work very seriously. From the very beginning, even Day 0 before the course begins, one can feel a marked difference in the calm pervading. It is really wonderful motivation to sit a long course. For me, these eight days were a very nice kind of summary of the previous courses in Massachussetts and Switzerland, where I wasn't really able to settle down into the more subtle points of the technique. I was able to really benefit from this, and I hope to have some more sitting opportunities very soon to build on this-- it is so difficult to keep these subtle awarenesses away from this concentrated environment. "It is a hard path, really, a hard path" I kept thinking during this course, and by the end, I remembered how amazing it is that this practice leads to real inner purity and peace. This is the actual product of all that time on the cushion, though only direct experience can confirm this.

After the course I stayed a day or two longer to chat with Ed and Junko and sample some more of those pasta dishes. I also took a small trip with a friend to try to find some gelato in a nearby town. A word on gelato... I had first had this seven years previous on my last visit to Italy. I completely forgot how this tasted during this time, but felt that I was never able to find ice cream since that could compare. Just before going to the center, I had a cup, and was blown away by how good it was! So after the course ended, we found this very small town where old men and teenagers alike stopped and stared open-mouthed at the new arrivals, and found some home-made gelato in one restaurant. Funny, after so long of training the mind to observe objectively, it was totally impossible to roll in the pleasant sensation and craving this very good gelato was trying to induce... the whole world is maya :)

I got a ride and took the train to Milan, wanting a day by myself in the "real world" before my flight to London. A nice walk around the city, seeing the impressive Duomo cathedral (with Latin chanting in the background) and a castle, but as usual, it couldn't compare with where I had been within...

The Swiss Center

I took the train from Menningham and after a couple changes arrived in the beautiful Swiss village of St. Imier. Carrying my heavy load (no pun intended) I made it to the cable car station that took me up the mountain to Mont Soleil, and Dhamma Sumeru. The center basically consists of one very large old European style hotel, housing the kitchen, dining rooms, meditation hall, male and female residences, office, showers, and teacher's residence. The first four days I succumbed to illness and the weather got so absolutely frigid that I was wondering when it would snow, and the heating system actually had to be applied. I had a real mound of blankets on my bed!

Slowly I got better and was able to take on more server responsibilities in the kitchen. Our crew consisted of a smattering of nationalities: Belgian, German, Swiss, Slovenian, and a mad Frenchman whose antics still crack me up as I think back. The food was of a gourmet quality-- too good, I think-- with things like fresh salad dressing and dessert made daily.

After the course ended most of the server crew drove down the mountain into the valley of St. Imier, and hiked up the peak of the opposite mountain. It was a beautiful stroll through the alps, past the musical notes of a myriad of cows wearing giant-sized bells round their necks each emitting a different chord (students at the center are treated to this for the full ten days!) , and nice to be in such a relaxed and fun atmosphere with people you've been working hard with to cook and clean for ten days. After this a few parted ways to return home, and others of us returned to the center to do some preparation for the coming course.



With much planning and decision-making sankharas coming up, I ended up leaving Thursday for Italy. I took one of the most beautiful train rides of my life to the Italian border. I had to sneak looks through the window to enjoy it, for I was sitting next to an Italian girl from Sicily who had been living for some time in Switzerland, and spent most of these many hours going detail by detail into all the problems of the Swiss people and their land. From hearing her I found myself amazed the two countries still have amicable relations.

I arrived in Milano greeted by sweltering heat and overwhelming crowds. I boarded a train for Piancenza that was equally hot and overcrowded, the whole scene looking so shabby and startingly different from the exact neatness of the Swiss train. I sat next to an Indian man dozing with his shirt off. I found the bus that meandered into the Italian countryside, on which one young man had an increasingly animated conversation on a cell phone with what sounded like his girlfriend, dirty looks back by the passenger having little effect. When he finally got off(a young girl waiting by the side of the bus), the bus driver slapped him and yelled something at him-- welcome to Italy.

And so arrived at the Italian center a day before the Satipattana....

Deep in Bavaria

I had a nice 12 hour plus train ride to get deep into Bavaria and have been staying with my friend Cathrin the last couple days. It is my first time to see real Germany since my only previous experiences were Oktoberfest, a few hours in the Frankfurt train station, and RUN LOLA RUN. It’s also been nice catching up from six years ago. I got to see Cathrin’s family and we went to a nice restaurant overlooking a lake last night, eating very good traditional German vegetarian food (maybe a contradiction, yes, but no so great as in Czech).

Then today we walked around some small towns, ate more very good German ice cream that I am sure is the cause of some stomach trouble but it still worth the price regardless, and ended up playing beach volleyball for several hours and mixing sunburns with sliding dives with sands and for a little while I was sure someone had put slivers of glass with the sand. I was on the losing side both times (at least I think I was, I never did understand the score, but it is was much more inconvenient to have to guess which German words meant “I got it!” and which meant “It’s yours!”, so I usually hazarded an incorrect guess and either went bumping into my teammate or passively watched it fall in front of me). To my delight for the several hours a small portable stereo blasted “PLAYIN’ WITH THE BOYS” on repeat for the duration of our game. This was nicely in the spirit of having seen Russian MiGs earlier in Czech. What can be next one can only guess— a bald cigar chomping train boss blowing smoke in my face and threatening to send me to Siberia, a dorky sidekick who follows me around and makes bad jokes, well, it can’t be anything to do with "YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVING FEELING” because that’s old hat from New Orleans.

Anyway, I am off to Switzerland tomorrow to serve a ten day Vipassana meditation course so it will be some time before I make another post. I really can’t wait… but am trying to be equanimous as well :) Once you get a taste of what it’s like to let go and leave it to nature, nothing else will do— I guess you kind of stop looking for new and greater things to hold on to :)

When I get a chance, I will post some of the Slany ceremony’s photos… did you know that after the crash, several Czechs living in town delivered wreaths to the American victims and were later arrested by the Nazis… then, the Communists wanted nothing to do with paying homage to any American war heroes, so all the materials were kept in hiding until after 1989…

And here are some photo pages from my time in Morocco...

http://community.webshots.com/user/alcmorocco, http://community.webshots.com/user/2alcmorocco, http://community.webshots.com/user/3alcmorocco

And some from SIT and elsewhere...

http://community.webshots.com/user/joahmcgee, http://community.webshots.com/user/joahmcgee2