Finding Sanctuary
Last Halloween just before midnight Joe and I pulled into the Refuge at Pudding Creek for our first night as new residents. It was cold and clear under a vast star studded sky. The house was dark (PG&E outages!) in the middle of a dark forest and it was hard to find the key for the unfamiliar lock. We slept on a bedroll piled with warm blankets on the floor that first night in what is now the music room. One year has passed and what a different world it is. My surroundings have become familiar and we sleep in a bedroom while the piano sleeps in the music room with a drum and a guitar. And the outer world, well, you know what has and is happening there. The intention for this place that is nestled in an apple orchard and guarded by redwoods and firs was to create a refuge in alignment with the Buddha's teachings on the "three refuges" or the "triple jewel" - Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Little did I know how hard things would become and how much all of us would need refuge only one year later. No matter how much privilege you have or do not have, we all need a place of sanctuary because life is uncertain, unpredictable and uncontrollable. The "triple jewel" is that which is precious because it supports and sustains us in our human vulnerability. It seems to me the more chaotic and painful things are personally and collectively the more important it is to draw close to that which is nourishing and sustaining. To take refuge is to remember to act in your own highest good so that you can then lift the people around you up too. To take refuge is to remember that you are held in this world, not separate. To take refuge is to join the people that are all over the world right now dedicated to service, compassion and wisdom. Martin Luther King Jr explains refuge so well in a letter written from a Birmingham jail:
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.