This Is Our Home, Not A Wonderland

Sister Brightness, Magnolia Grove Monastery, Batesville, MS

Dear Friends:

Happy New Year! How to describe the sweet precision in the voice of a young Vietnamese monastic, in a brown robe, seated on a dais at a Buddhist Temple in rural Mississippi, who offers a final ‘dharma talk’--a talk rooted in Buddhist teachings but grounded in lived experience–before the 130 retreatants as the annual New Year’s retreat at Magnolia Grove monastery draws to a close.

And how to describe the warmth in her voice as she speaks of her own journey as a young Vietnamese woman raised in France, and the stormy relationship with her father during her teenage years, as she used this relationship as a way to reflect on love, its many shades, and all of the different ways that we, as human beings, learn to love each other?

How to describe the sense of calm, stillness and warmth, as the sun descends and a deep, orange glow is cast upon the light colored wood in the massive meditation hall, built to seat over 500 people, as we sit seated close together on dark blue meditation cushions, our feet tucked under us or in the crosslegged (lotus) position?

And how to leave a retreat of this magnitude, where you have been sitting, and walking, and eating, and rejoicing and grieving as a community, for four consecutive days, in what feels like a new-found family and a new-found home?

One way, as Sister Brightness, the monastic who offered her talk on this last day, is to remove the sense of separation between “the monastery”--a meditation practice center in the Plum Village tradition, founded by peace activist and Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh–and our “real” life, or the life that comes before and after the retreat itself. As Sister Brightness noted, the monastery, for the monastics who live there, is the real world; it is their real world, and it isn’t any less real than my own life as a singer, songwriter, professor or anthropologist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So, reframe what is ‘real’ and what we see as ‘unreal,’ surreal or magical.

Sister Brightness’ insight is also a profoundly anthropological way to view the world, and specifically into what the anthropologist Franz Boas called cultural relativism; one person’s mystical wonderland or retreat center is someone else’s home, and one is as valid as the other. As I was reminded multiple times on this retreat, monastics, just like anyone else, are also human and experience joy, pain, sorry and personal difficulties. So what does it mean to mindfully leave a retreat and return to one’s ‘real’ life? For me, it means carrying the good seeds that have been watered during the retreat–seeds of spaciousness, calmness, and the ability to breathe through difficult emotions–into the other parts of our lives where they are admittedly often harder to practice, and thus are needed the most. As Thich Nhat Hanh (or Thay, as he’s lovingly referred to) has said elsewhere, we practice every day so that ,when difficult emotions or habit energies arise, we remember to practice in those moments, too.

May you each be happy, peaceful and well, wherever this message may find you around this big, beautiful thing we call earth.

In gratitude,

~Kristina

P.S. You can watch this talk, given on January 1st, 2025, on the Magnolia Grove YouTube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/live/1MJLR-2DaHk?si=gE8g3VzBBADWt1Hv