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Holding My Breath

Tonight our OSesshion retreat starts, so today we wait. We prepare as well, but mostly we wait. We learn a lot of rituals, how to eat, how to move, how to sleep during the retreat, but then we wait.

While we are waiting there is a little time to explore to monastery. Above the main gate, hidden in plain sight, lies a rarely visited 300 year old chapel with statues of Buddha Shakyamuni and the 16 arahats, his original followers. We have to wake up a monk who is taking a nap in the hidden stairway, preparing for the rigors of the retreat in his own way. He is very gracious and does not seem to mind. We climb up into the gate, unshutter the shrine and enter.

The Buddha is in a timeless pose, of course, as present to this moment as he was to the moment the chapel was built. The statues of the arhats tell a very different story. Some speak, some gesture. All are frozen in an expressive moment, silent snapshotsof their movement and uniqueness. It seems odd for them to be so animated and so motionless, as if they are suddenly holding their breath, stopped in mid-sentence, waiting for some hidden signal to finish their thought. This is the same feeling that I have right now.

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