Tatanka Oyate ti-k I ya Ate, Oyate kili, Wacin niyan oe lo Anpetu kin le wakan ca Cewaki yelo namaho wo heya hey ho
Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy New Year! Happy 2022! We’ve been longing to communicate with you all but sequestered ourselves — not in a Covid-19 or Omnicron way, but rather in a good way — in a great way — at my teacher Shinzen Young’s year-end/beginning retreat. This after a killer cross-country drive that took us — us being me and my Hungarian Vizsla sidekick Rosalita aka RoZie — 2,218 miles, from Midwest America, across the Great Plains to the heart of the Southwest. We left our home in South Haven, Michigan, stopped in Chicago, busted to Omaha, Nebraska, spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day a mile high in Denver, Colorado, and enjoyed one of the best meals we’ve ever eaten in Santa Fe, New Mexico. No, it’s not Paris and they don’t allow dogs at Palomas, but Roz Grrl received some serious yum in her tum at breakfast the next morning. We then completed the jaunt down to the hardpan of the Sonoran Desert, where we’ve put the tush to the cush aka our bottom up on a Zafu centered on a Zabuton for the last ten days. Not only have we reclaimed our practice, we’re in a new place, in a beautiful way, that place being Cave Creek, Arizona, our home away from home, surrounded by our loving, virtual sangha as well as some old, western cowboy friends.
En route, here’s a few things we whipped past: The Buffalo Bill and Herbert Hoover Museums, the Amana Village Colonies, the birthplace of President Gerald R. Ford (in Omaha, Nebraska), The Holy Family Shrine, War Axe State Recreation Area, the Cheyenne Zoo, Nebraska cities of Ogllala and Brulé (towns named after Lakota tribal bands), Angel Fire and Eagle’s Nest, New Mexico, Acoma and Sky City, Santa Clara Pueblo (known as the “Singing Water Village”), and the Original Pony Express Station at Exit 211, fifty miles east of North Platte, Nebraska. North Platte holds some great memories, a town where we would grab lunch every summer on the way to the Wiwanyag Wacipi Wakan Ceremony, Wiwanyag meaning the sun, Wacipi being a dance, and Wakan translating to holy or sacred, or the Sacred Sun Dance Ceremony, pounding the ground on my teacher Phil’s tribe’s land at Crowdog’s Paradise on The Rosebud Reservation in south-central South Dakota. So many stories to tell and we’ll be telling them all, with upcoming posts planned on some of Shinzen’s extraordinary dharma talks, a December 2021 class with my teacher John Ashbrook, a visit to the Denver Museum of Natural History’s Ute exhibit (the people indigenous to the land that became Colorado and where we took the pic. above) up to the celebration of Vietnam’s Tet and the upcoming exciting Year of The Tiger, or Năm Con Hổ in Vietnamese.
Having just experienced a major. major purification and deep rewiring of our subconscious mind, there’s so much to express and so much goodness to relish as well as look forward to, we’ll be back in touch soon. Until then, blessings to each and every one of you my dear readers, and again Happy, Happy 2022. Toskha, Until the Next, P + R