Learnings From the Land
The swimming spot we frequent, a 5-min drive from EM
It’s been one full year since we purchased the land we now live off-grid in the woods on, which also serves as the small-sprouting seed ground for our mindfulness practice center Empty Mountain. Minus the 5+ months we spent at Deer Park Monastery over the winter months - a place we will return back to this coming November through March - we’ve been learning & living the off-grid life first hand for what amounts to 6+ months now.
This is, no doubt, a different way of living. In-town living vs on-the-land living, while not separate from one another, are two horses of a very different color.
Here are some of the things I’m learning from the land:
- getting on better terms with bugs
- going with the flow of the weather
- venturing more readily into the unknown
- not being as easily affronted by last minute changes of plans
- befriending don’t know mind
- not being as fixed in place with my own ideas/ways of doing things
- giving myself more grace & space
- being outside more feels really nice
- living more simply feels really nice
Here on these weekly EM blog posts, I’m interested in sharing about the logistics of off-grid living, and also about being a lay mindfulness practitioner in the world. And in true Zen practice accord, these two things are both tied together and also two individual threads. We’re off-gridding it, and also investing intentional time & energy into cultivating and strengthening a spiritual life.
Whatever it is we’re doing - whether it’s scary new or something we do every day- it’s worth approaching it with a growth-mindset. That is, it’s worth it if we have the desire to be actively involved in captaining our own ship on the open seas of living. One way I like to look at mindfulness practice as a spiritual pathway of living in the world, centers around being consciously attuned and intentionally involved with what’s happening in the here & now. In my way of thinking, being a mindfulness practitioner in the world means committing oneself to personal growth-work. It means approaching whatever is happening with a genuine willingness to feel into and experience the full breadth of what’s going on.
Knowing myself as well as I do, I can imagine what kind of year this last year could’ve been, were I not also a spiritual practitioner rooted in a mindfulness-based tradition. And the reason I can imagine it is because at certain times over the course of the last year, such things cropped up as: feelings of disconnection & loss over not being housed in town; thoughts centered around whether I have what it takes to live so rustically & remotely; pangs of frustration & deflation; fear; disorienting confusion & swells of overwhelm. Had I been untethered from a spiritual path, these troubling mind & feeling states, if left un-tended, would surely run amok, creating great difficulty & chaos in their wake.
In other words, I’m incredibly grateful that I have good teachers and good teachings that help guide, support, and nourish me. I’m grateful to have found a spiritual path that spoke to me at such an early stage in my adult life when I stumbled upon it (at age 22), and that I was, and still am, able & willing to dig the well deeper.
There is good medicine available on this practice path. With effort, close attention, and care, there is a rich opportunity that is available for those of us who are interested in developing such qualities as ease, joy, balance & contentment. To grow into a genuine comfort in our own skin.
It takes practice. It requires diligence. And fruits will manifest from our continued efforts. With consistent and ongoing practice, it’s impossible for them not to.
