As explained in the introduction, I got permission at the beginning of my three-year Tibetan Buddhist retreat to keep in touch with the New Hampshire sangha by means of a monthly letter that would be posted on their website. When I was in retreat, I didn’t think of it as a “blog.” I just wrote a new “post” every once in a while (once a month for most of Year 1, much more sporadically as retreat progressed), mailed it to Arlo/Orlan, and never saw the result. I added my retreat graduation speech last spring and occasionally thought about continuing….but I wanted to reorganize the whole thing and it just seemed too complicated and amorphous, like a lot of things immediately following three years of one-thing-at-a-time. Plus life is very busy at the monastery!

Almost exactly a year back into Big World (more to say about that sometime; I’m never really sure which one is Big World) things suddenly clicked into place and I felt reoriented and ready to tackle the “blog,” among other things I hadn’t been able to focus on during re-entry. So, with Arlo’s help, I’ve restructured it a bit and added TWO new posts (including this one), and hope to check in regularly, as frankly there is a lot to catch up on.

Appearance and organization will probably never be quite what I envision. (Noble Truth Number One.) For the moment, it’s a triumph that I managed to customize the header photo with a shot of late summer 2012 Joe-Pye Weed along River Road in Richmond, Virginia, just across the road from the Pony Pasture Rapids of the James River, near Jean and Bruce’s house. That made me want to soften the colors of the header text….but if there’s a way to do that, I haven’t found it yet.

Anyway, back to work, and I hope you are having a good day, too.