Cooking for Buddhists in Das Book

We're back in Texas, getting ready for another retreat. Everyone will arrive on Friday and then we get to start cooking 3 meals a day for 27 people plus a special, separate meal for the Lama. I love it here so much. We're about 45 minutes west of Austin in this ranch house/retreat center perched atop a canyon rim. The flowers aren't out yet but the butterflies are, and last night the fullish moon cast its giant light over the field of oaks that surrounds us, and I almost cried because this is the last retreat we'll be cooking for.

I wish I could go to school and continue coming here twice a year and cooking for this marvelous bunch of people. There's something about this place and these people that brings my best self to the surface - my hardest worker, my most patient countenance, my most compassionate radiance. But to take two weeks off each semester to fly down here and shop and cook and chant and meditate - well, it seems like it would dovetail nicely with my studies but obviously it wouldn't.

I'm always nervous before it all starts. Did I buy enough cream? Did I spend too much on carrots? Do I have enough non-tomato dishes to serve the woman who's allergic to tomatoes on the lasagna/spaghetti/minestrone days?

But it always turns out alright. Better than alright, fantastic, rewarding, enlightening. And these people, this place, is part of what landed me at Naropa, in the counseling program. This is the first place where I've ever felt myself moved to believe in a "religion". Even in high school when I desperately wanted to be a Christian, believe in God, go to youth group and let some higher power guide my choices, I knew in the back of my mind that I was just trying to belong to something that I had utterly no faith in.

But Buddhism is different. Buddhist principles already shape my life. There's no giant leap of faith for me to believe that we all embody natural great perfection and that to strive for it and fail is just as beautiful as striving for it and achieving it. That self-improvement is a lifelong process, perhaps a many-lived one, that "Sangha" or community is as important as any other aspect of life and death.

Oh boy, here we go. Time to go shopping, to fill up two shopping carts with 15 bunches of kale and 17 bunches of bok choy and 10 pounds of plum tomatoes and explain to the girl checking us out that we're cooking for 30 vegetarians for a week when she gives us a dubious look.

<3