Inaugural EM DOM
We had our inaugural day of mindfulness (DOM) here at Empty Mountain on Sunday August 14th. 15 folks RSVP’d and 10 were in attendance. What a fantastic turnout for our first program event! It was tempting to think we should wait until we had more infrastructure up and going before hosting our first DOM, but we’re so glad we went forth and just started right where we’re at. Thay teaches there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. We find the same is true with nourishing our small-spouting practice center of Empty Mountain: there is no way to Empty Mountain, Empty Mountain is the way.
Our DOM went from 10:00am-1:00pm. We started with a short 10-min session of sitting meditation, followed by a 30-min practice talk I gave, entitled “Roots & Wings.” (To listen to the talk online, please click here.) Mike then led a lovely 45-min session of outdoor walking meditation. We followed that with an open sharing circle and ended the day by enjoying a picnic-style lunch together. We held the day in silence (save for the sharing circle portion) and part-way through our lunch period sounded a bell, indicating that our shared silence was over and folks were welcome to chat. It was a truly lovely day, spent outside in the woods in the company of friends on the path of practice.
Since we’ll be heading back to Deer Park Monastery - our home away from home - sometime in October, where we’ll spend the winter months, our plan is to host monthly DOM’s when we return next spring. We hope you’ll join us!
What else? Whelp. We wound up having to send back the brains of our solar powered system a couple of weeks ago and fetch a new machine to operate our PV (photo votalic) panels. Our new unit just arrived and Mike spent the day on Tuesday getting it up and running. As we’re fans of naming certain inanimate objects, we’ve named the new unit She-Ra Princess of Power (She-Ra for short), which is both an affectionate nod to our childhood growing up in the 80’s and is extra fitting given that our batteries came branded with the name: Power Queen. Thank goodness for Mike doing all of the necessary research and figuring out this whole new world of solar power systems. It seems like magic to me.
Right now, we primarily use the power we’re generating from the sun to juice up our devices and our battery powered tools (drills, weed wacker, circular saw). We also use it for our electric tea kettle, which is my personal favorite use of it (our old Coleman campstove just takes forever to boil water for coffee in the morning). Once it starts getting darker out, I reckon we’ll use it for operating lights too. We have our eye on a mini propane fridge, so we don’t plan on needing power for food storage. Side note: gosh am I looking forward to the day when we get that - maintaining ice in coolers is a relatively easy and workable short-term solution but it’s also a big pain in the butt. Once we build a bigger cabin, we’ll get a stove with an oven, but that will likely be propane too. So our biggest draw will most likely continue to be powering up our electronics and tools. But time will tell!
One of the things I’m continuing to find intriguing is learning how little we really need to get by on, in terms of electricity use and also water consumption. While the rustic style of living we’re doing right now is at times really challenging, there is also a great pattern of simplicity to it that is satisfying and ease-producing. And while at some point we’ll get hooked up with satellite internet, it’s kind of nice (most of the time) not having cell service or wifi. Once we’re in the woods, we’re in the woods and that’s that. There’s less disbursement of energy without having the call and tether to the internet and all things electronic.
One of our shared fave things that we’ve been using electricity for is to power up Mike’s laptop so we can watch an episode of Kung Fu in the evening before bed, which was a 3-season show series that ran in the 1970’s. We recently bought the box set for a family member as a gift and decided that he wouldn’t mind if we watched it first before giving it to him. We just finished watching the first season (and passed those discs onto the person they were intended for) and are now onto season two. I was expecting the show to be rather hoaky and not very good but I was super wrong. I’ve been really enjoying it! And the Kung Fu master characters are just great.
So, yep. We’re living in the woods, running on solar power, and watching Kung Fu. In other words, we’re living the dream.