A new feature for our newsletter: have news you'd like to share with the broader sangha in the newsletter? Just send your submission to newsletter@redcedarzen.org

"Helping the Homeless"-- and invitation to Red Cedar from Duane Jager of HomesNow Yes, you can help the homeless by building tiny homes. HomesNow is building a tiny home village for the unhoused and they need your help. Each structure costs $7,000 in materials and donations are needed. All labor is volunteer and more builders are needed. To donate, go to homesnow.org. or contact board chair, Doug Gustafson, at 360-224-3727 To help build, arrive any time from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Saturday at 3300 Northwest Avenue, Bellingham. Ask for building foreman Dennis Rensink or contact him at 360-820-2220. Whatever you can do or give will help. Thank you.  (Read Homesnow flyer.pdf for more details)

A reflection:

The breath in the breath.  The body in the body. Yes--the Sangha body in the Sangha body.  

Samish is a time for moving into stillness.  A time of openness and permeability.  As we move into each other, we allow a softness without distinct edges--and yet--it is a time, as Kanho Chris reflected, to take the backward step, and shine the light within...

Everyone and everything reflecting and holding our deepest intentions...What a gift--this coming together for ourselves and for each other...

~Deep gratitude for our teachers, for the hard-working staff, for our close community of practitioners who traveled from many places, and for the many forms of beings who were present with us throughout our days at Samish Summer 2025.

Thank you to Kanho Chris for the exquisite photos.

Desiree

Late June Sansui-ji Work Party; Sunday, June 29th; 9 am - 4 pm; We'll be deep cleaning and starting some of the setup that will enable us to move in in August.

Hike: Opening the Mountains; Saturday, July 12th; 8:30 am - 5 pm; One full day mountain hike to open the mountains to practice

Opening to Nature Walk: Old Growth Meditation; Saturday, August 2nd, 9:30 am - 3:30 pm; "Sitting with the Old Ones..."

First Weekly Sit at Sansui-ji temple. Wednesday, August 6th, 6:30-8:30pm.

One Day Sit; Sunday, August 10th; 7 am - 3 pm; Join us for a day of sustained, quiet practice together at Sansui-ji; followed directly with our Ordination Ceremony for Seishin Tyndall

Ordination Ceremony for Seishin Tyndall ; Sunday, August 10th, 3:30 - 5 pm; directly after our One Day Sit* see above; join us as Seishin receives their formal priest's robes and bowls and begins a life-long journey as a Soto Zen priest

Opening to Nature Walk: Lake Padden; Saturday, August 16th; 8 pm - 10 pm; a mindful, twilight walk around Lake Padden; 2 1/2 miles; slight elevation gain and loss

Opening Ceremony at Sansui-ji temple "Opening the Eyes of the Buddha". Saturday August 30th. 3pm optional work party, 5pm potluck dinner, 7pm ceremony and meditation.

Backpack: Mountains and Rivers Retreat; Saturday, September 6th, 1 pm through Thursday, September 11th, 7 pm; *this extended backpacking trip requires a phone interview about your experience and abilities to complete the registration process

Hike: Ptarmigan Ridge; Saturday, September 13th; 8:30 am - 5:00 pm; a gentle, high altitude hike in fall colors; sometimes crowded as it is a very popular public hike

Hike: Journey to the Source (Nooksack Cirque); Saturday, September 20th, 5 am - 7 pm; an intensive long day hike to the source of the Nooksack River *a phone interview is required to complete your application

Practice Period 2025 Application; Start: Wednesday, September 24th; End: Sunday, November 23rd; Join us for the Fall Practice Period! 

2025 Practice Period Opening Ceremony; Wednesday, September 24th, 6:30 - 8:30 pm; Sansui-ji

2025 Practice Period Opening Sesshin; Thursday, September 25th through Sunday, September 28th; Sansui-ji temple, 3 day sesshin with guiding teacher Nomon Tim Burnett and Shuso Junka Ken Oates

Shuso's Way Seeking Mind Talk; Saturday, September 27th, 10:30 am; Join us for the Shuso's first formal Dharma talk during our fall practice period

Ordination Ceremony for Myoki Raizelah Bayen; Sunday, September 28th; 10:30 am - 1 pm; join us as Myoki Raizelah receives her formal priest's robes and bowls and begins a life-long journey as a Soto Zen priest.

Shuso's Class; Starts Monday, September 29th, ends Monday, November 17th; 7 sessions; Online Zoom Zendo + Sansui-ji on Saturday, November 1st

Opening to Nature Walk: Heart Lake Circumambulation/Heart Sutra; Saturday, October 11th, 10 am to 1 pm; 3 miles, mostly level; chanting and walking the Heart Sutra

Hike & Ceremony: Closing the Mountains, Returning the Waters; Saturday, October 18th, 10 am - 4 pm; 5 mile day hike to close the mountains to practice

Samish Island Fall Sesshin 2025 - On the Island and on Zoom; Thursday, November 6th, 4 pm through Sunday, November 9th, 4 pm; join us for our fall 3-day residential retreat on Samish Island

Jukai Precepts Ceremony 2025; Sunday, November 9th; 11 am - 12:30 pm; Join us for the joyful ceremony of "Jukai"--receiving the Precepts

2025 Practice Period Closing Sesshin; Sunday, November 23rd, 7 am - 5 pm; Sansui-ji; our One Day Sit with Nomon Tim Burnett and Shuso Junka Ken Oates closes the fall practice period.

Shuso's Dharma Inquiry Ceremony; Sunday, November 23rd, 3 pm - 5 pm; join us for this important ceremony for the Shuso's training and the culmination of the Practice Period.  Offer a question from the heart for the Shuso.

Samish Island Sesshin 2026 - Save the Date! Next year's summer Samish-- Friday, June 12th - Saturday, June 20th!

I had to practice letting go this last week. I was pretty committed, and a bit attached, to starting to sit at our wonderful new temple in July. A month or so ago that did look possible!

But you'd think after these years of planning, and permits, and construction I'd know that it never goes at the pace you hope it will.

Consulting with the Practice Leaders and the Inos helped me release my grip. And feel the ease that comes with that release. 

So rather than sitting in an almost-done construction zone in July we'll stick around at Bellingham Unitarian for the month. Note that I myself will be mostly away on my annual July sabbatical, but look forward to Kanho Chris's leadership and some wonderful talks on our Zen women ancestors from our Practice Leaders.

Now it looks so very, very likely we'll be all good to move in in August. Look forward to our first weekly evening sitting on Wednesday August 6th (new day and time: now Wednesdays 6:30pm-8:30pm). Not only will those in person have the pleasure of the new space but Zoom-in folks can look forward to a much more immersive and interactive Zoom experience.

We'll warm the space up in August and officially open the temple on Saturday the 30th - save the date! Sansui-ji Opening Ceremony Saturday August 30th. (3pm short work party, 5pm potluck dinner, 7pm ceremony and meditation).

In the middle of August we'll celebrate the 3rd anniversary of our purchase of the building. It does take a while to create a temple it seems, despite what that koan says about Indra planting a blade of grass! A lot of time, effort, cooperation, patience, money, and just about everything else you can think of.

The wonderful thing I noticed as I released from my fixation on sitting at the temple in July was a lot more space for the deep, deep gratitude we all feel.

I really can't believe we have enough support from everyone to buy a building and do the major remodel we did to have this lovely temple. Words just can't express how very unlikely and amazing this all is.

A group that started 34 years ago as 4 people in my front porch is now a mature sangha with a temple! Wow.

If you haven't seen the place yet, or haven't seen it recently, we have a work party scheduled for this Sunday and there will probably be at least one or two more in July and August as we move in. We have a special page for these you can check: Zen Work.

Thank you so much for your trust in the Dharma, in Red Cedar, in me and the other teachers. What a miracle this all is.

Sansui-ji Exterior, June 2025

With love and a deep bow,

Nomon Tim

Our Creative Sangha Please enjoy two selections this month from writer Charlie Kyle.

Hy'shqe Koma Kulshan

~by Charlie Kyle

For this being-time uji (有時)

For this life to snowshoe White Salmon Road

For this snow the last few days

For this Tuesday in early March

For this brilliant sunshine and bluebird sky

For this wildness of the hoot hoot hoot hoot

For this small green fir bough lying on top of the snow 

For this quiet noise of snow falling off the branches

For this noise of a faraway jet reminding me of home 

For this view of Mt. Shuksan at the turn around

For this thermos of lentil soup

And most of all for you my partner Jeanne

Meditation and Rilke

~a short essay, also by Charlie Kyle

“Be more mindful,” by wife Jeanne said to me after I caused a ‘minor’ $1800 car accident recently. Wise words I ignored until I sat down at a mid-day meditation on Zoom a few days later and started to follow my breath. I started to realize how many days had gone by since I last meditated. 20 days? 30 days? Maybe more. I couldn’t remember the last time I meditated. But it was longer than any period over the past five years since I started meditating at the beginning of the pandemic.

Tim, the leader of the meditation, read this passage from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Tim continued through the first part of the meditation by talking about focusing on the questions without trying for the answers. Let the answers come to you, he said. During the next part of the meditation, we stood and did a slow walking meditation responding to Tim’s suggestion to appreciate your body.

I felt the aches and pains and the old injuries as I walked distributing my weight on three points at the bottom of each foot like I practiced during my physical therapy appointments. I was walking slowly back and forth in front of my desk and computer about six steps in each direction mindful of a relaxed but upright posture. I closed my eyes and remembered a feeling from 50 years ago — walking blind-folded guided by an acquaintance, learning to experience the world more by touch than sight. The result back then was not only noticing usually unnoticed details but also experiencing a renewed appreciation for the beauty of the visible world once the blindfold was off.

The second reading from this midday meditation was also by Rilke. I didn’t make a note of the source, but I remember it was about angels. With a little research, I found the Duino Elegies in the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland. The Duino Elegies consist of ten intensely spiritual poems.

Here’s the first stanza from The First Elegy, which is my best guess at the poem Tim read that day. The asterisks indicate the words have explanatory notes.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders

of Angels?* and even if one should suddenly

hold me to his heart I would fade back, touching

his intenser existence. For beauty* is nothing

but the beginning edge of the dread* we may barely endure,

object of our awe because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every Angel is dread.

*Angels: A famous letter from Rilke to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, contains as clear a statement of what he understood by the figure of the Angel as he ever made: “The ‘Angel’ of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angels in the Christian heaven (indeed has more in common with the angelic figures of Islam). [. . . It] is the creature in which the transformation of the visible into the invisible that we are undertaking already appears completed. For the Angel of the Elegies all the towers and palaces of the past are still existent because they have long since ceased to be visible, and the towers and palaces that still exist today in our world are for him already invisible, even though they still endure physically (for us). The Angel of the Elegies is that being which guarantees the recognition of a higher degree of reality in the realm of the invisible.—It is therefore “terrible” to us because we, who love and transform it, still cling to the visible. (13 November 1925)

*beauty . . . *dread: beauty may be seen as the visible world that has been (trans)formed and shaped (by the poet or by other artists), whilst dread is the invisible that has yet to be transformed. Cf. ‘Early Apollo’, II. 4-5 (p. 57)

From the explanatory notes it appears that Rilke believed metaphorically that angels could see what no longer exists, which is terrible for us because we cling to the visible. We can see beauty in the visible world especially when it has been formed by artists. But we dread the invisible task we all have of coming to terms with questions of our own individual existence either with or without a god and a heavenly host of angels.

I’ve always sort of believed in angels in the same way I believe in ghosts, spirits and an afterlife. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m not counting on it. As a kid I believed I had a guardian angel even as I doubted the existence of God. When I climbed up a tree farther than I knew I should, I believed my guardian angel protected me. And when I went to bed at night my guardian angel protected me from the monsters in my closet and the other strange goings of my mind in the dark. One time when I had a fever I thought the little plastic figures I saved from Cracker Jack boxes were alive, dancing around on my window ledge to the feverish sound in my head.

I was scared but not to point of hiding my head under the covers and not watching the show.

~

~Charlie Kyle writes and lives in the traditional territory of the Lummi and Nooksack Peoples near Bellingham Bay. He shares in the responsibilities for their homeland where we all live today.

Whatcom Faith Community Immigrant Support Contributed by Carrie McCarthy  Red Cedar is one of 32 faith communities coming together to help immigrants in Whatcom County. The Whatcom Faith Community Immigrant Support (WFCIS) is a network drawn together to support immigrant rights and to provide support for immigrant families. Requests may include donating food and supplies or participating in an event. If you'd like to help out, please contact Carrie McCarthy: carolyn@carolynmcc.com Board News At our annual meeting on Saturday, May 31st, the board presented updates on finances, introduced the board members and officers and had a lively conversation with the gathered sangha members. The Board would like to announce another newly nominated board member, Ariel Paulenich.  Our by-laws call for a 30-day comment period on board nominations. Please offer any comments by June 30 to board@redcedarzen.org or you may submit an anonymous suggestion at our new Sangha Suggestion Box. Volunteering Corner   Stay tuned for some new opportunities announced by Ariel--coming up very soon-- Our Volunteer Coordinator Ariel Paulenich is the person to reach out to if you have a volunteering offer or a volunteering need at Red Cedar.  See also the Committees & Volunteering page on the website.

A gathering of 25 sangha members joined Reizan Bob Penny and Nomon Tim at Hidden Mountain Zendo on May 10th to celebrate Reizan Bob's entrustment as a lay teacher of Zen at the conclusion of an overnight retreat at Hawk Meadow Farm in central Whatcom County.

Nomon shared that this fully empowers Bob to deepen his leadership and teaching with the Wilderness Dharma Program. 

You can enjoy Bob's wonderful Dharma talk reflecting on his life in practice given that morning on the website.

Great congratulations, Reizan Bob!

Celebrating Reizan Bob's Lay Entrustment at Hidden Mountain Zendo (in a yurt!)

Opening to Nature Walk: 100 Acre Wood; Saturday June 7th; please join us for a mindful walk through the woods; 2.5 miles of easy terrain in this wonderful extension of Fairhaven Park.

June Sansui-ji Work Party; Sunday, June 8th; 9 am; 2509 Cedarwood; painting, cleaning, and a variety of tasks.

Samish Island Sesshin 2025; join us for our annual sesshin with Zoketsu Norman Fischer on Friday, June 13th through Saturday June 21. This is a beautiful, silent retreat on the grounds of the Samish Island Campground; see details for full info. 

Opening to Nature Walk: Stimpson Family Nature Reserve; Saturday, June 28th; 7-10:30 am; a mindful early morning walk through old-growth forest; 4.9 miles; 300 ft total elevation gain.

Weekly Practice Moves to Sansui-ji: Wednesday July 2nd; new time and place for our weekly weekday evening practice time. Wednesdays 6:30pm - 8:30pm.

Hike: Opening the Mountains; Saturday, July 12th; 8:30-5:30; full day mountain hike; above tree-line near Mount Baker; uphill the whole way, 7 miles round trip.

Opening to Nature Walk: Old Growth Meditation; Saturday, August 2nd; 9:30-3:30; 1/4 mile and level (stepping over a few big logs) Meditation in the old-growth forest, stopping at Nooksack falls for sack lunch.

One Day Sit; Sunday August 10th; 7-3; one day retreat with breakfast and lunch provided, at Sansui-ji--followed immediately by a priest ordination ceremony for Seishin Tyndall.

Ordination Ceremony for Seishin Tyndall: Sunday August 10th; at end of one day sit; this special ceremony for Seishin to receive their formal priests robes and bowls and begin a life-long journy serving sangha and the world as a Soto Zen priest.

Temple Opening Ceremony - Saturday August 30th. Save the date. Details to follow.

Samish Island Fall Sesshin 2025: Thursday through Sunday, November 6-9. Our Fall Residential sesshin at the Samish Island Retreat Center. Registration is now open!

Dear Friends, 

Our last sangha home was a leased space on Forest Street on the edge of downtown Bellingham. We moved there from a rented room at the Masonic Lodge a block or so away in 2007. We had a wonderful procession in September of that year to move our altar, a Buddha and a few bells to have our first service in the relatively finished downstairs area of our new Red Cedar Dharma Hall. The upstairs was a blank canvas - a burned out shell of what had once been a church social hall. The next 6 months would find us remodeling that space completely: adding floors, lights, heat, walls. We created a beautiful space for practice. It was a miracle.

 

Procession to Red Cedar Dharma Hall on Forest Street, November 2007 

The Zendo at Red Cedar Dharma Hall on Forest Street, 2009

We all remember what was happening in early 2020. As everything was starting to shut down for Covid and the future looked very uncertain our landlord at Forest Street was insisting on a significant rent increase. We loved our place. It was our home. Thousands of hours of meditation had happened there in 13 years. Many retreats and cermonies. Jukai and ordinations. I was installed at Guiding Teacher of the sangha there in 2017.

Sangha Procession leaving Forest Street, September 2020

Like so many groups we continued all online through the magic of Zoom. This even freed me up to follow my heart to California for 6 months at the start of 2021 and remain fully engaged in sangha life. And sometime in early 2021 an idea was born: rather than finding another leased home in Bellingham might it be possible to raise enough money to purchase our own place? A fundraising campaign was born. We called it "Our Journey Home." A lot of hard work by so many in the sangha and so many generous donors later and we had another miracle on our hands: what we hoped was enough money to make a down payment on a building we could make our new home. The "Zoom Boom" real estate market in town at that time created even more challenge. I remember thinking to myself: "it's amazing we raised this much money, and it's amazing that it might not be enough!" Luckily it was. We purchased our building at 2509 Cedarwood Ave in August 2022. It wasn't until well into the purchase process that we realized how oddly perfect at new home for Red Cedar Zen Community on Cedarwood Avenue was!

Our Journey Home has led us to a home but our 1980 office building needed a remodel to become a Zen Temple. The scope of that work gradually dawned on us. At first we wondered if we could simply pull out of all of the little offices and paint. But the geography of the building just wasn't quite right. And so the major remodel we've all been watching and helping with was launched in earnest in November 2024.

Our first work party in the zendo-to-be, January 2025

Sansui-ji Exterior, May 30th, 2025

But now, at last, the real miracle of Our Journey Home is coming to its conclusion. There's a good bit of work to finish up the remodel, but we expect to be ready to come home to Sansui-ji, Mountains and Waters Temple, with our first weekly zazen meeting there on Wednesday July 2nd.

Words can't quite express how much I'm looking forward to practicing together at Sansui-ji, Nomon Tim p.s. at first our current weekly practice will simply move from Thursdays 7pm-9pm to Wednesdays 6:30pm-8:30pm. In the Fall look for our weekly Sunday program and many other new opportunities to practice to follow. We'll keep the website updated with the latest news!

We are getting so close! The professionals are starting to wrap up their work and the final stages of finishing the building are...up to us. It's happening. We hope to do a "soft opening" at the end of May with our Annual Meeting. Our April 27/28 work parties were a huge success. We've laid our zendo floor. This weekend we're ramping up to lay our Cloud Hall and dokusan room floors! Join us if you can. Saturday May 3rd Work Party  9am to 3pm Sunday Morning May 4th Work Party 9am to 1pm Come join us for floor laying, landscape work, and yes the opportunity for more painting!