To day I’ve been occupied preparing for a series of introductory meditation sessions at the University of Alberta, which is quite close to the Priory. The first session is on Thursday at 3.00 p.m. One of the lay ministers here is a professor and he, along with a woman who teaches at the University, will be helping on Thursday and then running the rest of the sessions. Mike and I got our heads together this morning on the best balance of information and the actual practice of meditation. Students get talked at from dawn to dusk so I don’t want to fill them up with more information than is absolutely necessary. If they feel drawn to the practice they can always come round here for more instruction.
I feel a million miles away from 18 year olds although I can empathize with their situation. Many will be away from home for the first time. That kind of release from parental boundaries can go both ways; mad partying or sad casting around not really knowing where one fits in to the new scheme of things. We have quite a few students come for introductory instruction. They do it as part of their course work for “Religion 101” and I regard their time here as sowing seeds that may, or may not, ripen in the future. I love their open willingness to give meditation their ‘best shot’.
All day, between phone calls and other business, I’ve been back and forth in my mind about what literature to have available for these up coming sessions. Contemplating how many copies to make and where the price break comes in terms of number of copies made. My intention was to nip over to Staples, the office super (dooper) store, in the afternoon and get the work done. It is never a hardship to visit Staples; just ten minutes walk away with only Calgary Trail to negotiate. That is the main southbound road out of town, a veritable racetrack with at least five lanes to get across, however it is worth it. But, something was sticking about this whole copy project and in the end I headed out for a walk in the other direction.
Returning to the Priory somewhat red cheeked from the cold it dawned on me that we have a copier at the Priory! So without further ado I tackled the complexities of double sided copying, putting together leaflets etc. For those of you who may run a meditation group or are part of one there is a booklet in PDF format called The Eightfold Path of Buddhism on the obc web site. It is in both A4 and Letter size to accommodate the two different paper standards in North America and Europe. Rev. Master Daizui wrote the booklet and it is well worth the effort to print up a few copies to give away to people who ask questions like “what do you believe in?" “Why do you meditate?” and “why do you insist on keeping to the speed limit?” Ahem! that sort of thing.
Still scratching my head about how I managed to over look the Priory copy machine!
