Голоса трёхлетнего ретрита (2013, разные места, Аризона), занятие 8

[Speaker 1]
See, you guys weren't all supposed to come to this. This was an optional talk. Now I'm more nervous.

But I show it in a different way than maybe other people. I get silly and giddy when I'm nervous. So, sorry.

Okay, so, could we hit the lights? Might make this show up a little bit better. So, this is a talk about the future of Diamond Mountain.

In the great tradition that got started yesterday, I didn't have time to rehearse very much, so I have notes. First, I'll just tell you who I am. I'm Nicole Davis.

I've been at Diamond Mountain for six years. Diamond Mountain started about ten years ago. So, I've been here for a while.

And I am, right now, the operations manager. So, what does that mean? That means I'm in charge of the upkeep, the repairs of the facilities.

So, buildings, roads, vehicles, stuff like that. And my trusty assistants, like Rob mentioned, are my husband, Brian, and Joe. And then, I also wanted to introduce Dennis, over here in the green shirt.

Who is awesome. And so, if I make the building, Dennis makes the beautiful things around the building. He's our landscape manager.

And I really appreciate his beautiful work. The rose garden that he got started outside just makes everybody so happy coming in here. And there'll be more of that to come in the future.

So, thank you very much, Dennis. So, this right here is kind of like the intro slide of my talk because it's like a gateway. This is like an entrance to a beautiful place.

And inside this door is a courtyard. Some of you might have been there. This is Royal Palms in Phoenix.

So, what are we here to talk about today and why? We're here to talk about the future of Diamond Mountain. I like my little flitty light.

So, why are we talking about this now? Well, we're getting ready to welcome our retreatants out of retreat in just under a year. So, right now, this place is obviously occupied.

We're very busy doing something very important. But in about a year, that's going to transition. So, these days, we are looking forward to what's going to happen next here.

So, that's why we're here now talking about this. So, like I said, we've been here in this location for 10 years now. And Geshe-la talked a lot last night about how we play a role in a larger vision, a larger Dharma movement.

And so, what is Diamond Mountain's role? I've seen three kind of aspects to what Diamond Mountain has to offer. One, Geshe-la spent time talking about last night, is the classes that have been offered and developed here, the teachers that have been trained here.

So, this is a photo, since you can't see it that well, of Geshe-la teaching in this very room. The second aspect is the service aspect. This is a photo of volunteers who built this very building.

So, service in building the buildings, serving the retreats, and serving others in various ways, going out into the community and serving. The third component is the practice. Practicing what we've learned in those classes, getting down on our cushions, getting on our mats, getting into retreat.

So, these are kind of the three things we have to offer at Diamond Mountain, and more. I just wanted to mention briefly at the start here, you know, we have been through a very difficult time. And I just wanted to acknowledge, you know, at the beginning of my talk, I personally have been very affected by what happened last year.

It was a tragedy for me to lose Ian. It was very sad for me. And has definitely affected my life.

And I also think has affected Diamond Mountain in a very big way. And obviously, everybody here is probably familiar, but one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up was just to say, like Rob said yesterday, I'm here if anybody wants to come and talk about that. I'm not going to talk about this in this talk any further than what I'm about to say, but please come and talk to me.

Please get my contact information. We are not opposed. I think the whole board is available to talk about it.

And we really do think it's important. We aren't in any way trying to pretend that this didn't happen. And in fact, we have been working very hard to learn what we can from what happened.

And to try to let the oaks continue to take root here. And be the Bodhisattva peacocks who, when the poisonous plant comes, you can munch it up and you can actually transform it and make something flourish out of that. So don't think that we haven't been affected or that we aren't talking about it.

We are trying to do something about it. We're trying to actually be the change that you want to see in the world. Right?

So, just wanted to mention that. So here's one of the things we have done about that, actually. We've created a work-study program.

It's called Sunche, which means joyful effort. It's one of the six perfections. So you can come here now.

There's actually more support for volunteers to come here. There are actually meals provided. And there's always been service here.

But now we're providing more support for that. And we've also, when problems do come up here, this is how we're supporting a positive experience at Diamond Mountain with this work-study program. But we're also, when negative things do come up with somebody maybe is having a small issue here, we have strengthened our behavior policy and we are actually being more vigilant about trying to make sure that everyone is as safe and healthy and happy here as possible.

So those are kind of the two things that we have already done and worked very, very hard to change. And you can feel a major change in the atmosphere. I like to call it our spiritual growth spurt.

And I think that we can actually dedicate that. I personally can actually dedicate that to Ian and to Lama Christy and to their future happiness and continuing on here to do great things. In looking forward, we have to ask ourselves, what do we have here?

What does Diamond Mountain uniquely have here? I listed some of the things. We've got a dedicated volunteer staff and an amazing dedicated volunteer board.

We've got highly trained practitioners. Geshe-la talked a lot about this yesterday. But we have Geshe-la, and I don't mean to say that in a cheesy way.

Geshe Michael is dedicated to this place and I very much deeply appreciate that. He's an amazing spiritual guide and he is passing on the authentic teachings and helping us to become capable to pass those on as well. So these are our resources that we have spiritually and we should not overlook them.

We also have physical resources. We've got a thousand acres of beautiful desert where you can go and do a silent retreat. And that's rare.

And that's needed. We've got this building. We've got our accompanying bathroom facilities out there.

And we've got 30 retreat cabins. This is huge. And we've got Dennis' beautiful garden starting.

So that's what we have. So when the Diamond Mountain Board sat down and looked at what do we have and where do we want to go from here? Where can we go?

Where should we go? How can we serve the needs that we see in the world, the spiritual needs, with our physical facilities and our spiritual resources that we have here? We kind of said to ourselves, okay, we have done a great accomplishment.

This is a picture of the retreat valley. You can't see very well, but there are 30 cabins in there. And we've done that.

We've built those cabins. It's remarkable. It's fantastic.

But we aren't stopping here. We have achieved something amazing and we're going to go to the next phase now. So what you guys have, some of you, sorry, I ran out of paper, so there probably aren't enough of those blue handouts, but I passed out, it's called a business plan.

We called it a business plan that the board has accepted, actually, to move forward in three phases for Diamond Mountain's future. So what we can offer is really unique, like I've been saying. I mean, we've got this desert solitude.

We've got these retreat cabins. We've got these amazing teachings and teachers. And this is a place where people can come and receive their training and practice to become even more highly qualified to help pass these teachings on.

So the idea we're proposing is to be mainly a retreat center where group retreats, individual retreats, and also one idea I have that I haven't actually run by the board yet is teaching people how to do retreat. Very hands-on. If you are nervous about doing your first retreat, you could have a retreat buddy here.

Maybe it's someone who's done a three-year retreat. Maybe it's someone who's done six one-month retreats. And they can sit with you and have one-on-one meetings.

It's very exciting what we could offer here because I know the first time I did a retreat, you don't know what you're doing and you have to go do it alone. So have a retreat guidance counselor or something who works with you beforehand and that you can then connect with afterwards to debrief and learn more for next time. So this is the kind of thing we're thinking about just because of our location.

It makes sense to use the retreat aspect. So that's our proposed main focus. Of course, there'll still be classes here that's part of the group retreats.

We're already offering ACI classes right now. We have gone through more than half of them during the three-year retreat and we're planning on finishing the 18 during the three-year retreat. And actually, this is also another one of my little pet ideas.

Since I'm the one up here, I get to tell my pet ideas. And it came from Geshe-la actually in business classes years ago. We have this facility we can offer for people to do retreat.

Well, then we can actually organize, we call them charity retreats, where we have a group of people who would otherwise not be able to go away, not be able to get away from their, maybe it's single mothers, maybe it's people who just came out of prison. These were some of the ideas Geshe-la threw out a few years ago. And I love that idea myself.

I'd love to see this place used for people to come who otherwise wouldn't get to experience that. And not that they have to sit in a Buddhist class, that they just come here and they just experience some degree of solace and peace that this place has to offer. And I think that if we had the spiritual retreats going on, we could then either find grants or we could use some of the funding that we'd have to charge for people to come here and do retreats to sponsor these charity retreats.

And I love that myself. I'm really interested in that, especially elderly people. This is another group I'm especially interested in helping to do retreat as you get older and what is going to be happening as your body ages and how can you use these practices to not be afraid, but to actually be at peace with yourself.

So right now, Geshe-la joyfully raises pretty much all the money for this place and I know he'd go on doing that. But one other thing that I want to talk about today is something we can do as an offering. The proposal is to make a mostly self-financing retreat center.

So what does that mean? That means we make an offering to Geshe-la that he doesn't have to fundraise, even though he wants to and he enjoys it, but he will fundraise for other virtuous projects and we can actually offer that to him. We can come up with a plan to make this place financially sustainable for the long term.

And I really love that idea. I think it's a beautiful offering. He has offered the conception of this place and the funding of it thus far.

Can we, by just charging to meet the basic costs, can we actually sustain this place financially? And I think we can. And there are some numbers at the back of your packets there that we ran that suggest that we actually can do that.

So the quality, because of the lighting, the quality is not so great, so I'll just go through these really quickly. Physically, so what do we want to build physically? That's kind of what role we want to serve spiritually in the world.

What do we need to do physically? We want to create a place of light, of beauty. Where when you walk in, it inspires you to reach higher for your goals.

That curiosity, that opening and grace and awe and that peace and that comfort of a refuge. This is, to me, a picture of a little refuge. That's what that does to my heart, that picture and that place.

I've actually had the privilege of going there. And so you can't show this in pictures and you can't describe it in words, right? I've got some pictures up here.

You can go to these beautiful places, but I think while I'm showing these photos, just try to think for yourself, where is a place that you've walked into and you have just felt that inspiration, that feeling of awe. And so I thought maybe to get that feeling across a little bit, I would just share a little story of one of those places for me. When I was a little girl, I used to have, and I didn't even realize it until I was older, that I was having a recurring dream about this incredibly beautiful place.

It's like a little nook under some viney trees. And as I was growing up, that place was in me. I saw it in my dreams.

I think it gave me a lot of inner strength and a lot of inner peace. And it's that kind of place that we want to be. We want to physically build a place that could be something like that for someone.

When I was about 20, I hiked the Grand Canyon for the first time and I actually saw the place.

[Speaker 2]
And I went inside and just sat there. And I think it was the first time I ever meditated. It wasn't a formal, I didn't know anything about meditating, but I was at my inner sanctuary.

And that, I think, is what we want this place to be.

[Speaker 1]
So if you have a place like that, then try to bring it up in your heart and we'll look at some pictures of other places. But the pictures, like this quote says, you have to have felt it to really know what I'm talking about. And I wish I could show it to you in a slideshow, but I can't.

So we're going to be looking at different architectural styles that are inspiring us for what we might want to build here. So here's another Royal Palms picture. And this is Tlacopaque in Sedona.

It's an artist, what would you call it, artist community that is now somewhat of a shopping center, artist shopping center. But it's modeled after a Mexican, an old Mexican Pueblo village. And it's just gorgeous.

So there are different design aspects. You don't have to read them because we're just going to see them. So arches, gateways, beautiful gateways.

And there was a fountain there too. These beautiful doors. And walkways, covered walkways.

Little nooks. Just small places where one or two people can sit and just really enjoy. Enjoy the moment.

I love the use of color in these architectural styles. It's got the bold colors in the tiles and then there are all these soothing colors on the walls. And the art.

There are just sculptures everywhere in places like this that we've been looking at. And the plants and the water features. And these are, by the way, the background pictures on some of these quotes are from around Diamond Mountain.

So taken by our own John back there. And also the fire, they've got the water features, the fireplaces, just amazing places. This is actually one of the places you can stay.

So one of the future hopes here would be to have more housing down around here that would be just small little places that people could stay for these retreats. And again, the vegetation. The plants is really what makes it.

And this is the parking lot of Tlacopaque, but look at the trees. It's this old sycamore grove. The plants in these places are really, that's why I wanted to introduce Dennis at the beginning because this is crucial.

I might be able to get us a building, but he and his crew are the ones that are going to be really putting the touches on it. So I wanted to show you guys one project that we want to start now. This is a rainwater urn that Dennis has designed and proposed.

This is a picture from a book that he's getting the design from. And just a beautiful urn. So this is what it would look like here at Diamond Mountain.

[Speaker 2]
I love that picture.

[Speaker 1]
So right outside the bathrooms, you would walk outside the bathrooms and you'd basically see that view. Except Dennis might not always be standing there with a stick. I don't know.

So this is a beautiful piece and it would actually be, in a sense, our first sculpture. Well, not our first. We have some sculptures outside, but it would be our first new sculpture.

So I wanted to bring this up because as we grow, we want to make sure that we do our best to give back to the earth or not take more than we need to. And so this building here actually doesn't have rainwater collection. We could, with this urn, we could actually collect all the rainwater from this building and that would be enough water to water all the plants that we already have.

So that would be really cool. So just a little pitch that we just need $1,000 matching grant. Diamond Mountain has pledged $1,000.

If others also donated $1,000, we would be able to build this urn. So this is a picture from my field area in Tibet. That's actually in Tibet there.

So I feel like we have just talked about the castles in the sky. We've looked at beautiful photos and inspirations. Now how do we actually put the foundations under them?

How do we actually get busy and do it? So let's see what other places that inspire us have done to make themselves last. This is Sara Monastery actually in Tibet.

And this is a place that has endured. It's endured bombing. It's endured invasion of the country.

And its main spiritual teachings have moved to places like this and to Sara in India. But they are enduring. This is something that I look to as an inspiration for it.

We want to see that these teachings, these beautiful ideas don't die out with us. We want to create places and programs that will keep them in the world. So let's look to places that have done that in the past.

So what do we actually need in the future? The first thing is we really need a kitchen. We really need a main central kitchen.

And what would go along with that kitchen would be a dining facility, indoor-outdoor dining. I feel really strongly, and I think the board also agrees, we don't want to really move forward too much without things like rainwater collection, greywater, solar. We want those to be components of what we're doing.

We need to work on the transportation and the roads here. Not going to talk much about that, but I'll just say that. It eats up trucks to get to the retreat cabins.

And then in terms of management, this is another change. I'm just talking about ideas for the future. I wanted to mention a couple of other changes that you'll see in the proposal.

We actually proposed to expand the management staff to have a separate board and management staff. On-site management staff, director, operations, things like that, right now overlap a lot. So in the future, what we're hoping, because it would help make it more democratic, it would help just get more people involved, would be to have a board that is sort of the driving visionary and also bottom-line body, administrative body.

But then you have your day-to-day staff, and the board really doesn't make decisions about the day-to-day activities the staff do. And the board is kind of a check-in, checks and balances for the staff. So just to mention that.

We're also looking forward to stipends, offering small stipends for a small, at least to start a small core group of staff. And this is a big change for Diamond Mountain. We've always run solely on volunteers, and that is such a beautiful thing, and I don't want to downplay that at all.

But looking forward, we said we think that it will be more sustainable if we can actually pay a core group of people that will be here and really embrace this place and also be able to live in a decent, you know, decent living at the same time without having to do all kinds of tricks to be able to live out here. And then, like I mentioned, future, future would be additional housing down here. But the crucial point is really the kitchen facility.

So I just made up a number, $200,000. I really don't know. I have to tell you.

I'm working on getting estimates, but I really don't know. But I think it's going to come in around that or more. It's not a small project because the equipment you need inside is expensive.

All of the, you know, ducting and mechanical stuff is very expensive. We have to meet commercial building standards, so we're going to need to have a lot of professionals involved, maybe less volunteer labor than we could do with the dining hall later. We can probably do that more in a volunteer way.

But this, we're going to have to have a lot of contractors and subcontractors and things involved so that we do it right and safely and everything. And we've got a ambitious timeline. We would like to have it built by, I would like to have it, you know, we would like to host our first large group retreat here in November 2014.

We've talked about that anyway. It's possible to do that first large group retreat without the kitchen facility, but if we want to aim towards that, I think that would be wonderful. So I just put these up here.

I actually didn't run them by anybody. I just put them up there. Raise your hand if I'm talking out of line here with these numbers and dates.

But I just wanted to let people know that this is crucial. We need this facility, actually, if we're going to go forward with the proposal to become a world-class retreat center that can really serve the function that we need to serve, that we want to serve, we really need this kitchen building. It's not practical to drive in, bless Chas for doing it this time, food that someone prepared in Tucson and driving it out here and, you know, serving it on the folding tables.

It works to a certain degree, but when you have a 10-day retreat, it gets a little tough to do that. And, you know, we want to make a place that lasts, like I was talking about. So how do we do that?

You know, we have to dream. We have to use our imaginations. We have to find that beauty and that passion in our hearts, and we have to then put the money where the mouth is or whatever and actually get on the ground and do it.

So that's Mount Kailash, the jewel mountain in Tibet. So where do we want to put this building? We can actually walk out there if we have time.

This is the building we're in right now. That's the bathrooms. This is the flagstone path to the handicap parking pad, and the parking lot is here.

So this is one idea. I like this idea best for where to put the building. This would be the kitchen right here.

This would be the future dining hall. And what we would do is we would just shift the parking lot. You know, the parking lot would move to here.

And we eventually... I think I have pictures that Dennis made of... Dennis made these maps.

He's awesome. Here's, like, an idea. You know, those green circles are plants.

He's got a courtyard in there. This is a courtyard. This is a covered walkway.

So this is kind of showing the potential of what we could do. If the building was there, we can build around it, right? Here's another, sort of, one of Dennis' ideas of how we could use this space.

So we'd have a large, you know, beautiful entry here, a gate, you know, a gorgeous entranceway. And you'd come right to the side of the dining hall. There'd be an outdoor dining patio.

There'd be some kind of a park, you know, type of a place there. Maybe we could put a small classroom over here someday. Again, here's the temple and the bathrooms.

And maybe that's a covered walkway. This is my cartoon drawing of what we could do for an interior design of the kitchen. I really do have someone helping me who's a professional.

But this is what I sent him, and he hasn't sent me back the professionalized version of it yet. So I'm not going to go into it in detail, but if you want to see it, that exists. That's about as far as we are with the actual, sort of, what does it look like.

But that drawing actually had a lot of input. We got input from people who work in kitchens all the time. We got input from different builders and stuff.

So it does have a lot of wisdom and hours of thinking into it, even though it's kind of drawn with my pens at my little cartoon version. So what I thought we could do, if people wanted to, and I have a clipboard, but I don't have a pen, is that if people wanted to sign up for helping with the building itself, you could be, and not necessarily in a physical way, but you could be on the fundraising team for a certain part of the building. So the groundbreaking team raises money and helps us with the first phase, which is breaking ground, getting in the foundation, getting in the floors.

Or you could be on sort of the skeleton team, the bones of the building, which is the walls and the roof. You could be on the team that does the interior design. And again, not doing it, but being on the team that's sort of, especially for fundraising, you'd be a team of people that is out there raising money for that phase of the project.

The equipment that goes into it, and the environmental components. We want to do solar hot water heaters, we'd like to, of course, do rainwater catchment, things like that. So that could be another team of people.

Or you can just sign up and say, I'll help. You don't have to be on a team, but if you wanted to, when you come here again in a couple years when the building's built, and you can say, I was on the team that got those walls up. And it kind of feels good, right?

You're part of that team that did that. So I like that idea. Again, I kind of just made it up and made a clipboard, but there it is.

So if you want to sign up to help, the main thing we need is help fundraising. Geshe-la offered to do the fundraising, we can help him. So that's the main thing we need.

I think in terms of actually building it, we'll definitely be having a few volunteers helping, but the main thing is getting the funding for it, because a lot of the work will be done by the people who live here and local people that we hire. So these are just other ways you can be part of the future of Diamond Mountain. You can come now.

We need help now, in the next year. That's the immediate future. You can join our volunteer program.

You can serve the retreat. There's less than a year left, so get your karma now. It's amazing.

Venerable Jigme had kindly made a website for an alumni association, and she's going to be the spokesperson for that, the point person for that? She may be. Another great idea to have an alumni association for people who've studied at Diamond Mountain, who've been part of Diamond Mountain.

There is a website. I didn't get it to put on there, but it's in your playbill. Oh no, sorry.

The website is not. The email address to contact Venerable Jigme to talk about the alumni association is there, and there will someday be a website launched. The retreatants are going to be coming out in less than a year.

That's the next major topic for us on the board is we need to support them as they make that transition. If you want to be involved in that, that would be wonderful too. Again, just to recap on the rainwater earn, we're looking for $1,000 for a matching sponsorship for that.

We can capture the rainwater from this building and put it on the gardens we already have, which would be great, and the kitchen facility. We'll just end with a... This is one of my actually beautiful places that was the day I decided to take refuge that I was there at that waterfall by myself.

I thought to end with that as just another... to plant in your heart the wish to help make a place like that for people, a place where people's hearts will open and where they can see that they have the potential to do things that they maybe never dreamed to do. That's what we're trying to do here.

I hope you'll be part of it. I love that you all came. It's wonderful to have everybody here.

We live here all the time and it's kind of quiet sometimes. It's great to have everybody here. Thanks for coming.

Anybody who wants to, I'm going to lead a group out to walk out just into the parking lot. It's 142, so we have a little time before the 2 o'clock that I was supposed to end at. If you want to, walk with me and we'll just have four people stand on the four corners of where we want to put the building and then you can see if you like it.

You're welcome to join us.