Love
is invisible
can only be experienced in the heart, now.
If this is true,
that I can only love now, every now,
and that loving is a choice, not a memory
then I can choose to bring to myself
the experience of love.
I can choose
to feel in my heart
the total nourishment of unconditional love.
I can choose it
now
with my breathing I can choose it
for my self
for myself.
Perhaps this is my only best choice ever
to give the gift of filling my heart
this heart here
with soft and gentle
love.

Two years ago I attended a grow-your-own shiitake mushroom workshop. Here is our second batch!

Hi Friends!

It’s spring! It feels like time to update y’all on Sanctuary. We’ve missed seeing our friends, but are still needing to get simpler and simpler. “Just this.”

Personal Retreats and Bed & Breakfast Please don’t forget that our guest room is available for personal retreats and B&B, if you have need. We had a lovely woman from MA come last weekend. She needed space and time to write. She set up her laptop on the platform at the end of the living room, with a shoji screen to give her/us a little privacy. We all really enjoyed the quiet and a little of each other’s company.  So if you want a few days to yourself in our Sanctuary, please be our guests. The rate is $120/weekend night for B&B, $135 for retreats and that includes 3 simple meals. We can accommodate a couple, of course, in the comfy queen sized bed.  If you want to come work in the garden this spring in exchange for a sleep-over, that could be arranged! Oh, and we will donate $10 for each night our guest room is occupied, to the 6 Tibetan orphans whom we help to support in India. We have been collecting donations for them for three years now, mostly when Geshe-la was teaching (Tibetan Buddhist monk). The children are doing well at school in Dharamsala,India.

New Website My son, Will Huenink, has helped me (actually, he did it and I asked questions…) update our website. The new feature is a blog, which I hope will be operative soon. I tried to start it this morning, but I guess I have to ask Will some more questions, because it would not publish my post. Hmmm.  Stay tuned. www.sanctuaryvermont.com

Free Polarity Massage Workshop A few weeks ago our friend Jane Collister led a workshop here on a Saturday morning. We had 9 participants, a full house, and we all enjoyed learning polarity balancing and receiving it at the same time. Jane will be offering this for free from time to time. She has a private practice in Putney and Chester, and can be reached at 802-869-1719.

Tong Ren Peter offers a free ‘ guinea pig class’ of Tong Ren on Thursday evenings from 7 to 8pm. For more information, see our website, or visitwww.tongrenworld.com.

Garden Consultations are available again this year. I know how to grow just about anything that will grow in our climate. I love to walk around your property with you and help you envision a beautiful nourishing garden around your home that will feed your soul. Rates start at $75 (a one-hour walk around your place). If you want me to write up notes or make a schematic drawing, that costs extra. I love to do this and hope you will call me if you have need.  If you live over 15 miles from me or 30 minutes, I’ll have to charge a little extra for travel. I am open to barter.

Free Plants Our garden always has extras. Today I was pulling out Forget-Me-Nots by the basketful, so if you want some, please call or stop by anytime. There will be other perennials available soon, including many nice yellow day lilies, and some 5 foot-tall lemon yellow daisies I call “West River Daisies” because that’s where I dug them up from, many years ago. They spread and do well in moist waste places, ditches and such, or just by the side of your garden.

White Mountain Sangha is having a 3-day retreat in New Hampshire on the first weekend in May, with Norman Scrimshaw and Margaret Fletcher. For more info, go to www.whitemountainsangha.org.

Much love to you all

I have discovered that to try to force myself to do anything is a subtle violence.  If the doing does not come from a desire in THIS moment, if I act from the thought “this will be good for me” but do not feel “yes” in my body, then the action is joyless, I quickly lose interest.

I seem to have to rediscover this over and over, perhaps because the opposite was repeated so many thousands of times. A residue of shoulds, frowning.

How many times in my six decades have I frowned at myself?  Enough!