Message from the President
by Tim Kennedy

I'm finding it a struggle to relax into my practice and life.

Stillpoint is moving to another location, we're working to purchase a property and we just did a great retreat with Reb Anderson.

Then we lost a much loved member of our sangha.

In our practice, we try to take a particular stance regarding circumstances as they occur. We try to be upright with things as they come along. This can be a problem.

When I learned that Stephanie had passed away, many things came to mind. I had just become aware that she was in a very serious stage of her illness. I made plans to spend time visiting and reading to her as she rallied back to health. i felt that this was a good response to the situation.

Then I learned that Stephanie died. It was so sudden - I was shocked. I felt somehow guilty. Then I wished I had known her better. Truth is, I really hadn't talked much to Stephanie. The things that I remember her saying were mostly her comments at the precepts group meetings and her comments at the Shohaku retreat.

But it also reminds me of another response to her-and how I really feel about Stephanie. I remember her in the silence of the sesshin-sitting; I remember the quality of her work to prepare a meal that I would share; I remember her kinhin. I remember these things and am grateful. This helps me to feel a sense of sangha. I can see how it is that sangha is one of the three treasures.

We missed Stephanie at the Reb Anderson retreat, It was a wonderful retreat. So much was said that allowed me to see things that I had never known about my sangha. In our practice there is so much silence that when people do open up it can be so appropriate and meaningful, It may sound odd (or maybe not)-but I am pretty shy in group interaction. I admire how others can so bravely share and I can see how valuable that is. Fortunately, I don't think that I missed out on the value of the retreat due to my scant sharing. In fact, one of the best things that was shared was how one retreatant said that she "was apologizing for just observing." I thought, "What a wonderful thing to say-I wish I had said that."

In addition to the sharing and maybe what allowed the sharing to be so great was how deep the sitting practice was. Toward the end I heard Reb say "Feel the thing that we have created." I really did feel a particular quality about the zendo that we had created. Reb suggested that we not hold onto that quality. He said, "Give it to Brother Fred and Sister Damien." For me, that is the practice.

Gassho,

Tim Kennedy

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Sangha News

- A New Home -
Stillpoint continues to search for a new home. Sangha member Catherine Gammon has most generously opened her home as a temporary sangha, but we will need to relocate by the end of November. Catherine has left the area to begin her studies and the house has been sold. Several sangha members are exploring other options, including trying to purchase a property that would serve as a sitting and retreat space. Your suggestions and support are important. Anyone with ideas for temporary or permanent space can contact any board member. Many of you have kindly offered pledges to help this become a reality. If you have not yet done so, please send them in so that we can be ready to move forward with this project.

- Special Events for Friends of Stillpoint -
• Please join us on Thursday, October 11, when Stillpoint and Peaceful Dwelling Place will cohost "An Evening with Beth Goldring," featuring a talk on the second of the Four Great Vows: "Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them." Exploring what it means to end delusion, Beth will discuss how this vow can help us to find a peaceful heart in the midst of troubling times and terrible conditions.
This will be the third annual visit and talk by Beth with the Pittsburgh community. A student of the late Maurine Stuart Roshi, she began her Zen practice in 1978 and was ordained in 1995. For several years, Beth has worked with destitute AIDS patients in Cambodia.
The event will be held at the Nuin Center, 5655 Bryant Street, one block from N. Negley Avenue in Highland Park. The schedule is

6:30 p.m. Zazen, sitting meditation
7:00 pm. Kinhin, walking meditation
7:10 p.m. Zazen
8:00 p.m. Program: "What Does It Mean to End Delusion?"

Those planning to take part in the meditation should arrive by 6:20 and bring cushions if they have them (a limited number will be on hand).
Orientation for newcomers will start at 5:45 p.m.
Donations will be used to support Beth's work among the poor in Cambodia. For more information, call Barbara Lebeau at 412-422-3456.

• Sensei Janet Jiryu Abels will visit Stillpoint in October. During the all-day sitting on Oct. 13, she will give one teisho in the afternoon on the Evening Gatha ("Life and death are of supreme importance...") Sensei will also be available throughout the day for dokusan (private meetings with the teacher).
On Oct. 14, following the morning sitting and chanting service, she'll give a more informal teisho.
Her lineage is the White Plum Sangha of Soto Zen, which was founded by Maezumi Roshi and carried on by Roshi Bernie Glassman. Her teacher is Roshi Robert Kennedy, a Jesuit priest and author of books on Christianity and Zen. She's also the mother of sangha member Carrie Abels.

- Many Thanks to...

CATHERINE GAMMON for opening her home to Stillpoint as a temporary home while the sangha searches for a new space.

DON and CAROLE ORR for once again hosting a wonderful day in the sun at the third annual Stillpoint picnic and bocci tournament

ANGUS MACDONALD for putting together the chant books we now use on Sundays, and for organizing the Hana Matsuri celebration in May

MARK PFAFF for web site redesign and timely updates

CARRIE ABELS for organizing the Sunday discussion series, and Mark Pfaff for launching a new Sunday evening sitting group

And to NEAL and BEV GRIEBLING, TIM KENNEDY and DON ORR for taking on the task of organizing our retreats. There have been three successful and memorable ones so far this year.

- Practice Schedule -

EVENING SITTINGS
7:00 p.m. Tuesday 6:30 p.m. Wednesday

Upcoming Sesshin Schedule:
Shohaku Okumura - November 8-11, 2001

Sangha-led sesshin are generally held the 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month. Please contact Don Orr at 412-366-4268 or Jay Hershey at 412-885-6204 for details.
Note: Please arrive at least 10 minutes early as we begin zazen promptly at the scheduled times. Latecomers are urged to remain in the foyer until a round of zazen has been completed. Newcomers are asked to schedule an orientation with a senior member before attending a scheduled sitting.

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Peaceful Dwelling Place: A Progress Report
By Neal Griebling

A number of people within and outside Stillpoint have inquired about the ongoing development of Peaceful Dwelling Place. I'd like to take this opportunity to share the latest news about the project.
Peaceful Dwelling Place is a vision that emerged from a feasibility study commissioned by Cathy Raphael to explore how a Buddhist approach to death and dying might be of value to residents of southwestern Pennsylvania. I was asked to coordinate the study.

The initial focus of the study team was on providing residential hospice care for those unable to remain in their own homes. As we explored end of life issues more deeply, however, we felt the need to broaden our scope to include how we might provide individuals with approaches for living more fully within the reality of our common mortality.

What has emerged is the notion of a community of healing intention that would focus our attention and our compassion upon ourselves and our relationships with all sentient beings. The vision asks us to take what we learn on our meditation cushion and integrate it within the fabric of our daily lives.

Throughout the body of his teachings, the revered Vietnamese zen master Thich Nhat Hanh weaves the themes of connection, community and healing. He wrote that we can only "inter-be" with others, including our ancestors and future generations, and that the self is made only of non-self elements. He urged communities of practice to create environments in which people can succeed in the practice.
We hope Peaceful Dwelling Place will offer a deep sense of spaciousness and belonging to individuals from all faith traditions and belief systems. We hope to provide an environment in which people from diverse sectors of the larger community feel free to pursue their own path, access their inner wisdom, and draw upon their innate resources to support healing and transformation within themselves and others.

The basic components of the vision of Peaceful Dwelling Place include:

An ongoing workshop series devoted to providing individuals with healing approaches to examining their lives, with mercy and awareness, within the light of suffering, aging and death

o A Living Fully with Illness component that offers individuals with serious illness opportunities to live purpose-centered lives within the realistic limits imposed by their illness.
o A Guest House that provides 24-hour compassionate residential care to terminally ill patients. It is anticipated the Guest House would broker with other community hospices to provide direct medical services; it would not provide these services on its own. A key element of this component is the continuous availability of skilled volunteers who are trained in deep listening and other aspects of compassionate caregiving.
o A pool of volunteer caregivers available for service outside the Guest House: in their own homes, area nursing homes, in other hospice programs

It is our human destiny to meet with suffering, sickness, aging and death. We know Buddha's practice and teaching was a direct response to his encounter with these "gifts" of reality. His wisdom remains as valid today as it was in his lifetime. We have drawn deeply from the Buddhist tradition in crafting our vision.

A contemporary example of engaged compassion can found at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. My wife and I made a site visit to this remarkable organization in May of this year. We met with Frank Ostaseski, ZHPís Founding Director, and Brad Byrum, the organization's current Executive Director. I was also able to meet and talk with residents and staff of their Guest House. Beverly and I were struck with how deeply spiritual practice manifested itself as compassionate caregiving within the organization and in the larger community. Our visit provided further us with inspiration to move forward with the development of Peaceful Dwelling Place. Staff members of Zen Hospice Project have offered their ongoing support.

On September 22-23, 2001, Peaceful Dwelling Place sponsored "Being a Compassionate Companion" at Magee Hospital, with Frank Ostaseski as teacher and facilitator. The workshop offered a mindful and compassionate approach to addressing the practical, emotional and spiritual issues that are inherent in being a companion to the dying. The scheduling of the workshop coincided with the formal and public launching of Peaceful Dwelling Place in the larger community.

We are currently planning the development of a four-part workshop, "Exploring our Humanity," that will be held during the fall of 2001.
"Exploring our Humanity" will be offered to the general public and will allow individuals to examine four basic questions:

Who am I?
What do I love?
Given the reality of my mortality, how shall I live?
What do I want to leave behind for family, friends, and community after I leave this life?

The workshop will incorporate meditative and contemplative approaches to self exploration and discovery within the living tapestry of our relationships with all sentient beings.
We will also be taking actions to build an infrastructure that will establish and sustain Peaceful Dwelling Place in future years. During the next 12-18 months, we intend to:

o Incorporate as a nonprofit organization
o Create a community of individuals who seek to express their spiritual practice through service to others.
o Identify and recruit teachers for lectures, workshops and retreats Secure facilities for lectures, training and practice.
o Establish a Guest House for residents with a terminal illness.
o Offer comprehensive training for volunteers to serve as compassionate companions to the dying and their families.

Peaceful Dwelling Place is expressly designed to serve as a resource to the larger community. We welcome participation from spiritual seekers from all wisdom traditions, from hospice staff and volunteers within the area, and from the general public.

For more information on Peaceful Dwelling Place and how you might become involved, please contact me at:
412-481-0970 or e-mail: kakuju@bellatlantic.net

Blessings.

Neal Griebling

Stephanie Bodhisattva
by Catherine Gammon

I wanted to write about Stephanie. Every start I made was about Stephanie dying.

Dying was how I knew her, how we knew her: living in her dying, living fully in her dying.

In a sense this is no different from any of us: dying, living in our dying.

This after all is our practice, to meet birth and death, moment by moment, in the ongoing arising and vanishing of life.

But for those of us who are well, or imagine we are well, this practiced living with dying does not yet require that we face the extreme physicality of our body's dying truth: this dying isn't upon us, doesn't move through our flesh and bones, presenting fatality with every agitation, discomfort and minor symptom.

Yet it does prepare us for that, and it may have been this preparation, this plain awareness without flinching, that drew Stephanie to our practice.

In Stephanie's dying there was this teaching: that birth, life, lives all the way to death. That with the jaundice that yellowed her skin and the whites of her eyes, Stephanie was present, alive, and expressing her whole beautiful big self. That with the tumor that fed itself and grew as her liver, her passion and humor made if not friends, yet intimacy: she named it after Harriet the Spy, a child's hero, because, she said, Harriet always enters the room first.

My most present memories of Stephanie are of her last days, when her body was already transformed and transforming for leaving, when her pain was visible even when she wouldn't speak it, or couldn't, when her heart-mind rose to meet the certainty that this dying she had been so consciously preparing for was now, so almost suddenly, at hand.

What struck me, maybe all of us, was the nearly exponential acceleration of her body's change in those last days. From Wednesday's drowsy visiting from the couch in her living room, with peaceful energy for conversation and reading (still preparing to receive the precepts) and narrating me through a photo of her husband Garth and his brothers (all strangers to me then), to Thursday night's long hours in emergency waiting for transfusion, the change in her circumstances was radical.

I don't know that anyone fully kept pace with the change, other than Stephanie herself. Holding my rakusu, she went over with Garth and Barbara, her mother, the disposition of some of her personal belongings; then keeping pace also with living, she asked for a reading from the precept materials, the group's next assignment, the opening chapters of John Daido Loori's Heart of Being.

Friday, transfused and stable, her color better, hooked up to a machine regulating medication and hydration, she was determined to go home the next day instead of waiting for Sunday. By then her father, Mike, had arrived, and she joked with him about work she had ready for him in her garden. We read more Loori (a little dry that day) and some passages from Cultivating the Empty Field by the twelfth-century Chinese Zen master Hongzhi, a reading that touched Mike's experience of nonseparation in Northwest forests.

Nonseparation.

What could be more separate, more separating, than dying and death? And yet in Stephanie's dying, nonseparation manifested again and again.

Even the last day, Saturday, when Stephanie gave the appearance of unconsciousness, everyone continued to speak with her, to address the life in her: not to keep her, not to hold her back from going, but to go as far with her as we could, to give her our voices and our hands and our attention along her way.

This was what she asked of us: to know that she was alive every minute of her dying, to meet her aliveness.

It was an incredible generosity that allowed this to all of us: Stephanie's generosity, which asked for it, and her family's generosity, which gave it.

I said my own goodbye to Stephanie in her hospital room early that evening. Even then, with knowing she was soon to go home, was going home so she could die at home as she had wished, her death at home a few hours later came faster than anticipation could prepare for.

Visitors had been in and out throughout the day. Neal and Bev had come to say their goodbyes and with their hospice experience helped Garth make hospice arrangements. Now Garth's brothers were getting the house ready. Garth was answering cell-phone calls and consulting with nurses and doctors. Earlier in the day Don and I had read Stephanie the precept ceremony, her hand loosely circling the small white Buddha Don had brought from his home altar for her. A little collection of gifts and memorabilia rose on the bed beside her - photographs, cards, the Buddha, a heart-shaped stone found on her honeymoon. We heard stories of her marriage to Garth just two years before, their "wild and succulent" wedding, their honeymoon in the Andes, with a shaman's healing ceremony unexpectedly performed.

When I came again in the afternoon, family and friends had been reading the Loori chapters aloud, the music of Loreena McKennitt playing softly in the background.

Visitors kept arriving, taking their turns beside Stephanie and with one another out in the hall. The hours were slowing. Stephanie's breathing became more audibly labored and her pain more apparent. Nurses came in to adjust the level of her pain medication. Taking her home waited on the ambulance. It was time to go.

As others had done, I sat beside her and whispered a while into her ear. Then I said goodbye to Stephanie's family, Barbara, Mike, Garth, and her sister, Staci. In so short a time, they had become, for that brief time, my family too. This feels a little silly or presumptuous to assert, at best poetic hyperbole. But it is none of that. This intimacy that our practice allows us, to offer and to receive, was Stephanie's gift to us, and her family's.

I have heard that when she got settled at home, Stephanie knew where she was, that she recognized its sounds and smells, that she smiled before she died.

For all of us of Stillpoint I would like to say, to Garth, to Barbara, Mike, and Staci, and to Garth's bodhisattva brothers:

We bow in deep gratitude to all of you, for opening your hearts with us, and to us, and we bow especially to Stephanie, for living with us, and inviting us in.

May she save all beings.

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