Practice Diary 2 – 28 Feb 2023

There is so much that I want to do. I want to collect all the red fabric that washes up on the beach and sew it into a mantle to hang around the shrine. I want to collect the fallen, tannin-rich leaves to dye an old bedsheet, and stamp it with a pattern of swirling grain speckled with star-like blooms, to leave this as an offering on a breezy day, when the sun is somehow both mild and bright. I want to push dozens of empty liquor bottles into the ground to mark a doorway. More than anything, I want to take the trash out of the sacred hollow and lay a curse on anyone who tosses so much as a candy wrapper in there again.

But the Bodhi tree is growing fine, nestled by garbage. Protected by garbage. Even the burned tree herself isn’t dead. A brand new trunk is somehow growing out of the remains, the leaves forming a perfect canopy above the hollow.

Every time I visit, I plan to do something. I want to a make a shrine. But the place says, in the tone of my old muay thai master and one I might have used myself, when teaching someone how to make a print: watch me first.