A Letter from Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett on the new Red Cedar Dharma Hall
October 10, 2007
Dear Friends in the Dharma,
When I and a few friends started the Bellingham Zen Practice
Group in 1991 I never imagined I would be writing a letter like
this to so many friends and supporters sixteen years later. I
invite you to please relax and take a minute to read this
longish letter. Much is happening and I want you to have a full
sense of the story, the situation, and the opportunity we are
currently facing.
Much has happened in those years and it has all unfolded so naturally somehow. Not without some trouble, is seems to be the nature of our human life to always have a good dose of trouble, but nothing forced either. Quiet, organic change.
We’re come from a few people sitting together in library basements or therapists’ meeting rooms and passing a reading around to a full zendo at a dharma center with me as an ordained priest giving a talk. We now have other senior members hosting weekly zazen. Several members have formally taken the precents in the Zen jukai (“lay ordination”) ceremony and several more are sewing rakusu in preparation for doing so. Several of us have now done the challenging head student’s Dharma Inquiry Ceremony at the end of practice periods. And between us and Mountain Rain Zen Community in Vancouver doing six retreats per year studying with Norman in the Northwest is never more than a few months away.
From our first formal retreat in a borrowed cabin with Norman’s interview in a tent on the lawn in 1993 we’ve grown to host events like the 7 day retreat this last June at a beautiful church camp on Samish Island with 50 people, some flying in from as far away as New York. We and the regional sanghas have developed to where I and four other collegues gave talks at Samish and a whole suite of members handling everything from arranging the accomodations to ringing the bells with a real feeling for the delicacy and strength of our Zen way.
And most moving to me when I think about is that most of the people who are a core part of our community received almost all oftheir Zen training here in Bellingham and with our sister sangha, Mountain Rain Zen Community, in Vancouver. My first idea that our little group could be nothing more than a kind of intro to Zen with the real training needing to come from the big centers in California has been thoroughly debunked. We have truly created a solid and complete practice community in the Northwest over the years with a broad reach and a deep feeling of maturity.
As you probably know from the flurry of email messages
recently, the Red Cedar Zen Community (our new name as of
earlier this year) and the Buddhist community in Bellingham is
in the middle of some transitions and has been offered a
wonderful opportunity. I am writing to tell you a little about
those transitions and about this opportunity and to ask for
your help.
The Bellingham Zen sangha has for fourteen years now been
housed at the Bellingham Dharma Hall, a shared and cooperative
practice space in downtown Bellingham. This has been a great
way for us to solidify and mature and go through many changes
as we developed our membership and leadership structures, and
simply kept on with our core purpose to practice zazen and
study Suzuki-roshi's way as our guiding teacher Zoketsu
Norman Fischer has shared it with us. Being a part of the
Dharma Hall has given us the blessing of not needing to worry
very much about the basic reality of paying the rent. And
we've enjoyed the symbiotic aspects of sharing with other
Dharma groups with similar styles and aims. Sitting in a place
devoted to meditation in different ways and styles simply feels
good, and many of us have friends in the the other sanghas and
feel a real fondness for the Dharma Hall, and rightly so. How
wonderful that such a thing could exist in Bellingham and keep
on for fourteen years.
The spaces the Dharma Hall have rented while very low cost and
workable for our needs are also far from ideal for our next
stage of development as a community. The current space at 1101
N. State St. for example is up three long flights of stairs,
the first of which is also quite dark, dusty and forbidding.
Once upstairs 30 meditators barely fit, programs with two
different elements (such as an adults program while a
children's program runs simultaneously) aren't
possible, and sharing with 3 other groups also fills the
schedule to bursting. This Spring for example I wanted to offer
a class on the Heart Sutra on another weekday evening than our
regular Thursday evening slot and it was simply impossible to
do so in the Dharma Hall.
The other sanghas and the Dharma Hall leadership, recognizing
these limitations have made two attempts to move the Dharma
Hall to a better space in recent years. Both failed due to a
lack of agreement between the four sanghas and a lack of
financial wherewithal to jump our rent from sub-market rates on
a too-small space to full market rate on a larger space. We
seemed to be stuck in a "cart before the horse"
situation: to grow and fully develop our sangha it felt like we
needed to move to a larger and more accessible space, but to
afford the larger space we needed to grow first.
Two important things have happened since then and I am happy to
tell you that on behalf of our community I signed the lease a
few weeks ago on just the space we need to move forward as a
sangha and also to start offering more to our community.
The first thing that happened was very steady and organic and
we barely noticed it happening. Our membership has increased
greatly. In the early Spring we checked our membership numbers
and we were at about 25 dues-paying members (with about 200
people total on our mailing list). Now as I write this in late
September our membership is in the low 40's and there are
nearly 300 people on our mailing list. And attendance is up.
It’s up at our regular Thursday night practice to the
point that we had to rearrange the zendo to fit everyone the
other night, attendance is up at retreats, and growing steadily
at our weekly noon sits on Mondays and Fridays. This year we
have gone from a small sangha to a medium sized one. And the
mutual support that comes from that is very strong in every way
(financial, volunteer help, spiritual support, etc.).
The second thing that happened is that we received an offer of
partnership from a major donor with a vision. The donor, who
prefers to remain anonymous, has a vision of a public space for
meditation centered on the Earth. The Earth Room she calls it.
This donor recognizes that although she has a vision and some
funding to put behind it she is not in a position in her life
to make this vision a reality. "I like the Buddhists, you
guys are the primo meditators, but I don’t need to be
one" she told me and she wondered if a local Buddhist
group, with her financial support on the table, could create a
new meditation center including the Earth Room.
The donor also appreciated the cooperative spirit
of the Dharma Hall and wanted the new center created with her
help to be a lively and shared place, and that the Zen group
think of ourselves as the “stewards” of this new
center. That think of it not as a place for our exclusive use
but as a place to share with other dharma groups and with the
community.
We consulted with Norman who is enthusiastic about the project and sees it not just as a funding mechanism for the growth of Buddhism in Bellingham but also as a real opportunity for us a part of the American Zen experiment to integrate our sense of the spiritual life with the many people in America who find their root and depth in their connection with our planet Earth. Norman feels that perhaps a new leg of his broad vision for the Everday Zen Foundation was being uncovered; that here is another way to express the idea of Norman’s hope that American Zen can be all about “changing and being changed by the world.”
With much gratitude to the donor and our community, Greg Greenan (our Treasurer) and I signed a written Memorandum of Understanding with the donor laying out the requirements for us to receive continued funding from the Earth Room project to create what we are calling the Red Cedar Dharma Hall. We will be joined there by at least one of the current Dharma Hall sanghas, the Bellingham Insight Meditation Society (BIMS, also known as the Vipassana group), and we have started conversations with yoga and tai chi teachers who might like to use the space as well.
In return for our help in creating the Earth Room within the new center the donor is providing $100,000 in funding to be used solely to pay the rent and perhaps as the seed of a down payment on purchase further down the line. This gets us in the building, but as part of the agreement we cannot use the funds for outfitting the building, program needs, and so on. And that is why I am writing to you now.
The building at 1021 North Forest Street on the
outskirts of downtown Bellingham is just a block from the
current Dharma Hall which is now to become Bellingham Shambhala
Center. It has two floors and is about 2600 square feet in
total. To honor the spirit of the original Bellingham Dharma
Hall we're decided to name the new center Red Cedar
Dharma Hall.
The upstairs with an accessible entrance from Forest St. will contain a generous foyer/lobby for entering reading literature and taking off shoes and coats. One door from the foyer will enter into the 150 square foot Earth Room allowing people who want to practice there easy access. Another door from the foyer will enter into the new Zendo which will be about 1000 square feet – large enough to fit 40 people comfortably, and about 60 for lectures and public events. Beyond that we will have bathrooms and a meeting room for classes and interviews.
And then the wonderful thing about this building is it continues downstairs (accessed by an interior staircase, a sloping path on the side of the building or level access from the alley in between Forest and State Streets). This downstairs, developed as a large studio apartment, add a kitchen, additional bathroom, small office and a 600 square foot meeting room that will be suitable for classes, meetings, children’s programs, and a library. And the final gem at the site is there is a generous fenced outside area off of this downstairs multi-purpose room which will become garden, outside sitting and walking space, and a place for children to play.
I am especially happy to have the two levels, it makes simulataneous use by two different groups possible and it also makes new rich programs possible. And it also makes sangha building events more possible. I picture a Friday afternoon coffee hour taking place – a change to sit together, sip coffee or tea, and discuss the Dharma less formally. I picture a new family program in which parents and kids try some meditation together upstairs in the more formal Zendo and then the kids head downstairs with the children’s program teacher to do art and activities iniside and out while their parents have a chance to discuss how to parent more mindfully in the upstairs meeting room.
I am also very happy to have a larger main meditation hall. It makes retreats with Norman so much more possible in town (we fill to bursting in the current space to the point where it’s been a regular agenda item whether it’s even still worth holding retreats with Norman there!); it makes public lectures and meditation programs possible.
I am happy about the visibilty and accessibility of the building. People who cannot climb stairs can practice now. The community will see our sign on a well trafficked street and know that we are here and have something to offer. Able-bodied people who were intimidated pyschologically by the long climb to an unfamiliar place to do an unfamiliar meditation practice will I hope feel welcomed in by the foyer off the street, read our literature, pick up a brochure and consider if they want to take the next step through the doors into the zendo.
And I am happy about the inclusion of the Earth Room. It offers the community another style of practice which is fully compatible with our Zen Buddhist style of practice. And I am happy that we are planning to share this space with others. The donor is encouraging Red Cedar Zen to think of ourself as “stewards” of this building and this project and to share it widely with out Buddhist groups and spiritual groups who have a similar feeling about the mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom that is the true goal and reward of human life.
It’s a wonderful opportunity coming at an excellent
time in our sangha’s development, and I hope it will also
be a wonderful opportunity to give a great gift to our
Bellingham community and the wider Northwest. We want our
center to be a lively place devoted to meditation, compassion
and deep understanding in many different ways. To offer a menu
of entry points and a grounding in the deep and powerful
traditions of Zen Buddhism. 
And this center makes it possible to start to
include families with children and the young people in our
community.
Here’s the help we need. We need financial help to make this new center a fully functional reality. The Earth Room donor’s donation is a huge help with the rent and makes the whole project possible, but we need to raise $5,000 in additional funds now to make this center a fully realized beautiful place to practice.
We been careful with our finances over the years and have amassed a savings of about $13,000, we received a share of the Dharma Hall’s savings ($3,800) and are receiving a tenant improvement allowance from our new landlord ($10,000) but we need about about $5,000 more to fully outfit the new building. Projects include a new floor upstairs ($7,000), a heating system ($4,000) and insulation ($1,600), parition walls to create the Earth Room and entry area ($4,000) a nice sign on the street ($1,000) and purchasing meditation cushions ($2,600). We need lighting and eletrical work done ($2,000) to purchase other furniture and kitchen supplies. We would like to set up a nice meditation garden in the outside space, and the list goes on.
Can you make a one-time donation to help us raise the short fall of $5,000 to get us in the door at Forest Street plus a little to keep our savings healthy going forward? Donations in any amount can be made in two ways:
- Mail a check to
Red Cedar Zen Community, P.O. Box 5193, Bellingham, WA 98227 - Use the online donation form here
Other ways to help:
- Come to a work party, take a look at the building, work a
little as your body and time allows.
Saturdays Oct 13, 20, 27, and Nov 3 noon to 5pm and
Sundays Oct 14, 21, 28, and Nov 4 10am to 2pm. - Become a member making a monthly pledge if you haven’t already. See the sangha page
- Consider whether it is workable for you and your family to increase your monthly pledge a little if you are already a member.
- Volunteer for the sangha in an ongoing way. Contact any Leadership Council member or use our general contact or info@redcedarzen.org to let us know your availability. Current needs include: registrar, newsletter editor, newsletter production
Thank you very much,
Nomon Tim Burnett
Resident Priest
223-0687 tim@redcedarzen.org
and the Leadership Council of the Red Cedar Zen Community