A raindrop

Each morning at Plum Village I would take my cup of hot water and go and sit by the lotus pond, listening to the frogs making a racket! You could see their cheeks bulging as they croaked and chorused to one another. And so this poem came about from looking at the lotus pond and from hearing Thay reminding us again and again about our interbeing nature, which is not the separate individual we think we are most of the time, but a cosmos body linked to the rest of the cosmos in a beautiful intertwining dance.

At Plum Village we are each put into Family groups (we were Sunbeams) and each Family has a particular job to do. Ours was keeping the tea table supplied, as well as getting rid of the recycling and garbage (rubbish to those of us in the UK) each evening. On the days when everyone from the other hamlets came to us for Thay's Dharma talk we had to provide extra tea tables for all the extra people (there were 800 of us all together on the retreat). For the last visit my lovely friend suggested I wrote out some of my poems and she illustrated them to adorn the tea table. So in this post not only do you get the poem, but also the calligraphy that came from it onto the tea table.

A raindrop

In appearance
we are each a raindrop
resting on our own lotus leaf.
Beautiful, unique, solid,
glistening in intensity and luminescence,
reflecting sunlight.
Yet one strong gust of wind
sends the unique raindrop
sliding into the pond below
dipping and diving and merging
with the water
that was always our true nature.
© 4 June 2014