Karma - Zen Retreat, part 2

I arrived at the retreat with my body on my usual late night schedule. So when we had to turn out our lights at 9:30pm I fell asleep quickly but woke up a couple of hours later, wide awake. I laid on my bed for most of the night, not sleeping until finally falling asleep around 3:30 only to have my roommate's alarm wake me at 4:45am, a full half hour before we were required to get up. Meditating is virtually impossible when you are that sleep deprived, so in order to rectify this I took the two hours after breakfast (8:30-10:30) to sleep. Now our official retreat (called "Seshin") schedule called for Samu practice during this time. Now Samu is an opportunity to continue and extend your mindful meditation practice in a "work practice." So when you are mopping the floor you are doing so in a mindful and meditative way thus deepening your practice and your understanding of the Buddha Dharma. Ok, that's nice, now here are my thoughts. Some swindling Bodhisattva came up with this crock of steaming horseshit because he couldn't cook and hated to do the dishes. Regardless, it was expected that all the attendees show up for Samu each day and I didn't. In fact, it took me two days of sleeping through Samu in order to get on this ridiculous daytime schedule. So when I finally went to Samu the third day, well rested with a full 8 hours of sleep, I entered with not a little trepidation, wondering if I had been missed.

Work practice begins. After legitimizing this swindle with an appropriate amount of chanting and bowing, the job assignments are given by the Shuso (the same guy I wrote about in the last post.) Now, I don't believe I can read minds, and I truly don't know if I was specifically missed or not, but as soon as the very first job assignment was given, I knew as well as any Buddha can know anything, which assignment I would be given. It took him awhile to get down his list, and once he got to the mundane cleaning jobs he would say, I need someone to polish the doorhandles on all the doors, and would ask for volunteers or might simply choose among the remaining people. But as soon as he said scrubbing toilets there was not an instant of hesitation before he pointed to me.

I bowed deeply and set about my noble task.