Our wonderful gardener (as well as Retreat Leader) Suchitta manages the Gardens, not only beautifully, but also resourcefully. At the back of the community she is growing potatoes, garlic and rhubarb, and near the Retreat centre shrine room grows Elderflower. For the Open afternoon Momtaz and I made some Elderflower cordial to share some of the resources from the Taraloka Gardens.
Elderflower cordial is very easy to make and has a sweet and refreshingly cool taste. We gathered about 40 elderflower heads, thinly...
One of my pledges for BAM is to save water. We have 11 of us in the Taraloka community at the moment, and while not everyone showers or baths every day, we still use quite a large amount of water between us!
I decided to focus on the kitchen bathroom because it is a favourite bathroom for many: newly decorated last year; with the best shower pressure; and regularly used by six of us. It needed to be a simple idea...
Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring and practicing the ‘Four Sublime Abodes’ in Exeter Sangha Night. The Sanskrit name for this body of practices is brahmavihāras (sublime attitudes, lit. “abodes of brahma”) are a series of four Buddhist core qualities and the meditation practices made to cultivate them. They are also known as ‘the four immeasurables’.
They are: loving-kindness or universal goodwill (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upeksha).
Owhiro Bay is part of the South Coast Marine Reserve (Taputeranga) – but being a marine reserve seems to mean little to the pieces of plastic, old bottles, old cans and general flotsam that continue to wash up on the shore and tidal pools. Nature needs more from us than the benign but distant good will of labelling a piece of coast line as a marine reserve
Written by Catherine Ward from the Norwich Sangha who is currently volunteering for 6 months at Taraloka:
Bread making is steeped in history with Sourdough being one of the earliest forms of bread, and very central to village and community life for our ancestors. For Taraloka also, Sourdough is one of the main staples, and its been one of my pleasures as a volunteer to bake bread for the community.
With the theme of BAM being ‘connecting for change’ I have been reflecting...
Amalaketu has been involved in sustainability for 20 years, and has worked as a low carbon engineering consultant delivering sustainable buildings. He has been instrumental in developing a scheme to help Triratna Buddhist Centres become more sustainable, through green energy, recycling and fairtrade. He is also the chair of the Colchester Buddhist Centre.
One thing ‘The World Needs Now’ is to become more aware of the consequences of our actions on our planet, other people, and future generations!
A couple of weeks ago, we had a great BAM preparation community night where Maitrisiddhi talked about the trends of Engagement and Withdrawal as personified by Green Tara. Then we did some writing reflection and came up with 5 personal pledges each to do during June. These were to include both withdrawal and engagement pledges.
Here are a few examples of our pledges:
Kathy, Maitridevi and I are going strictly vegan for the month. I have also decided...
