Field Trip Friday (Memory Lane Edition)—The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
September 18, 2020
Like most people, I’ve been staying close to home this year. I haven’t visited my mom in California, or met up with my friend Kerri for a road trip…and I miss it.
At home, it’s
been too hot to explore outdoors, and it hasn’t felt safe or appropriate to
explore anywhere indoors. I’m getting a little stir crazy! So I decided to take Field
Trip Friday into the realm of memory—surely there were some places I’ve
visited during the past few years that I haven’t fully savored or written about here
on Catching Happiness.
And indeed there were.
The first one I want to share with you is the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, the
first large Buddhist monastic community in the United States. Kerri and I stopped
briefly at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas during our California road trip in
2018. We didn’t have a lot of time there, but the atmosphere made an
impression. I had not heard of it before, even though it’s
been around since the 1970s, and was officially inaugurated in 1982. Just goes
to show how many interesting, out-of-the-way places are out there if we only
look.
The monastic complex lies on 80 acres of a 700-acre property nestled into a valley near Ukiah, California. There are 13 buildings, including the monastery, a dining hall, elementary and secondary schools, a gift and bookstore, a vegetarian restaurant, as well as an organic garden, fields, and woods.
Here are a few photos:
Under normal circumstances, the monastery offers in-person classes and events, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, the complex is temporarily closed to visitors and events are being held online.
Since I’m not ready to
travel again yet, I am going to take some time to go through my photos from the
trips I’ve been fortunate enough to take, and I’m going to pull out my trip
journals, too. It’s not a bad thing to have time to reflect on the past
travels. It lifts my spirits to relieve happy memories, and even the bumps and
inconveniences of travel become funny memories over time. This is one of the
(few) gifts of the pandemic: an opportunity to slow down and appreciate what I
have without always pushing forward to the next bright, shiny thing.
Has the pandemic offered
you any unexpected gifts? Please share in the comments below.
