AFTER TEN YEARS, WE MOVE OUR OFFICE

Our original office was at the corner of Pine and 15^th St. in downtown Boulder, right around the corner from the Shambhala Center.  I came on board as paid staff circa 2004.  Our sponsors, Cliff and Margot Neuman, owned the building but eventually sold it about ten years ago, and we moved into an office suite in downtown Niwot, a small town halfway between Boulder and Longmont.

I had a hard time adjusting after so long in the center of the action in Boulder, but eventually Niwot came to charm me.  Other than one Subway sub shop and a gas station, it’s—refreshingly—all local businesses.  It became my neighborhood: Garden Gate Café (classic breakfast place), Winot Coffee Company (down there for a large chai to get through the afternoon), Niwot Market (their soup makes a cheap lunch), and Niwot Tavern (when we had the pleasure to sit down for dinner).  I did a reading from my book Transmigration Suite at Inkberry Books.

I have a particular fondness for Niwot’s “Rock & Rails” concerts every Thursday night in the summer.  They have an open stretch of park space next to the railroad tracks along the Diagonal (the road between Boulder and Longmont) where they park food trucks and put quality local bands on the bandstand.  It’s a weekly town party, and everyone, from little kids running around and gossiping cliques of teenagers all the way up to senior citizens in wheelchairs, turns out for it.  The sun sets late over a beautiful vista of the Rockies, and everyone cheers when the train clanks by.

It has all lent me a sense of identity that you get from being in a location and feeling comfortable in it.

Of course, I’m also constantly reminded of the lives prison inmates lead, where they could easily be in a prison for 8-10-12 years, get woken up in the middle of the night and given a half hour to pack before they’re sent off to another facility without warning.  Sometimes they get moved rapidly and could live in several prisons over six months.  They can easily get disrupted out of jobs they like and friends they’ve made and classes they’re taking.  Sometimes they do request moves and don’t get them.  Sometimes they get to better situations…or worse.

That’s the imprisoned life, one you have little to no control over.

In this case, I knew well ahead that we would be moving.  We’ve been part of Cliff’s law office all these years, and now that he’s 76, he’s sun-setting his clientele and working from home.  Over the last couple of years, it’s often been just me sitting alone at my desk in all that office space, laboring at my keyboard to save the world.

I thought we were moving into the Neuman’s basement, but that all took a turn, and I found myself looking for office space in Boulder.  And it turns out, there’s quite a lot of it and not as expensive as you might fear.  Nevertheless, it ended up being a short period of searching before we had to move, and what did come available was office space in the Boulder Shambhala Center.

This is the place Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche established, a three story building a block from Pearl Street Mall, occupied starting circa the mid-70’s.  At one time this was the administrative headquarters for his international Buddhist community.  That’s how it was when I moved here to go to Naropa University.  A few days after I got to Boulder, I took the bodhisattva vow with him in the third floor shrine room on New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1980.  He gave me the Tibetan name Jinpa Gyurmé, “Generosity Unchanging,” a name that has mocked me many times since.

But I daresay that this had a lot to do with what happened in the 90’s when I started to visit prisons and teach dharma.  This also involved others from our community at that time, including the Neumans who formally established our organization as a non-profit.

So, in a sense, putting the Mindfulness Peace Project into the Boulder Shambhala Center brings it back home to its beginnings.  As a community building, the Shambhala Center here has been through a lot of difficulties in recent years, including literally the pipes bursting and drowning the place.  It’s been refurbished (it looks good!) and continues to find its legs in a new era when many of its past members have died off or gone elsewhere.  So MPP’s presence here means monthly rent that shores up its forever creaky finances and helps it go forward.

At the same time, MPP has a whole new environment around it, one with a lot more people, traffic, and interaction going on vs. me alone in the office or maybe with a  volunteer, but often only getting to talk to the UPS guy.  I’m hopeful this will raise our community profile and give us more access to volunteers.  One thing that takes up a lot of our time is the course work, which requires instructors with some experience to read and comment on answers to dharma questions.  It’s an excellent way to both study the dharma and learn something about how to instruct someone else in it.  Anyone who wants to work on that can contact me.

We’ve given up a lot in terms of space, so I’ve had to weed out many old files (which seemed almost endless), and I’ve hauled off four full boxes of books to the used store.  Most of our books have been donated, but some we don’t have so much pressing need for, and prisons mostly don’t allow in hard cover books (they’re afraid inmates will hide contraband in the covers).  So after a week straight of packing boxes, I’m now unpacking them and hoping I can find a place for everything.

I’m not really going to find out if we do or don’t right away, as I leave for two weeks of solitary retreat tomorrow morning with the job half done.  My whole year has bottle-necked into this moment.  There’s no more fundamental teaching of the Buddha than impermanence.  Birth means death, but death means birth.  MPP begins again, practically at its place of origin—the physical location where we came to get vision about what to do with our lives and how we might make them meaningful.  We’ve been shouldering the practicalities of actualizing that vision for over two decades now, making the long trips to our prison groups, sheparding inmates through dharma studies, getting bundles of dharma books out to prisons in Texas or Illinois, sorting out all the obstacles that can come with doing something as simple as sending a mala to a felon.  This is what we do and what it takes, me with the other instructors and volunteers who help with this work.  We begin it anew in January, for as long as changing circumstances, good merit, and stubborn adherence to bodhisattva vision will permit.