This is the first entry, the first time, and my first blogsite (and probably my only blogsite) and the site is limited to those who are invited to read and write here.

Bhavana is an idea that has been growing.  There are many questions about this new direction in my life, the practice, the readings, the teachings. 

In my life, all 67 years of it, there have been many contacts with ‘religion’ and philosophy.  The first contacts with Buddhism came with reading the ‘Beat Poets,’ writers like Gary Snyder and Phillip Whalen and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and in courses in comparative religions at college.

There was more exposure in San Francisco in the ‘60s (The Tibetan Book of the Dead comes to mind) and in Sausalito, where Alan Watts was a houseboat neighbor. 

I married and divorced (several times over, with children from each marriage) and continued to search and read writings by different philosophers and of differing religions. 

It could be that from the sunrise to the sunset of this precious human life, what I was looking for was always there, always in the background, always waiting.  Contact with an old friend led to reading Soygal Rinpoche’s ‘The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying and this led to other books and contact with Sravasti Abbey, a Western Buddhist Abbey in the hills near where I live, and the pieces of a lifetime came together to form a clearer picture – and the taking of the Precepts. 

So bear with me, I am only a student, a learner without a teacher yet, but with many good influences and markers on the Path.  Please feel that you may comment and leave messages and anything you feel the urge to write here …

Susan