Andrea Lemon's blog

Hello again from the Retreat For Peace webmaster!

Although I've studied at Diamond Mountain for the last six years with the three-year retreatants, I'm not going to be participating directly in the group retreat.  Instead, my husband Ted and I are moving to Vermont (near Ted's parents) and building a house where we can serve others and do our own long retreats.

Those plans hit a bit of a speed bump today when we got our estimate for insulation... yowza!  Normally insulation is not a huge expense, but we are building a next-generation super-insulated house, plus we are using environmentally-friendly materials, so the estimate was way higher than I was expecting.

My first instinct was to think, "How do we get more money?"  It's a reasonable thought, but I was very selfish in my approach.  It basically boiled down to "How do I get more money from someone else?", which is not exactly the height of Buddhist worldview!

Fortunately, it was time for yoga class at the DM temple.  At the beginning of class I was still thinking solely in terms of my needs (I fool myself that I'm mostly taking care of Ted, but who am I kidding?).  But as the class continued, my thoughts shifted nicely.  By the end of class I resolved to help my DM classmates pay for their future homes by improving the Retreat For Peace website, and also to help über-volunteer Nicole Davis with her own strawbale house.

So I made a date to help Nicole and Cortney tomorrow and Friday, and I spent the afternoon making changes to this website, including a major change in our overall message.  While it's true we are committed to bringing about world peace, our real motivation runs much deeper than that.  We want to use the microscope of meditation to examine the nature of reality itself, to see if there is more to life than the way it appears and whether enlightenment—ultimate lasting happiness for all beings—is possible.

Anyway, I'm sure Ted and I will figure out a solution to our rapidly-escalating building costs, and I find the best way to distract myself from obsessive number-crunching is to help my Diamond Mountain comrades glide smoothly into their deep retreat.

I am not planning to do the three-year retreat at Diamond Mountain. I'm not planning to serve as a caretaker, nor do I expect to do more than the odd afternoon of cabin-building.

But I believe I have helped, primarily by spending hundreds of hours building and maintaining this website.

About a year ago, DM student and marketing guru James Connor gave me a list of pages and a Photoshop design for a website he wanted me to build to publicize the three-year retreat. There were bumps along the road, including a financial collapse which made James despair that anyone would want to donate to such an unusual cause. But we've finally gone live, and we're hopeful that the site will draw thousands of people into this amazing undertaking, either as a well-wisher, a sponsor, or a curious/puzzled onlooker.

Working on this project has pushed my web-building skills to an entirely new level. It is also challenging my Buddhist worldview (I'm a longtime DM student as well). Allow me to explain:

Web design is one of those jobs where, when you've really succeeded, you make it look very easy. So I feel a little cranky sometimes that my huge effort could be mistaken for a few days' work, and there's a part of me that wants my Lamas and my fellow students to shower me with praise for this fantastic job I've done. Indeed, many of them have done just that, but somehow it's never enough.

I also want to see this site raise all the money needed for the entire retreat. That way I can pat myself on the back and feel like my efforts were the cause of this tremendous result. But that's a mistaken worldview. If the website succeeds in raising $2.5 million, it won't be because of all the work I did building it. If the karma was really there, then we could have pulled it off with a one-page site and a few PayPal links.

So I can't measure my accomplishment by the amount of praise I get or the amount of money we raise. I need to remember that, or else I'll get upset when someone sends me a cranky e-mail about a problem they're having with the site, or if the site sputters and doesn't even earn back the hosting and credit-card processing fees.

I need to think instead about how I took personal responsibility for a project that wasn't even my idea. How I spent hundreds of hours (did I mention that already?) helping raise money for cabins I'm not planning to use, food I'm not planning to eat. Even though I may not even set foot at Diamond Mountain during the retreat -- I've got plans of my own for those three years -- I am now deeply tied to this amazing event, almost like a fairy godmother.

I don't know what the result of my efforts will be. Maybe I won't know until I reach enlightenment myself. But I'm in awe of my fellow students who are leaping into the three-year retreat, and it is my honor to help them in whatever way I can.

If I think about it the right way, maybe it's the greatest goodness I've ever done.