Reeboot: May 2013

It’s certainly been a while since I last posted a blog…but I have gone through some good changes lately that have opened up some time for me to get back into the habit.  So starting today I begin cultivating a discipline of making regular entries.

So let me begin by briefly getting you updated on current goings-on…

I met a wonderful woman to share my life with.  Her name is Emma Churchman.  She is a Quaker by tradition of origin and continues to practice in that community.  She very happily graduated from seminary in May of this year with her M.Div. from Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary in Indiana.  She completed her first unit of CPE at Rutherford Hospital and is now in her first leg of a CPE Chaplain Residency at the hospital in Johnson City, TN.  Emma is also a Shaman, and works with clients and groups in spiritual direction as “the Quaker Shaman”.  Emma is awesome and I am happy to share life together with her.

We have a small farm cottage in Black Mountain, NC where we care for our two dogs: Noah, Emma’s older Black Lab/Rottweiler mix, and our young rascal Eadmünd, who is half Dachshund half bunny rabbit.  Very cute, but very obstinate.

We are trying our hand a gardening this year for the first time.  It’s still early to report on, but the radishes seem to be doing very well.

As for myself, I am very, very happy and content.  I bailed on that chaplain residency in Spartanburg, SC.  Being a chaplain in the rural south just isn’t a paradigm in which I feel supported or empowered.  I had a really hard time in Spartanburg trying to orient myself and discover my pastoral identity in that community.  Ultimately, because I am neither Baptist nor Pentecostal, I could not.  So I left.  Which was a difficult decision to make, breaking a commitment, abandoning my 3 other residents; but the experience there was really sucking the life out of me (financially and spiritually), and I felt it was necessary for my personal, emotional and spiritual survival that I extricate myself form the environment.  In the end, the decision was a good one.

I left the hospital and took a job at a doctor’s office starting off as a phlebotomist and winding up as the Clinical Coordinator for the practice.  I like it…I’m relied upon, I’m respected, I like the work that I do, and the best part is I’m only there three days per week.  Dropping to part time was another good decision.  The only bad part was the significant decrease in take-home pay which give cause for some creative budgeting.  But I am significantly less stressed.  I rest well, I have time to do more self-care and maintain our country cottage and property.  But most importantly, I have adequate time for ministry…meditating, networking, reading, blogging (as you can see), and specifically the ministry of cultivating a Christian-Buddhist contemplative practice community, the seeds of which I planted last year with my Abbot +Andy at my Lindisfarne Community retreat in June 2012. 

I call the community “New Seeds Priory” in homage to Thomas Merton, my monastic hero.  We are just getting started.  I have been slowly spreading the word about the community with flyers, word-of-mouth, free ads in community newspapers, etc.  Earlier this week I gave an interview on a local independent radio station for a program about spirituality.  And I am stepping up efforts at networking with local Episcopal clergy, exploring opportunities to lead retreats or workshops, or just let folks know I exist.  It is slow work, and the challenge is to resist the natural feelings of discouragement and simply keep practicing and letting go of conceptualizations of how things “ought” to be.

New Seeds Priory has a website:   www.newseedspriory.weebly.com     Please visit. 

And please do me a favor and help spread the word if you know anyone who is interested.

One last important thing to share is my “official” transition to practicing Zen as my primary meditation & spiritual practice.  Just before the Lindisfarne Retreat I mentioned earlier, I paid a visit to my Tibetan Buddhist teacher and explained to him what was going on in my life and how I had discovered that Zen Buddhist training was a much better practice for me.  He agreed and encouraged me to take up the practice of Zen.  My Spiritual Director, himself a former Carthusian Monastic and also a Zen teacher encouraged me in the same way.  I am happy to have found Jules Shuzen Harris Sensei, director of Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne, PA, and he has taken me as a formal student.  I am engaging in Koan study and making trips to visit Shuzen sensei and the Soji Sangha as often as I can.  This practice is good for me.

So that’s about it for today.  I just wanted to get the world updated to the goings-on of ol’ Scott Elliott.

I will be posting more in the near future and hope a few people will be interested in tuning in.

Be well,

Scott+