Sunday 18th April

Well, I had a very interesting evening last night.  Bruce and Rosalyn kindly invited me to join them in a trip to a Buddhist monastery, and a vegetarian meal, just outside Oklahoma City.  It was a really lovely place, and a very enjoyable outing.

I don't know why that guy in the yellow shirt continued to stand there when he could see I was trying to take a photograph.   I kept waiting for him to move, but he didn't.

 

Anyone who has seen the 145 framed photographs of friends and loved ones on the walls of my house would attest to the fact that they have an important place in life, but if I am taking a picture of a landmark it is an irritant to have someone standing ramrod straight in front of it.   If he'd been a friend or family member I would have suggested he adopted a more relaxed pose and focused in on him.   Then I would have taken another one of the monastery.   

As I said, it was a beautiful place.   It is new - the old monastery was next door, but in this country there is so much land, it is no problem to just put up a new building on surrounding land, when the time is right.

This is the meditation room.   We were given a talk, then had ten minutes meditation, which was plenty long enough for someone like me with ADHD.

After our tour, and introduction to meditation, we were served a very good vegetarian supper, with a wide variety of dishes.

The monks were all women, but they looked like men because their heads were shaved, only their voices gave away the fact that they were women.

Coming back we had a violent thunderstorm, lightning flashing across the sky all the way to Shawnee, and extremely heavy rain.  Bruce did a wonderful job driving through it, I just couldn't have done it.  I couldn't even do it from their house to mine.  I asked them to just drop me off at my house and I would sort the car out today, but Bruce drove my car home, and Rosalyn followed behind to take him back, which was very kind, I hated giving them extra driving on top of what they had to do.