“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
I just got word this morning that negotiations are on for a new property – five bedroom house on fifteen acres of forest only thirty minutes from Winnipeg. The move-in date is set for May 1st, but we may be able to move that forward March 21st (updated – yikes, that’s magical). Some issues about having to get approval to subdivide the land, so we will be renting it until that goes through. Either way, this gives us a place to begin setting up a centre – if we can’t buy it in the end, we will at least have time to find another property while actually holding courses in the meantime.
In the meantime, we are trying to promote the Saturday course to a larger audience, so if you are interested in joining us for the day at 640 McGee, please don’t hesitate to come without invitation. It’s not that we don’t have a sizable group already, but clearly most of Winnipeg is still not joining us and until such time as they do, we will try our best to encourage them to 🙂 If we start getting too many people for the Vihara, we’ll just find a bigger place.
Jared’s samanera ordination is set for the Queen’s birthday (we decided April Fool’s Day was too soon) *hint: May 24th is also the full moon of Visakha this year. He’s on his second course and doing well.
Working with a novice over the Internet, I’ve put together a set of Buddhist texts with Pali and their translations side-by-side; so far it includes the DN, MN, AN, Dhp, Jataka, and Vism, all with translations (soon it will have SN as well). Unfortunately, a good portion of the translations are copyrighted, so I can’t legally share it with anyone. it’s in the form of an Android app, so if I could send it out to people, and anyone with an Android device were interested, they could just contact me via this weblog and I could email it to them… hypothetically speaking.
Thanks to everyone who has donated/sent me stuff for recording purposes; I’m putting everything to good use. Recently someone here offered both a professional wireless microphone and a professional video camera. We still haven’t decided what sort of camera to get, but both of these things should help make video production much less distracting.
I’m wondering if someone out there would be interested in finding the timestamps for the questions and answers in our monk radio videos? I can send them an audio file from which they could just find the times for the start and end of each question in seconds and then send it back to me, along with a title for each question. This would make cutting the video and re-uploading the questions to YouTube much easier, since I could have our server do it automagically. Please let me know if you are interested+capable.
That’s all, sorry, not much magic after all. Well, life feels somewhat magical these days; lots of great things in the works.