Many Panels and a Fabrice

The Ocean of Dharma conference opened Saturday morning with meditation led by Loppon and Acharya Lodro Dorje. In the hallway, a large television was playing the first talk by Chogyma Trungpa in his first course at Naropa. The DVD was on a loop,playing throughout the day, having just come off the editing table and been rushed to the conference. The talk "Spiritual Materialism" was in the Tibetan Buddhist Path course, which is being lovingly remastered by Gordon Kidd of Kalapa Recordings to be made available next year as a DVD series. I was the moderator for one of the two morning panels entitled "SPoken to Written Word: The Early Books." The other panel down the hall was on "Vision in Action: Sacred Society." My panel was like a gathering of Titans, the old gods of the editorial world of Chogyam Trungpa. Samuel Bercholz, Publisher at Shambhala Publications, spoke first. Then Kunga Dawa, editor of Meditation in Action, gave remarks followed by John Baker and Marvin Casper. In the audience were other senior editors: Judy Lief and David Rome. Quite a gathering of editorial mind, which can be both beautiful and intensely editorial, if you know what I mean. I loved it.
Time running short for me, so I'll collapse the rest of the desription of the day: afternoon included workshops by individual presentors ( I did one on the method of Elocution developed by Chogyam Trungpa. Others included Judy Lief on Sacred Utterance, Robin Kornman on renaissance man, and David Rome on poetry.) Then more panels, one on vajrayana and another on language in psychology. The evening keynote was author, teacher and dear friend Fabrice Midal in glorious orange jacket speaking of his depth of understanding, love and connection with Chogyam Trungpa, whom he never met in "the flesh." Fabrice encouraged us all to meet him in his work. For the full text of the address, go to www.chronicleproject.com. Now I'm on to a meeting this a.m. with the Chonricles board members who are in town and others. More panels and closing reception later today.