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These informal reports, filed every couple weeks by Sensei (and e-mailed to interested members), are meant to provide snapshots of what's happening at Chapin Mill, plus the who, how, when, and where of it.
Another milestone was reached in the construction of the Chapin Mill Retreat
Center last week: the first painting of rooms. These were the three end
dorm rooms, which we've been going full-bore on to ready them for sitting
and dokusan. Through the winter the little guest house has served well as
the Chapin Mill zendo, but since it was the only place suitable for dokusan,
at those times sittings had to be switched to the farmhouse living room
(with sitters sometimes facing windows, doorways, and the backs of
furniture). We could continue with these improvised arrangements until the
huge temporary zendo in Phase I is ready for sitting, but instead want to
begin "charging" the new facility with the daily zazen of the residents and
guests.
These end rooms, which will serve as zendo and dokusan waiting line, are now
painted a creamy off-white. Before being painted, the drywall was carefully
mudded (screw holes and seams erased) and sanded smooth, so that now the
walls, with their quiet matte finish, are so featureless as to be somewhat
disorienting. "It's like standing in a cloud," Mike Chrest commented. (Once
the Douglas Fir window trim is up, and the carpeting in, the rooms will come
back to earth!) Throughout the complex all walls and ceilings will get the
same scrupulous preparation and finish.
What remains to be done now before the daily sittings can be moved into the
new building is to throw down over the sub-flooring some temporary rugs we
salvaged. Then for dokusan we'll use one of the rooms in the future
monitors' quarters, near the main entrance, far from the dorm zendo rooms.
Warm spring weather has established itself now, allowing us to resume the
outdoor construction that we left off with last fall when the snows began.
Already Mike Hurd has put up a lot more of the beaded board ceiling to the
"porch" to Phase I (the covered deck/walkway that runs along its north
side), and other workers have resumed hanging the unending cedar shingles.
And then there is the pressing work of spring landscaping, not around the
building site but "south of the creek." After forty years of looking after
the property, Laimons Klava, 
Ralph's hired hand, comes in to work now only
to help Andris Chapin wrap up the disposition of her father's things.
Trueman is beginning his second season as Caretaker, regularly assisted, at
least during this busy season, by Kadi Sprengle, who moved to the Mill at
the end of the winter from the Chicago area. With the help of spurts of
guest workers (some ten people so far have signaled an interest in working
in the garden from time to time), the list of accomplished tasks now
includes the following:
- General spring clean-up, with several truckloads of debris hauled away
- Three perennial flower beds revived
- Clean-up around the spring
- Crown vetch planted on the road embankment (to control soil erosion)
- Farmhouse and Guest House banks cleaned up and mulched
- Bushes around the barn pruned
- Compost pile for the vegetable garden built
- Rose bushes pruned
- Lettuce, spinach, radish and peas planted in the garden
- Two trees felled to open up the sharp bend in the road
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