buddha and hockey

Sunday morning, we took a drive up the Poudre Canyon to see The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a Buddhist temple near Red Feather Lakes. It was a pretty, hour drive to Echo Glen and then a short drive on a dirt road to the Buddhist Mountain Center. Paul’s been to Nepal, so this is not a new thing to him, but it was my first visit to a Buddhist temple. I learned that it’s actually a stupa, a place for the remains of a great teacher. This one houses a man who helped spread Tibetan Buddhism in North America.



The temple is a tall and colorful structure in a pretty valley. It’s a peaceful spot for meditation. While inside, (surprisingly small) a man told us that Timothy could have a small red marble that was among others in a spot cut into the marble floor. We don’t know what it signifies but will save it for him as a memento. If we gave it to him now, he’d swallow it, and I don’t believe that was the man’s intention.



One of the Buddhists practices is to write prayers on a strip of cloth and hang it so that the wind blows it. Every time the material is moved by the wind, the prayer is sent. The first time that Paul told me this I thought it was a rather lazy and passive way to pray.



In the early evening, Bob and Sue, who live next door and treat Timothy like a second grandson, called and offered us two tickets to the local hockey game. They have season tickets but didn’t feel like going out last night. Mom and Dad offered to babysit, and Paul and I went to our first live ice hockey game: the Colorado Eagles vs the Mississippi Riverkings.




It was loud and action packed. We didn’t see a big fight, but there was plenty of slamming against the glass to make it exciting.

The puck is much easier to follow live than on TV. The Eagles won, but only in the last period. The area is a testament to capitalism with advertisements on every flat surface. The big screen TV’s (two of them plus the four on the scoreboard hanging from the ceiling in the center) blasted commercials with every break. Almost all of the players for both teams had beards. I wonder if this is hockey fashion.