Expanding our zendo required pouring a new concrete floor. The community did the grunt work of jack hammering and removing the old slab.
Photos courtesy Red Cedar Zen

Red Cedar Zen Community expects to open its “Mountains and Waters Zen Buddhist Temple” in Bellingham later in 2025, a next step in a dharma journey that has been long and sometimes arduous.

This place of practice is emerging on the edge of the Birchwood neighborhood in northern Bellingham, a small city north of Seattle. We hope to open in May or June, and look forward to sharing the space in opening ceremonies.

Our purchased two-story building offers just under 4,000 square feet, with a remodel adding another 700 square feet. The temple will initially reside downstairs and will be fully ADA accessible. The upstairs will remain commercial office space, and will stay rented out for now to help fund the project.

We’re excited there will be a zendo (meditation hall) large enough for 50 sitters, and also a fully separated community room of about the same size. Other features include two private interview rooms, a cozy library space, a small kitchen, and a fairly private yard. We also plan to install a hearing adaptive system, to make the dharma accessible to those with hearing challenges.

We hope the building will facilitate new possibilities like family programs – making practice accessible for parents with young children – while keeping our current programs thriving.  We plan to be a stronger member of the Bellingham community, supporting our neighbors as best we can.

Our most recent physical home was a leased space in downtown Bellingham we occupied from 2007 to 2020. Since we left that space — largely due to the  pandemic  forcing us  to close the  facility to  in-person sits  precisely when the landlord  raised  our rent — our sangha has been meeting online and in rented church spaces. It’s a testimony to the power of the practice that it can also continue, thrive even, without a central place.

Our new zendo will be the culmination of long journey for this medium-sized Sōtō Zen community, which practices in the lineage of Shunru Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.

Red Cedar Zen Community is a vibrant medium sized sangha with about 120 active members. The sangha emphasizes Zen practice with an open, inclusive, and cooperative spirit, while honoring our Japanese tradition and lineage. Over the decades we’re matured into a sangha with a dozen empowered practice leaders, including three ordained priests and three entrusted lay teachers.

One of the things we’ve always felt deeply at Red Cedar is that Zen is a practice of place – that practice is rooted in the earth on which we sit, stand, walk, and bow. Reflecting this, we completely remodeled our former leased home to fit our vision of a space for practice. And we practice extensively outdoors in our local bioregion, through our Wilderness Dharma Program.

Therefore even though the rented spaces were  working, we knew  we needed our own space. So in early 2022 we mustered our courage, and launched a capital campaign. We had no idea if it would work!

After hiring a fundraising consultant, we spent nearly six months preparing for the campaign. We trained in how to ask with clarity and heart for the money we’d need, to purchase a building in Bellingham. Then we got to work. You can read our brochure or my fundraising letter if you wish to learn more.

The results were amazing, and we raised over $600,000. But also amazing was the challenge of buying a suitable building in Bellingham’s booming real estate market, driven by an influx of remote tech workers. Prices were skyrocketing and properties were being snapped up by out-of-town investors, sight unseen in some cases, on the day they were listed. It seemed nearly impossible for us to buy.

Finally, a 1980s office building in northern Bellingham came back on the market. It was a place we’d been interested in, but thought we’d missed out on. We were able to move fast (not our usual mode of operations as an organization) and secure it. That was quite a moment!

After we purchased the building in August 2022, the journey toward opening brought its own challenges, with our board needing to make large and expensive decisions. The first design committee tasked with coming up with a remodeling plan, fell apart. The first architect we hired, turned out to have no commercial remodel experience. Strong personalities and opinions emerged within the sangha, about what to do and how to do it.

Plenty of fear about screwing the project up and ending up badly in debt, were breathed in and breathed out. Much patience, many conversations, and plenty of practice were needed, before we could submit for permits and break ground.

And then during the first stage of construction – pouring the foundation for our zendo – we hit an unexpected snag. We discovered our newly acquired building was originally erected on top of the tailings pile of an old coal mine! You never know what will happen.

But we’re now on track and moving forward. The small contractor we more recently hired is willing to work with us. Our own hearty volunteers have joined together  in a series of work parties, to move the project forward while keeping costs down.

As we look toward opening, I think of my first encounters with Zen practice in 1984, at the tender age of 18. With a school group I visited a small Zen center in Mountain View, California. What I saw and felt touched me deeply: the quiet dim room, a sense of order and settled ness.

It was a kind of place I’d never experienced before.  A place of practice. What I felt that afternoon has stuck with me all my life, and shaped my life’s direction.

Seven years later, with a few friends, I started a small Bellingham sitting group, meeting in borrowed and rented spaces. At the time I was just looking for support to keep practicing, with no idea of what might happen over the next 30 years!

 Fast forward to 2025, and I’m myself a Sōtō Zen lineage holder, working with my sangha to establish a long-term place for practice. It’s a strange and wonderful thing, and oddly straightforward and sensible at the same time. Our practice is the practice of place, and we each do our best to establish it where we can.

What I wonder now, as Mountains and Waters Zen Buddhist Temple (Sansui-ji in Sino-Japanese) takes shape, is how many 18-year-olds will cross this threshold and feel the power of a place of practice. How will it shape their lives?

My hope is it makes a difference in many lives, young and old, and from many different backgrounds. What I dream of is that creating a place of practice – a place of peace – makes a real difference in our beautiful, fractured world.

I hope you’ll come visit us in Bellingham after we open. You can check in on us at the Red  Cedar website.