In 2020, Nomon Tim Burnett leads sangha members on a last walk around their former zendo.
Photos by: Red Cedar Zen, Mark Jaffrey

The Red Cedar Zen Community in Bellingham has launched its first-ever capital campaign, to develop a new zendo for everyone interested in coming home to true nature through the dharma.

We’re calling the campaign “Our journey home.”

People sitting zazen at the Bellingham Dharma Hall in 2006.

I’m amazed we’ve already received pledges and gifts totaling nearly $600,000. In our exploding West Coast real estate market, we hope this will be sufficient down payment for a building large enough to be configured into a dharma hall.

We need a space suitable for our own Zen practice. We also want to share the space with anyone whose mission is compatible, in the greater Bellingham area.

We’re envisioning a structure offering about 3,000 square feet of floor space. We envision a peaceful large zendo for our Zen meditation, and also a second meditation space or classroom to share with other groups

We’re hoping for a building in central Bellingham, easy to find and easy to access by transit, bike, or walking. We imagine a little greenspace around it, or perhaps a roof garden. We dream of a space that can be a kind of spiritual living room for the Bellingham community.

Zen teacher Norman Fischer speaking to Burnett at the 2017 guiding teacher installation ceremony.

Perhaps we’ll even offer some public-facing businesses, like a simple tea café where guests are invited to sit quietly over their tea.

If you would like to help us along the way, please see the “Our Journey Home” section of our website, to pledge your support.

Our search for a new zendo follows the poignant end of our former zendo in Bellingham, which had been our stable home for 13 years.

We called the rented building Red Cedar Dharma Hall, and shared it with Bellingham Insight Meditation Society and with many smaller groups including Buddhist recovery and secular mindfulness practice groups.

It was a wonder to create such a place of practice. One of the deep joys of my life was watching people enter the zendo from the teacher’s seat. I’d watch as people bowed and entered the space. I could feel their shoulders release, their faces soften, their hearts and minds shift and settle: that feeling of coming home to a place of practice.

The Red Cedar Dharma Hall, shared with Bellingham Insight, was a significant presence in the Bellingham.

Back then we remodeled the empty shell, with largely volunteer labor, creating a beautiful dharma center. Over the years our rent gradually increased, but happily membership increased to match. We offered a full schedule of weekly practice, classes, and retreats, deepening into the rich traditions of Soto Zen.

In 2017 I completed my formal training and practice with Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and was installed as guiding teacher in Bellingham.  Others were ordained as priests, and installed as entrusted lay teachers. Organizationally we continued to grow, forming a strong board of directors and other structures, which would serve us well when the pandemic hit.

This brings us to early 2020. Our lease was up, and the building owner was unwilling to budge on a requested 10 percent rent increase. Meanwhile, like the rest of the world, we were watching the pandemic take hold.

At a March sangha meeting we realized it wasn’t safe to keep practicing in person, and soon Red Cedar Dharma Hall was sitting empty. But the property owner continued to insist on an increase, even while the building was unusable to us. So we decided to leave.

Buddha’s birthday celebration in 2014.

It was very hard to let go of this space, into which we’d poured heart and soul for 13 years. But let go we did, moving completely online while we considered what was next.

In a ceremony to close down the center we walked in procession to a member’s home, carrying a Buddha statue whose eyes we’d just “closed” by wrapping it in cloth. And then we considered where journey would take us next.

Twenty seven years earlier we had taken another big step, by teaming up with three other small sanghas to create Bellingham Dharma Hall.

Our 1,000-square-foot walk-up cost us all of $600 a month, and we shared the cost among members of all four groups. It was exciting to collaborate with Bellingham Insight Meditation, Bellingham Shambhala Center, and a Thich Nhat Hanh-style mindfulness sangha, to maintain four styles of practice under one roof.

Each of us used could use the center for one weekday evening each week, and we rotated the weekends among the four groups.

Retreatants processing to the dining  hall at the 2010 Samish Island Campground retreat.

This was successful and the Bellingham Dharma Hall moved to a larger space downtown in 2001. But over time all four sanghas were growing from sitting groups to dharma centers, so that the single center couldn’t offer enough space or flexibility for the growing needs. Bellingham Dharma Hall had been a powerful “sangha incubator,” for which I will always be grateful, but it was time to move on.

And so in 2007 the four-sangha Bellingham Dharma Hall dissolved after 14 years of continuous operation and Red Cedar Zen leased our own space a few blocks away.  Fischer kept coming to teach, and I ordained as our first priest.

Red Cedar Zen’s 30-year journey began with a surprising turn of fate. After trying out Zen practice in California at the impressive campuses of the San Francisco Zen Center as a young man, in 1990 I was on the cusp of a move to Bellingham. I’d found Zen to be important, helpful and also difficult. It touched something deep in me, but I doubted I’d keep it up in a new place without support.

Burnett and Red Cedar Dharma Hall co-founder Reizan Bob Penny, and Penny’s son, remodeling the hall.

And so on my way north I stopped at Green Gulch Farm to say goodbye to the teacher I’d clicked with the most: Norman Fischer. I shared that I’d appreciated my encounter with the practice and my doubts about continuing in a place with no Zen center. And then Fischer surprised me.

He said, “Bellingham, Washington? Is that near Vancouver, Canada?” and proceeded to tell me that he’d recently accepted an invitation to start making annual teaching trips to a small sangha in Vancouver.

Perhaps I could cross the border and practice with him some more, when he was in Canada leading retreats? I did so, and soon met a few friends interested in starting a sitting group in Bellingham. Red Cedar Zen Community was born.

It’s interesting to think now that if Fischer had responded as I’d expected, thanking me and saying “So long,” none of this would have happened and there wouldn’t be a thriving Soto Zen sangha in Bellingham.

Red Cedar’s first residential retreat in 1993.

The ensuing decades saw two sanghas growing up together on both sides of the border with Fischer’s support: what was to become Mountain Rain Zen Community to the north, and Red Cedar Zen to the south. Both started as small, simple sitting groups, gradually learning more of the Zen rituals, forms, and practices, and evolving into what are now medium-sized Zen Centers.

The devoted young founders kept plugging away, training, and learning – often in the “school of hard knocks” – how to manage the diverse personalities and passionate interests of their sanghas. Those founders became Zen priests and teachers as the decades rolled by.

At first Red Cedar met in rented or borrowed rooms – at the public library, at the conference room of a member’s workplace. We’d load in our Zen gear, convert a conference room to a small zendo, and roll out again each week. I was amazed by how someone always came with a sincere desire to practice.

And now we’re looking for a new home again.

I hope that next time you’re in Bellingham you’ll find here a vital and welcoming new dharma hall offering a place to stop and reflect on your own journey. Our unsettled hearts propel us forward, and we are always looking for a way to come home at last, aren’t we?

Let’s all work together to provide good stops for each other, to pause along the way.