Austin Street Retreat Day 4

We survived the final night on the streets, again sleeping in a park by the river. We awoke at 4 am to the sound of drumming. Some people were in a gazebo down by the river beating on cans and other make shift drums and doing rap. We got up grateful for the early wake up call, as we'd heard that the police might come through the park ticketing people for sleeping around 5 am.

We spent the early morning walking by the river and hanging out downtown waiting to get coffee at the ARCH (Austin Resource C Center for the Homeless) at 6:30 am. While downtown, we bought the Austin newspaper for 50 cents and discovered a feature article about us and the retreat on the front page of the second section of the paper. We've been outted !! We were a little hesitant to go to the ARCH after that but did anyway and had some good conversations with people who recognized us.

We had a powerful council this morning down by ARCH each talking about our practice with the peacemaker precepts during the retreat, doing the tradition monastic confession circle around the precepts. We are headed off to our final council now, after which we will walk back to the Austin Shambhala Center. Genro Gauntt and I give a public talk there tonight that was mentioned in the newspaper article, so hopelfully we'll get an interesting audience.
Peace and blessings from the streets of Austin,
Fleet Maull