My Monastic Academy Journey (Part 4: deciding to start a Canadian branch)
During my mostly-nomadic year in 2018, I began to entertain the idea of buying a small cabin in the woods as a little escape for myself when I wanted to get away from city life and travel. As this idea began to grow, I realized that I could perhaps even buy something larger, a space I could live in full-time and welcome others into – after all, I had gotten so accustomed to “living on the internet” during my year of travel that living a few hours outside of Toronto didn’t really seem like such a hassle.
After my two-month stay at MAPLE in 2019, that plan began to shift slightly. MAPLE has plans to grow exponentially (doubling their centres every 5 years), and I really wished that a branch could exist near Toronto, where so much of my life and my communities are. Then I realized that I could do something about that.
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