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Hello Hiver friends
How are you today? Is everything going swimmingly for you? 🤗
I'm Tani and I came back 😍

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Today is Saturday which is also the day I look forward to most of the week. I'm excited to share my trip with everyone in the community the last weekend. As the first word of the new year, I would like to wish everyone a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year with their families. People in Vietnam will spend the first day of Tet visiting pagodas to pray for peace and good luck. Before the first day of the new year, I did something very special this year. My paternal grandmother and I went to the temple on the 29th day of the lunar calendar to offer incense to the spirits worshiped there. Furthermore, we stayed to assist the Abbot and Buddhists in cleaning and decorating in time for the New Year. Due to the complicated situation of the epidemic, many Buddhists did not come to the temple to make merit. So my grandmother and I decided to stay behind and assist others. This is also my first time participating in a temple activity, which has piqued my interest. 😉

I assisted others with tasks such as sweeping banyan leaves from the temple grounds, scrubbing all of the stone benches with a brush, cleaning the Buddha statues, decorating the New Year's locust tree, watering flowers, and so on. These tasks do not appear to be difficult, and anyone can assist. According to my grandmother, this temple used to be very simple, but now it is much larger and more complete.

Linh Son Pagoda was constructed on a hill and is surrounded by lush rice fields. The temple stands alone in a sliver of the sky. This location is far from the busy streets and traffic smog. If you want to go to a temple to pray for peace or find a place to study for a short-term peace retreat, this temple is ideal.

Besides that, large and majestic Buddha statues can be found on the temple grounds. The majority of the campus is surrounded by ancient trees and flower gardens that Buddhists have meticulously planted and cared for. The vibrant flowers enhanced the temple's brightness and radiance.

When you go to the temple on New Year's Day, you can not ignore the New Year's harvest, in my opinion. Harvesting at the start of the year is one of the traditional beauties of Vietnamese people who want to pray for good luck and good things in the new year. This is the first time I have been able to prepare the lucky tree for everyone entirely by myself, from the lucky money envelopes to the folding of each couplet to celebrate the new year. When we were able to do these works, the Buddhists and I had wonderful year-end moments together.

After that day I realized that our grandparents were old. They can't drive themselves, climbing seemingly simple slopes on their own. I once heard a very beautiful but also very sad saying. The older we get, the more lonely we become, and the more we miss our children and grandchildren. I hope to continue accompanying my grandmother to year-end activities like this for many years to come. 💝

If you like this pagoda - Linh Son pagoda, please share it with me in the comments section below. 😉 Thank you for reading to the end of my post and see you all in the next post.

Thank you so much!
Love all 😘