Canadian author Christina Kilbourne spent one weekend at the Zen Forest, had a ‘waking up’ experience, and felt she knew just what to do with her life: She went back home and told her husband she wanted to leave her job, sell the house, and move with him and their kids back to her hometown in Muskoka.
Kilborne was born in Bracebridge, grew up on a Christmas tree farm between Bracebridge and Gravenhurst, went to high school in both towns and graduated from Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School, then left Muskoka to see the world. She got a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Windsor, met a man from New Zealand while they were both in Africa, and decided to marry him.
After establishing careers and starting a family in the Newmarket area of southern Ontario, Kilbourne returned to Muskoka for a long weekend marathon writing event called the Muskoka Novel Marathon at the Huntsville Festival of the Arts. She wrote a novel in just three days, called Dear Jo. The Muskoka Novel Marathon publisher her novel and then it was picked by Lobster Press, of Montreal, and republished, with a few changes. It went on to win young reader's choice awards in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.
Eat, Pray, and Move to Muskoka
Since then, she has added Where Lives Take Root, Day of the Dog-tooth Violets, The Roads of Go Home Lake, and They Called Me Red to her growing list of published novels. The majority of her books are set in a fictionalized version of Gravenhurst, Muskoka, Ontario, about one hundred miles north of Toronto, on the edge of northern Ontario. They Call Me Red was set, in part, in Vietnam.
While reading the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Kilbourne decided it was time she tried meditating, like the author and central character of the story, so she went to the Zen Forest to meet a Buddhist monk and Zen master from Vietnam named Thich Thong Tri, and known as Thay. He informed her that most people practice sitting meditation for years before having an ‘enlightenment’ or ‘waking up’ experience, but one in ten thousand people wake up quickly, and he said he was one of them.
The Zen Forest is built on the edge of the Canadian Shield, so it looks like Muskoka, although it is located in the country north of Belleville, and the buildings are designed to look like the tea houses and meditation halls of Vietnam. Kilbourne spent the weekend working as a volunteer and was given the task of uncovering a big granite outcropping beside a pond, to turn it into a Zen garden.
Sitting Meditation, Sleeping Meditation, and Waking Up
The monk coached her through formal sitting meditation early in the morning and evening and encouraged her to keep meditating as she worked. It was while she was removing trees, bushes, leaves, and sand from the bedrock granite outcropping that it hit her: She had been thinking about making changes in her life and moving back home, and suddenly her thoughts and plans all came together.
First she got a new job, then left her old job, put the house up for sale, sold it, found a place to live up north, enrolled her kids in school, and within a month or two had moved back to the region she writes about, and where her extended family lives. Her husband plans to join them as soon as possible.
She asked the monk if you have to sit down to meditation, explaining that she had a busy life with little time to sit down, never mind meditate. The monk showed her how to do walking meditation, and sleeping meditation, and how to meditate all day while doing her usual everyday activities. Kilbourne reports that it led her to her new life in Muskoka, surrounded by family, where she is enjoying what she calls the many small town moments when she runs into people she knew in the past.
