Vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning, everyone. This morning I went outside to the garden before coming to this hall to plant some herbs in front of the greenhouse because I'm lucky enough to have been able to work in the Zen Center Gardens for the last 20 plus years. The great Buddha Hall outside of the Buddha Hall out there, the great green room that doesn't have any walls. And coming up I remembered seeing a little stand of the state flower of Colorado, the columbine flower, in our inner herbal circle. So I went in there and brought a blossom here for you to contemplate. And on the way up it appropriately fell apart

[01:02]

because, you know, there's a noble tradition in the Zen world of offering flowers to the Buddha and then letting those flowers on the altar finish their entire life cycle. So they're not a decoration. They're an offering of awareness. So we endure our flowers in this hall for one week. We're careful to change the water and take really good care of the blossoms. But we don't deprive them of their opportunity to go full cycle and to join us in meditation going full cycle. So when you come on Sunday, the flowers have been here for a few days just so they'll not be too fresh. And we don't freshen them up for your benefit, which I always think is a great thing. But for the benefit of all of us I did bring up the state flower of Colorado, Columbine. Colombo in Latin means dove, bird of peace, you know. Aquilesia.

[02:03]

I think Colombo means dove in Italian. It has more of that kind of, right? And Aquilesia is the Latin for dove. And if you look down at the flower, the spurs of the Columbine draw back. And look, if you look at the flower from the top, it looks as if five doves are drinking from a fountain and their wings are back. Their wings are the petals of the flowers. So please spend some time today after the talk coming up to this altar dedicated to travelers in and out of life and dedicated to children and contemplate the Columbine flower, Columbine High School and the world we live in right now, the times we live in. I'd like to say something about the closing of the bombing in Kosovo and to acknowledge the bitterness of this experience. I think for many of us this has been a very difficult and challenging time.

[03:06]

And I've noticed that people seem to settle into this hall with greater vigor and gratitude. Maybe I'm projecting that because I feel it. But we do acknowledge that the bombing has ceased for now in that part of the world. Although the use of depleted uranium, that this incredible heavy metal that can penetrate through armor and explode in radioactivity that lasts for close to five billion years, that's the half-life of uranium, continues to stroke the world with its message. So I'd like to begin by quoting from the Buddha. He says, In a battle, the winners and the losers, the winners and the losers both lose. And I think we have a stomach in this hall to handle that ancient awareness, this 2,500-year-old awareness.

[04:09]

This is a peaceful place and our work is to make peace, not war. And to make peace, not war, with awareness and a stomach and a gratitude to be able to stay and look at the dark side of our life. This morning I was reading a report from the Worldwatch Institute called The End of Violent Conflict. A small pamphlet dedicated to looking at the life of war in our world right now. And I learned to my horror, and I won't say to my surprise, that in the last 100 years there's been something like four times the loss of life as in the wars from the first century of the Common Era all the way up to this time. It's an extraordinary truth that we have to have a stomach and heart and mind to endure and to understand. And then to ask ourselves, what helps us with awareness? What helps us wage peace in our times?

[05:12]

A good friend of this community, artist and activist, Mayumi Oda, just returned from the 100th year anniversary of the Hague gathering for world peace in May of 1999. 4,000 delegates were designated to come to the Hague to talk about waging peace from all different persuasions and traditions. And she tells me that double that number showed up, close to 8,000 people gathered in the Hague. And many, many tribal people and indigenous representatives made the trek, that long trek to the Hague, and they arrived without enough money to stay in the developed world. So they set up a camp on the outskirts of the talk, and many of the peace activists worked to feed them and to welcome them and to listen to their experience of what's happening in our times and to listen with a stomach and heart for the truth.

[06:16]

Anyway, she came home quite affected by this, and I noticed that 100 years ago the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, convened the first meeting of peace activists or peacemakers in the Hague with the express purpose of finding a way to live peacefully on earth. And so we have the opportunity at the end of the 20th century to review how are we doing to take the pulse, to look deeply at what our life is. This morning I'd like to draw from one of the most ancient teachings of the Buddha, guidelines, I think, guidelines for stability, change, guidelines for activism and meditation, practices called the Seven Factors of Enlightenment or the Seven Limbs of Enlightenment. These limbs are close to my heart

[07:22]

because we practiced them very deeply a few weeks ago when we commemorated Memorial Day by gathering a small retreat at Santa Sabina Retreat Center about 25 miles north of here. We've made a vow, some of us who are active in waging peace, we've made a vow to celebrate and redeem and commemorate these holidays, Veterans Day and Memorial Day and to spend time looking at the roots of remembering, spend time really remembering who we are, what we're made of, what it is to fight, what it is to have violence and conflict in our lives, what it is to work wholeheartedly to relieve suffering in the life of the world. One thing I teach, said the Buddha, suffering and the end of suffering. So we gathered at Santa Sabina Retreat Center

[08:22]

and Mayumi brought, gave us, loaned us two of her huge banners which we hung on the wall, one banner dedicated to the fierce representation of wisdom, Yamantaka, fiery Yamantaka, expressed as a goddess, Mama Yamantaka we called her, very powerful banner hung right behind the altar. On the other side of the room, on the other side of our altar, a long banner dedicated to Sarasvati, the goddess or protectress of creativity, represented by water. So we spent three days meditating, pretty deeply practicing Zazen, walking meditation, living in silence, recollecting, remembering our lives, thinking of the dead, thinking of Memorial Day, thinking of the war that was biting into the hide of Yugoslavia during that time, offering incense and prayers and chants

[09:25]

and really investigating what it's going to take to fully inhabit our times. And these banners helped. They've gone to Hiroshima, Japan and hung. They've been in the Church of St. John the Divine in New York. They've hung wherever peace activists gather. And they were a wonderful help and reminder of the power of creative expression in our times. I've been thinking about the word remember, re to turn again and member to inhabit. Remember the present moment, return to the present moment, one of the primary teachings of all meditation traditions. And I've been thinking about And this potent statement from Freeman House

[10:27]

who's a community activist and protector of a natural ecosystem up north about 250 miles north of here. He lives in the Mato River and has just written a wonderful book called Totem Salmon all about how to remember the ancient life that fills and includes our life. So he says, in one ancient language the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful. In another from a word to describe a witness. In yet another it means at its root to grieve. To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost. So every day in our retreat we began with this remembering. And remembering all along the parts of our body. Vowing to be mindful.

[11:27]

I mean I think it's so much the vow and commitment that fills this room. To vow to live in mindfulness, unafraid to remember and unafraid to feel the grief that will naturally spring up when we sink down and remember who we are and what our work is. I don't want to be grim but I do want to ground what I have to say today in this recognition. So I hope you'll bear with me. I've been thinking then about memory, where memory resides and letting my senses, letting my body remember its place and purpose in the world. So that means calling up all the senses. And when you have the opportunity to practice meditation, even for five minutes, five precious minutes, the body and mind remember our old lineage.

[12:28]

My friend and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh often when we first began to practice many years ago with him, he suggested that one exercise that's wonderful for meditators to do is to go into a dark room and get very quiet, sit quietly and let your breath and body and spirit settle. And then after a time when you feel quite settled, ask yourself, where am I? Where am I? It's completely dark. You can't see yourself. And rather than turning your hands toward your own body, experiment with turning out toward the world and feeling yourself be remembered by the world. This is not a vague, touchy, feely, abstract practice, but an actual experience that we have when we remember through the five senses what our work is and who we are. So turn toward seeing,

[13:32]

looking deeply and calling up the sense of smell. During our Veterans Day retreat, Maxine Hung Kingston told us about veterans smelling turkey at Thanksgiving, coming home from Vietnam in particular, and weeping. And when they unpacked what was there in that memory that came alive from the smell of the turkey, it was both the sense of home and a lost feeling of home and also the smell of flesh, of actual flesh. So do we have the courage and stability to remember that deeply? And can we train our bodies and minds for this work? Look deeply, listen deeply, develop a sense of smell and touch and taste. We say that when farmers

[14:35]

from North and Central Vietnam open up a pot of rice and smell the steam or taste the rice, they can remember or know the river system in which the rice was grown just by the scent and taste of the rice. So could we be that alive to our world and to each other? Do not tarry, do not struggle, said the Buddha. Put your attention toward remembering. Return to yourself, to the island of yourself. So at Santa Sabina I spent some time sitting out in a small garden that they have and underneath a giant Deodora cedar I began to think and remember old teachings from my first years of practice at Tassajara in 1973 when I practiced with Linda Ruth and Maya and other people, Peter and Miffin and other people who live here now

[15:38]

when we practiced together at Tassajara. We had a precious study period when we got to study and I remember reading about the seven limbs of awakening and thinking these are good exercises, good remembrances. So lo and behold in the quiet of Memorial Day weekend retreat this old teaching came back to me and of course it came back at the roots of a tree. This is a magnificent, huge cedar that has, conveniently enough, seven limbs. Oh, how nice. The material world cooperates with the disoriented meditator to provide a teaching. And actually I think it's significant that this memory came up for me during the retreat because it's connected with fire and water too, with the elemental world of which we're made. Fire, water, air. We remembered

[16:39]

during our retreat we remembered and I remember every day in this meditation hall that breath is not ordered or organized by conscious thinking but comes from the oldest part of the brain, from the stem of the brain. We have no control over that. So breath would never be entrusted to conscious thinking, would it? Couldn't be. So remembering and realizing that and thinking about fire and water I considered these seven limbs and I'd like to go over them with you because I think they're very relevant to our times and then in discussion hopefully we'll make them brighter. So mindfulness is the orienting limb. It's the central or the pillar. And sitting underneath the Deodora cedar, there are three true cedars in our world. The Atlantic cedar of North America, the Deodora cedar of India and of course the cedars of Lebanon which are no more great ancient cedars

[17:41]

except in our museums and in botanical gardens. We may have one or two but we were admonished in the Bible, in the words of the Bible to cut the cedars and build the temples. So hopefully sitting in this temple made of redwood we can remember the ancestors. And that happened for me being in the garden there at Santa Sabina. Mindfulness is the first limb of awakening or the first factor of awakening. These are seven factors that help us stabilize and go deeply, help us remember all along our bodies. I saw mindfulness and this is not traditional so forgive me but it comes out of some other connection. I saw mindfulness as the stem of the tree. Mindfulness being true awareness, deep awareness based in the present moment, awareness of what's going on. I'm going to draw from the tradition. Feed your good, true food.

[18:43]

The character for mindfulness is made of two parts. The top part means now and the bottom part means put the mind and heart together. So now, in the present moment put your mind and heart together and remember who you are. Come back to the present moment. So I really, it's usually in these lists the first factor is quite important. It helps you orient yourself. So for me, I saw the stem of the tree as mindfulness, as mindfulness practice because mindfulness practice infuses and invigorates all of the other factors. And there are three, only three points that are very important to remember. So, first of all, to see life in the present moment. If you're mindful, when your body and mind are lined up, when you're living in the present moment with heart and mind together, then we're ready and stable enough to absorb what's going on in our lives.

[19:49]

And there are many practices that help us do that. And second of all, mindfulness develops all the other functions or the stem, if you will, the stem gives rise to all the other limbs. So mindfulness is the stabilizing factor. I'm thinking of trees a lot because we have, this last couple of weeks, we've been welcoming a young group of students here to Green Gulch to help form our first tree core or a group of friends that are working to take care of the trees around Green Gulch. So we've been putting a lot of attention to the trees. Maybe that's why I could see so clearly that mindfulness was the stem of this great Indian cedar. So the second point is mindfulness helps us develop all other functions of awakening. And quite important, it balances the mind. A few months ago, Pat Leonetti, who's director here,

[20:51]

gave a very strong talk about balance. Practice dutifully with everything falling out of balance, says Suzuki Roshi. So balance, finding balance is walking that thin line between too much and too little and correcting all the time in the same way that we drive a car, correcting all the time, orienting yourself all the time to the road and finding balance and stability and a huge zest for change at the same time. That's what my gardening teacher always said, find balance in stability and a huge zest for change. So mindfulness practice gives us both the stability and the zest for change that creates balance. So you can have a balanced mind and heart now in the present moment. So this is the first factor of enlightenment. And then the next three factors are factors that arouse intensity, arouse your mind

[21:53]

and body, give strength, courage, fire to your practice. And the last three are ones that quiet you, like water. So of course I thought of Mama Yamantaka and the fierce deity that's found in fire that admonishes us to wake up and serve, to wake up and recognize what's happening in our world, what's happening right in front of us. Arousing and quieting. Again, they have to find some balance with mindfulness in our bodies and minds so that we can function. If we're too aroused and too excited and too worked up, and when we first began our retreat, a number of us were quite fired up about what was happening in the world. And it took three days of silence, stability and a huge zest for change to arrive in the present moment to stabilize and be able to endure what we were smoked up about. So I have

[22:55]

a visceral sense of the importance of both of these qualities. And in every tradition there's a balance of fire and water in the body, a balance of fire and water. And those of you involved in medicine, in mental health, in working with children, in just about every walk of life, know very well through the five senses this importance of balancing. And this is an ancient teaching, 2,500 years old. Balance fire and water and make them real. The Buddha says, if there's, and when he talks about the seven factors or the seven limbs of enlightenment, if there's too much fire, do you add more fuel to the fire or do you put damp branches on it? And of course his obedient students recommended dampening down the fire, damping down the fire, decreasing the oxygen, decreasing the fuel. And when in fact your fire is wet and slow, do you add wet branches to it or do you increase oxygen and put dry

[23:55]

sticks and twigs? And of course you balance, you fire up your torpid state or your quiet mind and you calm your agitated fiery mind by finding the balance. And here are three beautifully, three limbs of intensifying and three of quieting. So the first on the fire side, the first is effort, energy, virya. I'll tell you what the three are so you have a sense, okay? So effort, effort or energy, investigation and joy, rapture. I'm happy that's there. I'm really happy that's there. And on the other side, the water elements, the water limbs, concentration, tranquility and even-mindedness or equanimity. Now of course this is not limited to the Buddhist tradition but it was a primary

[24:56]

teaching of the Buddha and he spent many years working with his monks and nuns and lay people to develop a capacity for these factors of enlightenment. And enlightenment is awakening. If you're sensitive or slightly allergic to the word enlightenment as I tend to be, awakening helps to wake up to the situation of the world. So let's begin by taking a look at virya or energy. Shojin in Japanese. Shojin, sho means wild herbs, the kind of herbs you get from the mountain. Wild food. I like that. Kind of gives a sense of hunters and gatherers from before the time of polished rice. Going out and getting energy from the wild mountain herbs and the Chinese jing, jing, jing, essential advance and go forward. So those same words, you advance and go forward to the essence

[25:57]

with, by touching, tasting the wild taste. Effort and energy. It's one of the five, one of the six paramitas to effort or energy. I remember years ago with Kadagiri Roshi, we asked him, what is right effort or right energy? And he encouraged us not just to look at the human realm, to look at the energy and effort, the vigor of all forms of life. Animate and inanimate, sentient and insentient and to recognize that our own effort and energy comes from that connection with the wider mountain, like tasting the wild herb. There are three points in the practice of energy and effort to make the effort to be aware, to see directly and pay attention. That's one point.

[26:57]

So make the effort to live in the present moment. Again, this is where mindfulness comes in. And give it your all. I like this. Writer Annie Dillard says, don't, if you have an insight, don't save it for the better day when you can write. Don't save it for the story you haven't written yet. Put it all out. Play your whole wad, says Natalie Goldberg, also a great writer. Don't hold back. So first, make the effort to live in the present moment. Don't hold back. And I'm not, I'm sensitive to the fact that this may be dangerous. It has to be tempered. But don't think, I'm going to hold back. I'm going to save my energy because I won't have enough energy. By experimenting and giving generously, more energy is generated. And third, and in the Buddha's time, the admonition and remembrance that physical exertion helps with mental stability in meditation. That some exerting of the body,

[27:58]

some expression, some active care of the body is necessary. And I'm happy that that's twenty-five hundred years old from a yoga tradition. So exercise, physical and mental, provides and sustains effort. These are such wonderful teachings. We could have a seven-day retreat and spend seven days looking at energy. One day looking at energy. One day looking at mindfulness. One day looking at investigation. But briefly, again, from the old texts, the Buddha spoke of four great efforts that we make. And just consider these. To enhance and foster wholesome states. Make the effort and energy. Find the energy and make the effort to enhance that. And don't get entangled in unwholesome states. So it's, you know, both, both poles. Make the effort toward a wholesome. Don't get entangled in the unwholesome. And you know this because you're familiar with them

[29:00]

through your own body and mind and five senses. And then the next two, again, another diet, encourage skillful states that are not yet part of your life. Energetically encourage them to grow. Just like a gardener encourages seeds that haven't germinated yet by watering, aerating the soil, providing adequate temperature and light. Encourage those wholesome states to come up, to germinate. And make every effort not to germinate what isn't wholesome and what hasn't yet arisen in you. I find these teachings very pertinent to our times. We can talk more about these later in question and answer. Investigation, Dharma Prachaya. Again, I'm impressed by the fire and relevance to modern times of this old teaching to investigate deeply, to look deeply, to find out what the world's made of and to put the fire

[30:00]

of your attention toward doing that. Don't settle for second-hand information, the first admonition here. When you investigate, investigate with your own experience. Be a lamp unto yourself and use that lamp to look. Now, this can be dangerous because doing that may mean that you, in your investigation, will confront discouragement, disillusionment, anger, remorse, whatever may come up, but face it. Facing it as part of the fire. So you put the full effort and energy of investigation toward looking deeply. It's one of the limbs of enlightenment and awakening. The tree depends on the nourishment that comes from investigating actively. And it requires courage and curiosity.

[31:00]

So true. A spirit of inquiry, insatiable desire to ask questions. An investigation is balanced by faith or confidence. I think it's important to remember this because you can get pretty, I don't know, I know that I can get pretty lost in fire and smoke and darkness and other states without the balancing factor of confidence. Confidence that I'm put together to look deeply, to be able to look at, to be able to investigate the use of depleted uranium by the North American armed forces in Iraq and in Yugoslavia is my inheritance as a human being. And the fire that comes up in me when I do that investigation is meant to be and meant to be tempered by confidence that through working together

[32:03]

with other people we can create a peaceful world. Now maybe I'm deluded and lazy but part of my inheritance is this limb of investigation. Looking deeply. I was thinking about curiosity last week or I guess last month when I went out with the children. We were talking about curiosity and looking at curiosity and how healthy curiosity is. And I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago or maybe it was a year ago, Yvonne Rand gave a talk to the children about curiosity and she told the story of llamas being employed by sheep farmers in South America because when coyotes come llamas are curious about what these beasts are and rather than running away and hiding they go toward the coyotes. They investigate the coyotes with curiosity and llamas are large animals and coyotes are not used to being

[33:04]

met head on by curious ones investigated by curious ones. So coyotes flee. Therefore, llamas have a good business in South America protecting sheep and other more meek creatures. So the teaching is simple. Curiosity is part of investigation. Balance your curiosity with confidence and stability. The third factor... Actually, the fourth factor of enlightenment is joy. Rapture. Joy is balanced by compassion. Joy is the willingness to celebrate and to be happy life, even in dark times, and compassion is the willingness to recognize that there's

[34:05]

suffering in the life of the world, even in bright times. So the two go together, and they give fire to your practice. At Santa Sabina, there was a tremendous amount of sorrow having to do with loss and the recognition of war. For the veterans with us, it was a very intense time. It was difficult to generate joy. Every morning we chanted the metta sutta, and we had singer and peace activist Betsy Rose with us, and we set the phrase of the metta sutta to song. So I'm going to sing to you what we developed, and it was wonderful. I'm not Reb Anderson, and I will not, I promise you I will not torture you with too long singing. Not that he does that, excuse me. That was probably not great speech, but anyway, I just want to sing a refrain of this song. You can make your connections, but don't make that one.

[35:05]

This song we worked with, and I've actually found in the last weeks since being at Santa Sabina, it comes up in very unexpected times, like listening to the news. May I be happy, may I be joyful, may I be filled with peace. This is the ancient refrain from the Buddha, and Betsy put it to Isn't She Beautiful, Isn't She Lovely. Whose song is that? Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder, thanks. So it goes, may I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be filled with joy. Just like that. And then you begin with yourself, then may you be peaceful, excuse me, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be filled with joy. And last is toward the world, so if you want to, you can sing with me, but you don't have to. May we, and it's like the French, ah, may we.

[36:09]

May we be peaceful, sorry, may we be happy. May we be happy, may we be peaceful, may we be filled with joy. We practice with this as a question. May we be happy? We actually ask, is it possible to be happy in the middle of this recognition? May we actually be peaceful when the world is burning up with war? May we be filled with joy in the middle of all of this? And to have Ted Sexauer, who was a veteran of the Vietnam War, a medic who practiced in the front lines in combat, be able to sing that song with us was very potent. So these are the fiery limbs of enlightenment, and they're meant to be balanced by the cool water of solid meditation, concentration, samadhi, first of all.

[37:11]

One-pointedness, steadiness, and we practice this in the morning, letting the water of samadhi run through us, the water of one-pointed concentration, paying attention to the breathing, to the body, to the heart and mind, and dedicating that concentration to the well-being of the world. It's interesting what we discovered. We discovered that when a number of us found that when we were agitated or burning, concentration balanced us, meditation balanced us, and settled us, and made the fire, kind of banked the fire, didn't put it out, but it banked it and made it burn at a different level. And when we were sleepy from too much concentration, which does happen, right, in these retreats, you get a little too relaxed and floaty, then just paying attention with mindfulness, paying attention, oh, I'm sleepy. Paying attention to that was a kind of fire that woke us up and made us aware, oh, I'm

[38:18]

sleepy. With awareness, with the fire of awareness going toward that, we balanced and woke up. So this was very potent practice that we experienced, the balance of fire and water. Samadhi has two features, two features of concentration that are ancient teachings from the Buddha. And let's just look at the word sam means together, and ah, sam, ah, d, sam, together, ah, to a certain place. And d, d-h-i, means energy of the mind. So let's go to a certain place with energy of the mind. Put energy of the mind to meditation and to features. Focus on a fixed object. You can watch your breath. Not that your breath is fixed, but you can watch your breath. And a number of us worked with breath-watching during the treatment and feel that pulse of breath in and out. And secondly, you can watch change. You can watch how your breath changes.

[39:21]

You can watch how it stabilizes and is unified. You can also watch how it changes. So we floated, we worked that river. We were in that river of calm samadhi. Now and then. Tranquility, the sixth limb or factor of enlightenment, sixth limb of the tree, is also translated as ease, satisfaction, because tranquility comes when you're satisfied with what you have, with just enough. Tranquil mind, tranquil body. Wise attention, says the Buddha, is the food for tranquil mind. And the sign of serenity is non-diversion, staying focused, staying tranquil.

[40:23]

Not tranquilizing yourself, but finding satisfaction in quietness and in just enough and having just enough. These are hard ones for me. But I did experience, I do experience this, especially in the presence of others who are working, working. Again, Katagiri Roshi is saying, settle yourself on yourself and let the flower of your life force bloom. Tranquil and ease, calm and ease. And last of all is even-mindedness, equanimity. I always hear Gary Snyder reminding us that compassion without wisdom can be a little sappy, but wisdom without compassion feels no pain.

[41:25]

So we're not talking about that kind of equanimity that feels no pain. We're talking about balance again, but balance on the cool and the water element side. In a way, equanimity relates to joy. Equanimous, even-mindedness has a sense of joy and energy to it, just as joy and energy have a sense of even-mindedness. It's really interesting to watch how that tree balances itself. I like the image of turbulent or stirred-up apple juice settling, so the sediment goes down to the bottom of the glass, and what we drink is clear, even-mindedness. Oftentimes, equanimity is presented in the Buddhist iconography as a mountain. Be a mountain, and let snow and wind and rain and water come onto you and off you, more accepting and grounded. I think of the picture I have on the door of my house.

[42:29]

When Steve Weintraub spoke recently, I went and got this picture and tried to bring it to him. I actually missed him and didn't have a chance. It's a picture of a cellist. Many of you may know this picture. A cellist who lived in Yugoslavia and made it his practice to dress in a tuxedo on a Sunday during the war, during the bombing of Bosnia and the fighting in Bosnia. He would take his cello and sit in the ruins of the National Library in Sarajevo and play the cello in the afternoon. The bombing stopped during that time, and he played the cello. After a certain time, he would pack the cello up and go home. So that kind of courage and even-mindedness is part of our life and vow. It's difficult to get the news from poems, said William Carlos Williams, but men die

[43:38]

every day for lack of what is therein. So I'd like to close by reading two poems and thanking you for giving me the opportunity to share my experience. Before I read the poems, I want to recognize that in our retreat at Santa Sabina, the bell mistress is a student who practiced for years at Zen Center and as a young woman was attacked by a bear in the wilderness around Glacier National Park. And this completely changed her life, as you can imagine. She was nearly killed, and her whole internal system was reordered by her encounter with the bear. So she's been practicing meditation, lying down, and she hasn't been able to sit upright for a number of years. But she's a very courageous person. So during this retreat, we had the pleasure of inviting her to be the bell mistress. And she said, you want a lying-down bell mistress? What if I fall asleep? We said, you won't.

[44:38]

If you're the bell mistress, you won't fall asleep. So we had the incredible experience of watching her ring the bell from the lying-down posture. I think it was very moving to a number of us because so many of us have experienced rupture in our life and damage. And so to know that we have the full capacity to awaken the factors of enlightenment is so important. So it was wonderful hearing her bell. Her bell was very clear. In fact, it was stronger than most people's bells. I said to her, could you lay off a little bit of the bell? You're getting us too aroused. She just... But she said afterwards that it was a very incredible experience for her to ring the bell. And to... You know, the bell master or mistress minds the meditation periods for the whole day. And you have to be very alert and conscious. And it called her out of her sinking, watery state and fired her up. And another friend, a man who lives here at Green Gulch, came and brought a beautiful

[45:45]

painting he's done. He's been dealing with Parkinson's disease for the last 14 years of his life. And he's a painter and hasn't been able to paint because his hand doesn't hold still. Last fall, he ordained as a priest and took up the challenge this spring of trying to paint. Well, I'll just see what happens, he said. And so when he had a spaz attack, he included that in his painting. The painting is beautiful. It's very beautiful. I didn't bring it because it's inside. I think it should be in our hearts and minds. We can all see and imagine. He drew a beautiful Buddha. And usually his Buddhas are very complete. In this case, the midsection of the Buddha was missing and a river was running through his midsection. That's what his hand presented him with. It's a beautiful painting. And we put it on the middle of our altar so that we could wake up together this courage

[46:49]

to be fiery and to be watery at the same time. And to find out how the limbs of enlightenment support our practice. So, I'd like to begin by reading a poem by poet Denise Levertov about water and close with fire. Actually, I think I'll do it the other way around. I'm following the admonitions of the Buddha here. A poem, The Fire, by poet Jane Hirshfield, who we'll read tonight as we celebrate the kindling of our tea garden. You've been hearing we're going to have a special dinner tonight and immersion in poetry this evening. And poet and practitioner Jane Hirshfield, The Fire. Again, open the book of reds and golds. Study the faces of poppy and lion, the bright carpet of your own life.

[47:50]

What looks back and seems to be burning is burning, though not all the same. In the moment of turning away from rain, the day gives off red and gold, the slightest scent of peaches. This too, so you might know things as they are. So you, who are already walking within, will come in. Why else take up the body's single candle, if not to see how everything is consumed? And she's echoed by poet Denise Levertov, The Fountain. Don't say, don't say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts.

[48:55]

I've seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there, and I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water. The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as she watched, but not because she grudged the water, only because she was waiting to see we drank our full and were refreshed. Don't say, don't say there is no water. The fountain is there among its scalloped green and grey stones. It is still there and always there, with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us, up and out through the rock. You know you're in the presence of many great noble trees here when you come to Zen Center.

[50:24]

I hope that you will follow the ancient tradition and admonition of the Buddha to put your heart and mind together in the present moment and find some time today to lean your back up against a great tree and to feel how the seven limbs of enlightenment are your own home territory, the body of the tree, the body of your own mind and intention. And we'll find some way to make these teachings relevant to our times so that we can light the light of peace and conflict resolution for our world and beyond, and make the vow to do it together, to not tarry and not rest, and to find out, to investigate joyfully and energetically, to find out mindfully with concentration and calm, tranquility, that even-mindedness that provides for the well-being of all beings on earth.

[51:28]

Thank you for coming here Sunday morning and joining your practice with our practice.

[51:35]

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