Good morning. So traditionally the first Shuso talk is a way-seeking mind talk, and I'd like to tell you about my life and how I came to practice, but first I'd like to express some gratitudes. First of all, to Hojo-san, Linda Ruth, my teacher, for encouraging me to practice and keep on practicing and continue to practice and to be myself. I'd also like to express my appreciation for all of you here today, all of us practicing together in this valley, and Dogen says in Regulations for the Auxiliary, Cloud Hall, where he talks about students being like milk and water, it is rare to meet one another and to practice what is rare to practice. The support to you and your practice given by this assembly of practitioners surpasses

[01:08]

that which was given by your father and mother. So we're very important to one another, and I really cherish all the support and friendship I've received from many of you and look forward to getting to know those of you I don't yet know during this practice period. And finally, I'd like to express my gratitude for this beautiful valley in which we practice, the creek, the mountains, which support our practice so deeply. I'd like to dedicate this talk to my father, who died this year on February 4th, and of course without him I wouldn't be here today. And finally, I thought I'd like to have a title for my talk, and when I thought about it, the best one I found is a line from a poem by Jane Hirshfield, the poem is called Tree,

[02:09]

and the line is, softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. The way I came to practice, it's hard to fathom in a sense, there's not a straight line, there's not a single moment, many causes and conditions. So softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. So with my life, I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. My grandparents all immigrated to the United States. My mother's parents came from Russia, and my grandmother on my mother's side was one of 13 children, so we had many people in the extended family, and the family was so large

[03:13]

they formed a family society called the Children of David, based I think on the seventh generation ancestor David Widomlansky. And I got to know many of my grand, in fact all of my grandmother's brothers and sisters, and when I was growing up, occasionally the whole family would get together at a kosher restaurant on the Lower East Side and take up a whole room, and sometimes we would go on outings, we'd hire a bus and go to a state park, and my father always led the singing on the bus. He had a great singing voice. And my mother's parents, when they came to the United States, settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and they had a stall in a market called the Essex Street Market. They spoke Yiddish and they didn't have much education, but they had three children and

[04:15]

they really encouraged my mother and her brothers to study, so much so that my mother became the valedictorian of her class in high school. My father's parents came from Poland and Austria-Hungary, and also came to the Lower East Side and then soon moved to Brooklyn, and they were hat makers, milliners. One of my favorite memories as a child was we lived in the Bronx from the time I was two, and we would get on the subway on a Sunday morning and take the train, I think we had to take three trains to get to my grandparents' house in Brooklyn, and when we got there, the smell of chicken soup just filled the house. My grandfather made wonderful chicken soup with parsnips and dill. So my father was born in Brooklyn and loved Brooklyn and New York.

[05:20]

He was very athletic as a young man. I've seen pictures of him at the bottom of a tower of young men that would climb on his shoulders and they'd be three high, and he was a great swimmer. He loved the ocean and swimming, and he was a scout and could light a fire without a match, things like that. My mother grew up in the Bronx, and my parents met when they were working. Neither of them were able to go to college. They grew up in the time of the Depression, and although my mother really wanted to go to college, I think she went to part of one year, they had to work. And so they met in my Uncle Sammy's garment factory, it was a fabric factory, and fell in love, got married, and they got a canoe. They lived in the Bronx, but they tell these stories of canoeing on the Hudson River with their pup tent and their dog named Spike, and catching rides on barges and camping along

[06:27]

the banks of the Hudson River. And then when I was born, they sold their canoe, which is, I never got to ride in it. So I was the first child, and my name was actually Alice Jane Schwartz. I changed my name later. I was named after, in Jewish families, it's typical to name your children after relatives who have died. So Alice was, I was named after my father's brother, Arthur, who had died at a young age. And the Jane was after an aunt, Shana. I was always sorry they didn't name me Shana, but Shana's a nice name. And then when I was 18 months old, my sister Helen was born, and my family moved to Parkchester in the Bronx. Parkchester is a kind of housing apartment complex that was built by the Metropolitan

[07:29]

Life Insurance Company, and there were thousands of families living there. We lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building, and it was a four-room apartment. And sometimes my mother's mother, my grandmother, lived with us, so it was crowded. And Parkchester was, at that time, a place where families were either Jewish, like my family, or Irish or Italian Catholic. And all the Irish and Italian Catholic children went to parochial schools, so the public school that I went to was almost entirely Jewish, and it closed on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Most of the teachers were Jewish as well. The neighborhood has changed quite a bit since I grew up there. So I had this sense of being Jewish that was very cultural, but my parents never went to synagogue, and although we went to relatives' house in Brooklyn for Passover, which is my

[08:35]

favorite Jewish holiday, and there was always a large gathering there, but I didn't really know anything about the Jewish religion. My father, from about the time I was five, got a job in the post office, which was a very secure job, and he worked at night in the post office around 34th Street, the main post office, and he worked there for over, well, for 40 years until he retired working at night. And then he got a second job in the mornings at Macy's Department Store as a stock clerk, and he had told us he was working hard so that he could send us to college. And it was a trade-off for me because I hardly ever saw him. I really saw him only on Sundays, and I think I would rather have had more contact with my father, but I was also grateful that I did go to college. So I was the oldest, and I was told lots of things like, set a

[09:44]

good example for your sister, and be good, and I was pretty good. I loved school, and I worked hard in school, and my parents, I think it was mostly my mother, set up a kind of dichotomy in my family, which I don't think was very helpful in the long run. I was considered the smart child, and my sister was the pretty child. And I was chubby, and I wore glasses, and I didn't think of myself as very attractive. And my parents really praised me when I did well in school, so there was a lot of encouragement to study, but I also really loved learning. My father told a story, I don't know if it's true or not, that he taught me the alphabet on some of those long subway rides to Brooklyn by pointing

[10:47]

out letters in the subway ads before I started school. And I did love to read, and I remember story hours at the library, and taking out library books pretty frequently. And then a wonderful thing happened for me when I was ten years old. My fourth grade teacher heard about a scholarship for children from non-musical families. I don't know how you could tell that a family wasn't musical. But anyway, I went to the Henry Street Settlement on the east side of Manhattan, and had an aptitude test, and they decided I had musical aptitude, and so I won a scholarship to study the cello for three years. And that was a big, it was a wonderful thing for me. My cello teacher's name was Signe Sandström. She was Scandinavian from Sweden. And I just recently found out she was a student of Pablo Casals. If any

[11:47]

of you know about cellists, he was a great Spanish cellist. And I went to the Henry Street Settlement once a week at first for cello lessons. And somehow my mother, even though she was working, took me, because it was a long way on the subway, until I was old enough to go by myself every week. And then I started taking theory lessons and was in a junior ensemble and junior chorus, and I started going twice a week. And then I applied to go to the High School of Music and Art, which is a public high school in New York, but you had to audition either in music or art. And I did go to music and art. One thing about the New York school system at that time was that you could skip a grade in junior high school, so I did 7th, 8th, and 9th grades in two years. And so I started

[12:49]

music and art at 10th grade, and I was 13, so I was a little young. And I remember the first day of school just feeling, seeing all these people who looked older than me, greeting each other with great warmth after the summer and feeling very shy. And I was pretty shy at first in high school. But music and art was a wonderful school, and my only regret was that I couldn't go for four years, because it was a school where there was so much life and love of learning. And you'd walk down the corridor and hear a clarinet or a string quartet and there'd be students with their art portfolios under their arms. And eventually I did have some friends. I had my close friend, who I'm still close to, her name is Linda

[13:53]

Fisher, was her name then. And we joined a chorus that was started by one of the teachers at music and art. It was a renaissance chorus. We sang renaissance music, and it met on Saturdays in the village, Greenwich Village. So we would, Linda lived in Parkchester too, so we'd take the train down town and we'd spend the whole day going to chorus and wandering around the village. And we became fans of a music group called the New York Pro Musica, which was one of the first early music groups playing renaissance music before Bach. And we would find out whenever one of the people in New York Pro Musica was giving a free concert and we'd go. And Linda became a music teacher and a voice teacher, and it's nice to have

[14:54]

a friend still who I've known for so long. So a couple of other things about music and art. I was very interested in lots of subjects. I had a math teacher named Mr. Starr, who was the first person who told me to stand up straight, which people have been telling me all my life, and I'm still working on it. But he really inspired me to love algebra, so much so that I started, I got some other students together and we started an advanced algebra class. I also loved science, and I loved writing. There was a, I wrote for the high school newspaper, which was called Overtone, and I took a creative writing class, which was a wonderful class. We'd read essays, and then we'd have to write our response to the essays. And so we read Emerson and Thoreau, and those writers really inspired me. And

[16:02]

also had an English teacher who encouraged us to memorize poetry. And there are a couple of poems I remember still that I learned then. One of them, I just want to say a few words of it. It's part of a sonnet by Wordsworth, and it's, the world is too much with us. Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. And that poem just appealed to me so much. I think maybe because I saw how hard my father was working, and he, in the summers, we went to the Catskills and rented a bungalow. And my mother and sister and I would be there all summer, and my father would come on weekends, and also on his two-week vacation. And he loved being outdoors. He taught me to swim,

[17:03]

and we'd go berry picking and things like that. And somehow, even though I lived in New York, I really acquired a love for nature. And during those years, and I was in high school, I went to Girl Scout camp. And I was in a pioneering unit one summer and went on my first canoe trips and overnight camping, and really enjoyed being out of the city. So when it was time to apply for college, I wanted to leave New York. I'd never been anywhere else. And I heard about Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and decided to go. I was accepted to Antioch. And there were a few things about Antioch that were pretty unique. The slogan was, More Than Books. And they had a work-study, they still do, Antioch

[18:04]

is still there, a work-study program. So you would study for three months and then have a co-op jobs for three months in various cities all over the United States. And it didn't have any fraternities or sororities. There were students on the governing body of the school. And they had folk dancing as the main social activity. So I started at Antioch when I was 16 and couldn't figure out what to major in. I started out thinking I would major in physics. And I took physics in the spring of my first year. And it was so beautiful in Yellow Springs. There was a great park to walk in. And I couldn't bear staying inside to do the physics labs. So my physics professor advised me to drop physics, which I did. And then I switched to philosophy of science, and then to math, and

[19:15]

then to sociology. And it was very confusing. But one thing that happened after my first quarter at Antioch stands out for me. I took the Greyhound bus back to New York to visit my family. And my father met me at the bus station. And we were walking across town to the subway. And we passed the office of SANE, which was an organization for SANE nuclear policy, one of the early anti-nuclear organizations. And I had heard about it at Antioch. Antioch was a very liberal college. And there were many activists on campus. So I wanted to go in and get some literature. And my father wouldn't let me go in. He kind of froze. And then he said, what difference can one person make anyway? And I always remembered that. And kind of after that, began looking to see what difference one person could make and I think he was so frightened because it was the time of the McCarthy era. And many

[20:21]

people got in trouble for their political views. But that's the closest I can understand to why he had such a strong reaction to it. So Antioch had an education abroad program. And what I didn't mention is that because I thought I was going to be a science major, I started studying German literature. I started studying German and had a wonderful German professor. And I really loved German. So when it was time to do Antioch education abroad, I decided to go to Vienna where I could study German and music because I was still playing the cello. And also I was interested in psychology and that's where Sigmund Freud came from. So I went to Vienna and I loved Vienna. I first lived with a Viennese woman who had an extra room in her house. And I found a group of international students at Quaker

[21:26]

House in Vienna and many of them were music students. And we played music together and took walks in the Vienna woods and went to the opera. You could get a standing room ticket for four shillings, which at that time was the equivalent of 16 cents. So I went to the opera. And then as I learned German, I was able to go to the theater. Vienna has an incredibly rich cultural life. And also it was in Vienna that I had my first relationship with a woman. I met her at Quaker House and I needed a place to live. And I got a room in her apartment. She was an artist, a painter, half English and half Viennese. Her name was Lisa. And we lived together for about six months. And then I wanted to go to Israel because I really wanted to understand more about being Jewish. So she came to Israel

[22:28]

with me and two other Viennese friends and we all went to a kibbutz for the summer. And then I decided to stay and study Hebrew at another kibbutz. There's an old pond. Israel has a wonderful, I think it still does, but at that time, this was 1960, a wonderful program where you could live on a kibbutz, have a kibbutz family adopt you and study Hebrew. The kibbutz I went to was in the north of Israel. It had been founded by Dutch Jews. And also there were some Czech Jews who spoke German. So while I was struggling to learn Hebrew, the other people in the old pond were young people who were immigrating from North Africa and Romania. We had no language in common. So my kibbutz family spoke German and

[23:30]

I became actually very fluent in German while I was living in Israel. It's strange, but that's what happened. And when I returned, I was very drawn to kibbutz life. Say that was my first experience of living in a community. And what was valued on the kibbutz was how hard people worked or how, not just hard, but how willing they were to do whatever needed to be done rather than what degree they had. And when there was a birth or a death, the whole community was involved in the celebration or the mourning. And the holidays were celebrated together. I remember Hanukkah, which comes in December, it's a festival of light. And every family had a menorah in the dining room. People ate together and the dining room was just full of light. So I was tempted to stay in Israel, but I also thought it would be

[24:38]

good to finish college. So I left and went back to the States, but I had stayed too long to graduate with my class from Antioch. So I went to Berkeley where my sister Helen was studying and decided to stay in Berkeley. And eventually I got a job and I transferred to UC Berkeley and became a German major. In the summer of 1963, just before my last year at UC Berkeley, I joined a voter registration project in North Carolina. It was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and a group of black and white college students came together and we were housed in a black church and we went out every day to register people to vote. And Greensboro was quite segregated at that time. It was shocking to me. I had never been in the South. And it was around that time when the Woolworth's soda fountain

[25:44]

counter was integrated. And at the end of the time we were there, we all got on a bus and we were given police escort out of Greensboro because we were black and white students together. And we went to the March on Washington in 19, the famous one, where Martin Luther King gave his talk and Joan Baez was singing. And there were, it was an incredible experience. Bus loads of black children from freedom schools were there singing and people from the labor movement. And it was a very inspiring event. One other thing happened for me during that time in Greensboro. One of the participants was a woman named Nora. And somehow we got lost one day and she kissed me. That began a very important relationship. So I went back

[26:48]

to Berkeley and she was going to Antioch. But when I graduated the next summer, she came, she drove out to California and we spent the summer in Sand City, right near Monterey. We rented a little cabin and we studied French at the Monterey Language School. Because I had majored in German, I was thinking about going to graduate school in German literature and I'd been accepted at a few schools and I was going to go to Harvard. So I was learning French and somehow going to graduate school didn't really, in German literature, didn't feel right. And at the time I thought it was that I couldn't imagine living or spending the rest of my life in a university. But I also think that it was such a big stretch because I was the first person in my family to finish college and I didn't know any college professors except for the ones that I had at UC Berkeley who were all men and didn't

[27:50]

have really a mentor. And so I spent the summer learning French and then kind of thought maybe I would go to France and continue learning French. I didn't really have a plan, a solid plan, but I got a ticket to France and Nora and I drove back east and stopped to visit her family in Ohio and somehow I got poison ivy when we were walking in the woods. And I arrived on the east coast with a really bad case of poison ivy. I was supposed to leave in about a week and I went to visit cousins in Boston who I got to know. This was a family that was very important to me but I don't think I'll take the time to talk about them now. But anyway, my cousin Sylvia who I respected greatly just asked me what I was doing going to France, giving up graduate school. She thought I was wasting my life.

[28:55]

I was only 23 but she thought I was wasting my life. And I got cold feet and I didn't go to France and I didn't go to graduate school and I moved to Boston and looked for a job and Nora moved there also and we shared an apartment. And I got a job as a research assistant at a mental hospital working for two psychiatrists. They were doing a study of outpatient clinic patients and part of my job included interviewing many, many patients using a questionnaire that we developed. And while I was working there, I looked in, now we call it the DSM. It's a book that had all the psychiatric diagnoses in it. And there was one that said character disorder, homosexual. And when I saw that, I got really scared. What was wrong? Was there something wrong with me? I didn't know anyone else who was gay or lesbian. I

[30:01]

didn't know anyone I could talk to about it. And I talked to Nora about it and when she went back to Antioch at the end of December, she was only there for three months, I decided to end the relationship. And I got really depressed. I got dermatitis actually and went to a dermatologist who said he thought I was depressed. And I decided that I would just try to go out with men after that. And the other thing that happened in that year was I decided to go to social work school. So I was working in this mental hospital where there were psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. And I found I really enjoyed

[31:03]

talking to the patients that I interviewed and I wanted to know more why were some of them. One of the questions I had to ask, for example, was how many times have you moved in your life? And found some people had never moved and other people were always moving. And the always moving ones, there were other problems that were going on in their lives. And I wanted to understand more. But I didn't want to go to graduate school for four more years or seven years to be a psychiatrist. So I decided to go to social work school. And I went to Smith College School for Social Work in Northampton, Massachusetts. It's the school Seguin is. Some of you know Seguin. She's going there now. And Smith is a wonderful

[32:06]

school. It was, at that time, very psychoanalytically oriented. And you go to school in the summers and do all your coursework. And then there are two ten-month fieldwork placements where you work in an agency. So you really get a chance to do social work. And I graduated from Smith in 1967 and got my first job at University Hospital in Boston as a psychiatric social worker working with outpatient clinics, excuse me, outpatient adults. University Hospital is in a part of Boston that is called the South End. And at that time, there were people of many different ethnic groups living in the South End. And I was able to do some home visits to visit families and individuals in their homes. And it was a wonderful experience

[33:12]

to work with people in their own homes as well as to see people who came to the clinic. And during that time, two things happened. One was I was interested in doing some therapy for myself and started therapy with a psychiatrist. I told him about my relationships with men. And he said that he thought I would be cured when I was in a stable... I told him about my relationships with women. And he said he thought I would be cured when I was in a long-term stable relationship with a man. I never got cured though. And the other thing that happened was I started studying viola da gamba. I played cello up till then all my life. And my cello teacher, when I lived in Berkeley, had a viola da gamba

[34:13]

in her house. Maybe some of you don't know what a viola da gamba is. It's a six-stringed instrument that's played with a bow like the cello, but it comes in different sizes. And it was played... It's a Renaissance instrument, so music was written for the viola da gamba before the cello, like before the time of Bach. And it's often played... It's called a consort of vials. We have a treble, which is about the size of a violin, a tenor, and a bass. It's softer sounding than modern stringed instruments, and they're often played with harpsichords or recorders. And I found a viola da gamba teacher in New Haven, and I would take the train every week to study with her. Her name was Martha Blackman, and she had played in that original New York Pro Musica. So I found other people who played early music,

[35:19]

and I got so interested in it that I was actually thinking of leaving social work to become a musician. And I wasn't getting along with my supervisor at University Hospital. She was... I'd say I wanted to try different things. I wanted to... I wanted to try different things to do some work with groups. I wanted to do some work with couples, and she didn't think I was ready to do that. And so it was a combination of feeling kind of stifled at my job and really loving music. And then one evening, I was riding my... I used to ride my bicycle. I lived in Cambridge, and I'd ride across the Mass Avenue Bridge. It was a few miles to the hospital. I was riding home on Halloween evening, and a car door opened in front of me, and I hit it and fell into traffic. And I woke up on the... I think

[36:25]

I woke up... I mean, I think I was unconscious for a little while. And I woke up in great pain, and an ambulance came and took me to the hospital. And it turned out that I had broken my pelvis in my left leg. And that was a very difficult time in my life. I was in the hospital for 10 weeks, and there's no way to mend a broken pelvis except to not move, basically. And soon after I was in the hospital, they discovered I had some very deep bruises on my buttocks. And so I couldn't just lie on my back. So I was on a circular electric bed, and every six hours, it would be flipped. So I'd either be on my back or I'd be on my stomach, and my leg was in a cast. And so it happened on Halloween, so I was there for my birthday and Thanksgiving. And I couldn't do very much. I could move

[37:27]

with my hands and my head. And friends came and brought music to listen to. And on my birthday, a music group I was in came and serenaded. It was just amazing to hear this music, this Renaissance music, in the hospital. And my cousins who lived in Boston also came and visited and brought me a Thanksgiving meal that was home-cooked. And I spent time with friends, and the interesting thing was I discovered that because I couldn't move, when friends came, we had some really quality time in the hospital. And I also experienced the hospital as a very caring place, which I had had kind of negative thoughts about hospitals. I'd never been ill. But the nurses took such good care of me. And before I left the hospital, I had to have surgery. I had skin graft on my scars, or they were now scars,

[38:29]

and knee surgery. And so I learned to walk first with a walker. I had to relearn how to walk, and then on crutches. And I left the hospital on crutches. And about a week after I left the hospital, my leg began to swell up. And I went back to the doctor, and I had phlebitis, a blood clot in my left leg. So I had to go back to the hospital for another week. And all in all, I was out of work for about three months. And one thing I didn't mention is that the night before the accident, I'd gone out on a date with someone, and we'd slept together. And so somehow I felt guilty that, I mean, I associated that with my accident. And I had just a lot of guilt about having somehow caused the accident.

[39:36]

And when I left the hospital also, I found that I had really deep scars on my buttocks. And it was very hard to accept my body at that time. And when I went back to work, my doctor, she wanted to fire me because she didn't think that I was somehow that I... I guess the other piece is while I was in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think, and I decided I wanted to continue on in social work. I didn't want to become a musician. So when she told me she did fire me, it was a real blow. And I started looking for another social work job. So I would say this was one of the hardest times in my life. And yet

[40:42]

out of it, some amazingly wonderful things came. One was in the process of looking for another job. I found a job at Cambridge Hospital in Boston. I mean, Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, where my... It was a job working in child psychiatry and pediatrics. And the supervisor was a psychiatrist who was a community psychiatrist who really believed in group work and working with families and couples, and encouraged me to do work in some of the neighborhood clinics in Cambridge. And my work kind of took off and blossomed. I really enjoyed that job. And I continued to play music, although I decided it wasn't going to be my career. And I found a music group of people. We formed a consort, the Greenwood Consort, and played

[41:46]

a lot of concerts. And one of the people who taught early music, one of our teachers, was a... How do I put this? So there was a group of early musicians who had been our teachers who bought a place in Maine that we went to visit. And while there, I saw a book called Don't Push the River. It was a book by Barry Stevens about gestalt therapy. And I read the book cover to cover and decided I wanted to learn about gestalt therapy. And so I heard about Esalen at that time, and I got a catalog and convinced a friend to go to a gestalt workshop at Esalen with me. And at the last minute, she couldn't go. So I went to Esalen by myself.

[42:50]

And somehow, in flying from San Francisco to Monterey, my luggage got lost. And I arrived at Esalen, and the first thing I saw was a swimming pool. And I love to swim, but I didn't have my bathing suit. And there were plenty of people swimming in it naked, but I had my scars, and I just didn't feel comfortable. But I decided to do it anyway. So I went, and that was the beginning of a lot of healing. It was only a week at Esalen, but it made a huge impact on my life. I had my first massage at Esalen, and when this masseuse was working on my back, I could feel kind of drops of water falling on me. And it turned out that she was crying, that she had had a broken back. And working on my scars just brought up issues for her, but it was actually very healing for me that she could touch me and

[43:50]

not shy away from touching my scars. And in the workshop, the gestalt workshop, I also worked on my feelings about my scars and ended up leaving. I felt, oh, the other thing that happened at Esalen was, it was the first time where I saw someone meditating. Someone was sitting on a rock meditating. So it was about, I was about 33 at that time. And when I came back to Boston, I found out about a place right outside Boston called Associates for Human Resources that offered training in gestalt therapy. And I took a leave of absence from my job and was an intern there for three months. And interestingly, Jack Kornfield was working in the office there, and he took the whole group of, he taught meditation one morning. And after showing us sitting meditation and walking meditation, we walked to the local

[44:54]

ice cream place and did some eating meditation. And I was very, very, very impressed with it. I decided to see one of the gestalt therapists there for a private session. And I told her about my feelings about women. And she said, I've had feelings like that myself, which was a total shock. Here was someone who I respected, who was a mental health professional, who didn't think there was anything wrong with having feelings about women. And that again was for me. And by this time, it was 1973. So there was a whole different climate around being gay or lesbian. It was the beginning of the gay rights movement. There was a women's bookstore that had just opened in Cambridge. There was a women's newspaper called Sojourner,

[45:58]

which I wrote, I was a music critic for a while. I went to lots of women's music concerts and went to my first Gay Pride March. And I really came out in a whole different way with a lot of support. And it was so different from the feelings I had had about being a lesbian earlier on. So when it was near the end of my three-month internship at Associates for Human Resources, and I was supposed to go back to my job at Cambridge Hospital, one of the exercises that we did, I was somewhat conflicted about going back to traditional social work. And we did a guided meditation where Gestalt uses the imagination a lot.

[47:10]

I think that's one of the things that appealed to me about it. So there was a guided meditation where you were going somewhere with a backpack on your back, and then you would take out the contents of the backpack and have the different items in the backpack talk. So I had this box of colored pens that wouldn't stay closed. And as I became, I was the box of colored pens that wouldn't stay closed. And I realized that going back to that job, even though it was a great job, felt like closing the box, and I didn't want to go back. And I didn't go back. I submitted my resignation. My supervisor told me that I was wasting my life. This theme came up again, giving up a brilliant career in social work. So what I did instead was a number of the staff at the Associates for Human Resources had been doing a training called Arika. And it was a training put together by a Chilean

[48:15]

man named Oscar Achazo. And I decided to do a 40-day training in Vermont in Arika. So it combined meditation, something called psycho-calisthenics that was like yoga. We ate vegetarian food. We did visualizations, mantras, and lots of different things. And that was really my introduction to Buddhism, although it was in this amalgam of other practices. And I lived in an Arika house after that and started a private practice in psychotherapy. And in that house, I met a woman named Abba, and we became very close. And Abba was the one from Jamaica and had lived in Ghana for a number of years. And she was very interested in Tibetan Buddhism. So after that year, living in an Arika house, we moved to a Dharmadhatu

[49:21]

house in Cambridge. And I went to my first retreat, which was at Karmic Shilling in Vermont. And Chögyam Trungpa was alive in those days, and I can remember him giving a Dharma talk coming an hour late, everybody waiting. And that's what I remember more than the content of the talk. And during that time, I was also given my first Dharma name by Trungpa Rinpoche. It was Dharma Lake Feast. And there was an initiation. I checked with Diana. I think it was the Karmapa who came, and I got initiated, a red string around my wrist. And Abba said that meant that I would be a Buddhist for life. But I didn't really believe it. So anyway, I lived in the Dharmadhatu for that year, and then it didn't feel like the right practice for me. So I went to my first retreat at the Insight Meditation

[50:23]

Society in Bari and kept on going. Once or twice a year, I'd go for a ten-day retreat and try to sit in between. I'm going to try to fast-forward a little bit. So this was in the mid-seventies. And I had a private practice, and it was called Practice in Cambridge, and was going to retreats. And then in 1982, a friend told me about Joanna Macy's work, and I went to a workshop with Joanna. Joanna is a Buddhist scholar and activist, and at that time, she was doing workshops called Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. And this was a weekend workshop with about sixty people in it. And in that workshop, I realized that I had a really deep concern about, and still did,

[51:34]

about the threat of nuclear war. My activism had been kind of on a back burner, and I felt inspired at the end of the workshop to find some friends. Three of us formed a support group, and I wanted to learn how to lead despair and empowerment workshops. And I had already been working with groups, and so it wasn't such a big stretch. And I went to a couple of trainings and began leading despair and empowerment workshops. I also joined a women's civil disobedience group at that time, and we were inspired by the women of Greenham Common, and we protested at a place in New York State, the Seneca Army Base, and climbed over the fence along with other hundreds of women who climbed over and got arrested. And the first time, but not the last time, I did civil disobedience around anti-nuclear issues and then around the war in Nicaragua and the U.S. government's participation in that.

[52:40]

And I continued to do some work with Joanna Macy, and at the end of one of her workshops, I got the idea that I wanted to go to Japan to lead despair and empowerment workshops. And I spent about a year networking with people in Japan, and I got the idea that I wanted to do something about learning some Japanese and raising money. And in 1986, I went for three weeks and offered despair and empowerment workshops in Tokyo and Kyoto, and I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was extremely moving. And then the next year, I went to Australia to lead some workshops and fell in love with Australia. And it was a wonderful experience. Trying to condense this. So I lived in Australia, I went to Australia, I went back and lived there for three years, and worked with a group of activists, counseled women at a women's

[53:47]

health center, and went to retreats. Christopher Titmuss visited that part of Australia. It was northern New South Wales, and there were a lot of Buddhists in that area. And Christopher did a retreat every year in Bodh Gaya, so I decided in the middle of my last year, it turned out to be my last year in Australia, to go to Bodh Gaya and sit his retreat in India. And what I didn't mention is that through my work with Joanna Macy, and there was a whole network of people who were working with her, leading despair and empowerment workshops, I met Fran Peavey, who became my partner. And Fran had written a book called Heart Politics, and the Australian inter-help group that I was part of decided

[54:55]

to hold a heart politics conference and invited Fran to Australia. And Fran and I fell in love, and even though I'd known her since 1982, she'd been more of a colleague, and when I first met her at an inter-help gathering, she was leading a workshop on terror for people who were terrified about nuclear war, and you had to really be terrified to go to the workshop. And I was terrified of Fran, so I didn't go. But over the years as I got to know her, I got to really appreciate her big heart and her real commitment to social change work. And when I really connected with her, she had found out she was HIV positive, so she was also vulnerable in a way she had never been before. And so when she came to

[56:01]

Australia, she invited, and I told her I was going to India. She was working in India every year in Varanasi on a project to clean the Ganges, so she wanted to show me her India. And after Christopher's retreat, I went to Varanasi and spent about a week with Fran in Varanasi and met all the people she worked with there on the Ganges project. And then she went back to California, and I went back to Australia, and we wrote and called, and she invited me to live with her in San Francisco. Long story short, I did, to make it short. And we lived in Oakland, and the very first week I was living with Fran, she took me to a synagogue in San Francisco. She was a member of Metropolitan Community Church, and there

[57:01]

was a synagogue up the street called Congregation Chaar Zahab, which means Congregation Golden Gate, which was a synagogue with special outreach to gay and lesbian Jews and a gay rabbi. And the minute I went into Congregation Chaar Zahab, I felt very at home and became a member. And a year later, Fran and I had a ceremony of commitment at Congregation Chaar Zahab with the minister of Metropolitan Community Church, the rabbi, and Joanna Macy. So we had Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian ceremony with all our friends, and my parents came, and it was quite wonderful. And my work shifted, because when I moved to the Bay Area, I had a social work license that was good for Massachusetts, but it wasn't good for California, and I started studying to get a California license. And in the meantime, I was doing various social change projects, and Fran had promised, since I loved Australia so much, that we would go

[58:04]

back there every year. And she had developed a workshop on something called strategic questioning, a tool for social change, and we went back to Australia and led workshops every year and saw our old friends. And I also wrote something about support groups for activists, because I had been in an activist support group the whole time I was in Boston, and then the three years in Australia, and I joined another group that Fran had been in since 1982, an activist support group in the Bay Area. So the little book that I started on expanded and was published by New Society Publishers, so I was working on that. And then Fran got a teaching job in Australia for three years, just around the time I finally got my social work license in California. So we went to Australia, and we were also going to India, and I gave up trying to find a job in social work, and just said, okay, this is my work

[59:09]

working with Fran. She had started an organization called Crabgrass Working for Social Change, and crabgrass is a kind of grass that has very deep roots, so if you pull up one piece of it, it comes up somewhere else. And that was a great image for social change work. You can't kind of stop it. So I just want to briefly mention the most, I think there were a couple of wonderful things that we did. When we heard about the war in the former Yugoslavia, Fran was very, very touched by hearing about the mass rapes in Bosnia and wanted to do something to help the women who had been raped. So she wrote a letter to about 60 friends and 20 friends in Australia, asking people to make small bundles of things that refugee women might need, practical things like soap, shampoo,

[60:11]

lotion, handkerchiefs, and the response was incredible. We got thousands of packages from all over the United States and thousands in Australia, so we went to the former Yugoslavia together with a friend from Australia, and sometimes it's much too long a story to get into how we delivered the packages to the refugees. But it was that kind of, you know, seeing a situation and being able to respond that I really appreciated about Fran and finding a skillful means, you know, something that people also could join in on. And the other project that grew out of the work in Varanasi was gathering together women who were working on water issues in different parts of the world, and we went to the Beijing Women's Conference in 1995 and did a couple of workshops about women and water that women

[61:15]

from all the continents came to, and we were hearing about the water, the terrible shortages of clean water and difficulty in keeping water clean, and mostly women were dealing with these issues, carrying water for long distances. And so we organized two women and water conferences, one in Varanasi and one in Kathmandu, Nepal. I learned a lot about water. So while this was going on, all my work with Fran, when I moved to the Bay Area, I also wanted to find a place to sit, and I went to Spirit Rock because I had a connection with Jack Kornfield, but it didn't feel right to me there. And then I went to Green Gulch, and Green Gulch, it just reminded me so much, I forgot to mention, when I lived in Australia,

[62:19]

I lived on a biodynamic farm that had a meditation hall, and it was about 30 years old, and there were cows and a big organic garden. Everyone worked in the garden every week. It was called Dharmananda. So Green Gulch reminded me of Dharmananda, and I loved the fact that there was a farm and that people had been living there together and practicing for so long. And so I started going to Green Gulch first on Sundays, and then I did guest practice a couple of times, and then part of a fall practice period. And my very first practice discussion there was with Belinda, and I felt an affinity with her. And part of it also, I began to work with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and joined the board of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and knew that Linda had been president of the board. I became

[63:22]

president of the board of BPF. And so there was an affinity that I had with Linda, and there were many reasons why I asked Linda to be my teacher, and she said she would if I agreed to sit every day. So that was the beginning of my sitting every day. And I received lay ordination in May of 98, and the name I was given was Courageous Wind Devotion Jewel. And the very next day, Fran and I went to Yugoslavia to do some more work, and that name really gave me heart, gave me courage. So I continued to practice at Green Gulch and also at Berkeley Zen Center, because we were living in Oakland, and by kitchen.

[64:24]

And I did my first practice period as a non-resident at City Center, and sometime during that practice period I had the thought, I could really live here. I liked, there was something about the practice at City Center that felt very strong to me. And so at the same time, as I was practicing every day going to Berkeley Zen Center, my commitment to practice was growing stronger. There was a lot of difficulty in my relationship with Fran about my practice, and also then I started to work for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship half-time, so I couldn't travel with her as much. And we had different takes on it. I thought that having a little more separation

[65:33]

was beneficial for the relationship, but she experienced it as great loss. And so finally I decided I wanted to live at City Center, and we thought we would do a trial of staying together in our relationship while I was at City Center, and see each other twice a week. And I realized at the end of our two-month trial period that I wanted to stay at City Center, and that the relationship just wasn't sustainable for me. So it was very sad for me and for both of us, and it took a long time for that rift to heal. Now Fran and I are once again in communication, and I think in a place of mutual respect.

[66:35]

She came to my ordination, which meant a great deal to me. So after living at City Center for a year and a half, I came to Tassajara. I talked with Linda Ruth about it. I wanted to come for one practice period so I could keep my job at Buddhist Peace Fellowship, but Linda suggested coming for a year. And I agreed and came for a year, and here I am, and it's now four years. I think I might just end here. There's a lot I left out, but I've been talking for a long time, and you probably kind of need to stretch. I would like to end with Jane Hirshfield's poem, Tree. And just before that, I'd just like to say that I'm

[67:39]

aware that this is a time in the practice period where there's kind of, I think of it as a steep learning curve for everyone. So many of us are in new positions, not only the Tongariro students learning all the different jobs that you learned, but many new senior staff people and other people doing new positions, and this is also for me a new position. I just take a lot of heart from the way that we're all continuing to learn and challenging ourselves this way. And I want to say especially to the Tongariro students that I look forward to having tea with you and getting to know you during this practice period and hearing all of your way-seeking mind talks. So this is the poem, Tree. It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime

[68:45]

you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books. Already the first branch tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. Thank you very much. May our intention...

[69:16]

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