This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations by people like you. And children, I heard that you're going to be harvesting potatoes today. Is this true? Harvesting potatoes? Well, I have a story to tell that's not about harvesting potatoes, but I thought I would just tell a short story, which is that when I lived here at Green Gulch, I was going to say in charge of the horses, but that would be way overstating it. My job was to work with the horses, and one of my fondest memories was the day and the days when we harvested potatoes and we would get these two horses lined up over these rows of potatoes and we would be holding it was like a big shovel but a shovel that had two handles on it and in the back there was a little wheel that would spin and

[01:26]

So you'd line up the horses over these rows of potatoes, put the shovel into the ground right behind this long row of potatoes, and if everything worked out right, the horses would start to walk. And they'd straddle both sides of this row of potatoes. This blade, this big shovel, would dig underneath. The potatoes would come... of the ground up into the air and this wheel would separate them all into neat little kind of piles all on this row and when you got to the end of the row if you walked straight as you turned around you'd see this beautiful straight row of potatoes all on the ground if you didn't walk straight you see this amazingly curvy road like like the Lombard Street and it wasn't it wasn't quite as beautiful I want to tell a story that I bet a lot of you have heard, and it wouldn't surprise me that this story has been told here in this zendo before.

[02:40]

I'm not sure. It's a story called Miss Rumpheus. How many of you know this story? Just a couple of the adults, great. How many of you know this story, Miss Rumpheus? A few, okay. Well, this is a story about a little girl named Alice. And Alice lived by the sea with her grandfather. And her grandfather used to tell Alice stories of when he used to go on these great adventures around the world. And very exciting stories of being on boats and on the land and climbing mountains. And they lived in this house in England near the sea. And this little girl, Alice, said, Grandpa, when I grow up, I want to be like you.

[03:44]

I want to go on these great adventures, and I also want to live by the sea. And Alice's grandfather said, that's really terrific. But there's one thing that you're leaving out Alice, I want you to make sure that you also do something to make the world a little more beautiful. And Alice said, oh, great, I'll do something to make the world a little more beautiful. Well, Alice grew up and she ventured off and went on these great, great travels. She went, she visited... She also visited mountains in many different places. She went scuba diving. I think she even came here. I think she came here to Green Gulch and visited Zen Center and Tassajara. She liked to sit zazen and she also liked to fly airplanes. She did amazing, amazing adventures and she spent her whole life doing just incredible stuff.

[04:49]

She loved to eat. She went to the finest restaurants in Italy and she went to Greece and Turkey. And she even went to the rainforests of Brazil. And then, at some point, she came back to live by the house where her grandfather used to live. Her grandfather had died. And she had now gotten quite old. And she was called Miss Rumpheus. And there she was. She now had spent much of her life traveling, doing all these adventures. And she now lived by the sea. And one day, she got quite ill, and she was lying in bed, recovering. And she remembered this conversation that she had had many years ago with her grandfather. And she realized that she lived by the sea, and that she went on these great travels and adventures. And she remembered that she also promised her...

[05:51]

grandfather, that she would do something to make the world a little more beautiful. And she didn't know what that was. And when she was lying in bed, she looked out her window and she saw these beautiful lupine flowers, these beautiful, tall, blue and purple flowers that were outside of her window. And when she recovered and she got better, she got up and went outside and she saw that the hills were just covered with these beautiful lupine flowers, that the wind must have blown the seeds and had scattered them all around the hillsides, all around by the sea. And she realized at that moment that this was what she could do to make the world a more beautiful place. And wherever she went, she brought with her lupine seeds and she put them around on the hillsides and in gardens and near forests.

[06:52]

And this was what Miss Rumpheus, this little child who had been Alice, could do to make the world a little more beautiful. And then she had a niece, a young girl named Anna. And she remembers that Anna was sitting in her lap And she, as this older woman, was saying to Anna, one day maybe you too will go on travels and adventures, that perhaps you too will live by the sea, and I wonder what you will do to make the world a more beautiful place. So I wonder, I have a question for you, which is, is there something that you do to make the world a more beautiful place. What do you do? Anyone want to be... I hear some whispering, some ideas.

[07:59]

Yes? Well, I picked up trash a lot because I picked up a bunch of trash and a lake and then I found $20. The world is surely a beautiful place by that trash. Any other things that anybody... Could everyone hear that? No? What is your name? Michael. Michael said that he sometimes picks up trash. This is something he does to make the world more beautiful. And one time he was picking up trash and found $20. $20. Any other things that anyone wants to say that you do to make the world more beautiful? Anything? Well, I think... Is there something being cooked up here?

[09:03]

I'm not sure. Do you want to say it? It's okay. No? Well... Well, I think that two things occur to me that I think you all do. One is something that you're going to do. I think picking potatoes is a way to make the world more beautiful. And people will eat these potatoes. These potatoes maybe will help make someone's table and life more beautiful. I was also thinking that I think something that your parents have done All of your parents and people that are here with you have done to make the world more beautiful is to be with you, is a way of having the world be more beautiful. So, thank you very much. Please enjoy. Have a great time with your potato harvesting.

[10:05]

My sister, I was going to tell you, after the first day, I sat here with all the people, and I thought J.J. was going to yell. Oh, I'm glad he didn't. So there are some spots up here if anyone wants to come up, sit down on the floor up front. There's some cushions. Well, good morning, everyone.

[11:21]

It was a real treat for me. being able to be here with the children. What I want to talk about this morning is... I realize it's something that has been one of these... something that's been on my mind for a long time, and I have never spoken about it, and it's the subject of power. And as I was preparing for this talk, I remembered... A conversation that I had, this was when I first came to Zen Center, I was in my early 20s, and one of my teachers, a woman teacher, who was, I think at the time she was here at Green Gulch, she looked me in the eyes and she said to me, Mark, you have a way of pissing away your power. And I remember...

[12:23]

that I felt a bit shocked and a little ashamed and embarrassed. But I also thought, what an amazing gift this is. I had no idea that I had any power to piss away. And you may be wondering about this Buddhist technical term that I'm using. LAUGHTER it means to dissipate, to let go of, or to use unwisely. It also makes me think of, there's a short little poem by Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, where he says, why do you,

[13:26]

Why do you beg for coins when you have a collection of gold beneath your feet? Why do you beg for coins when you have a collection of gold beneath your feet? So this was, I felt, the message. And this was the first time in my life that anyone had ever said anything like this to me. It was shortly after that, I think at the time I was living at Tassajara, I had just been kind of asked to come here to Green Gulch and to work with the draft horses. And I know I've told this story before, but I had this feeling that somehow my resume had been misread. that though I had been pretty good at gymnastics and the horse, the idea that I was going to be working with the horses here at Green Gulch seemed pretty amazing.

[14:31]

But this was also a really interesting introduction for me into the subject of power. Because here at Green Gulch, there were two Percheron horses that each weighed nearly 2,000 pounds each. Even though Their names were Snip and Jerry. But they were big, powerful horses. And it became clear to me that power wasn't about muscle and physical strength. That there was something that had to be accomplished in my relationship with these horses that I really needed to understand the world of the horse. And also... the horse needed to understand my world, that there needed to be a way. This was my first experience at learning about the importance of finding my own power and of setting boundaries. It was really important with horses that there be a real sense of what I meant and what I wanted.

[15:38]

I look back at that time and given all of the mistakes that I made, I feel really lucky to be here to tell about these stories with these horses. And I realized that much of my life, and I think much of Zen practice, is really engaged with this question and issue of power. And I realized that after having been a resident of Zen Center for 10 years, that my choice to enter the world of business, that this was in a way had to do with wanting to enter this question of power. In part, I think it seemed like the most difficult and least obvious choice for me to make

[16:42]

But it also seemed that the world of business seemed to have an awful lot of power in affecting the world. And that this seemed to be a choice that made sense at the time. I've spent much of my life running businesses, being a husband and a father, being ordained as a priest, And all of these things feel like they're part of this path of trying to penetrate and understand power. And I want to suggest that each of you ask yourself this question. What is power? What is your power? For each to ask yourself, what is my power? How do I influence and how am I influenced by power? How do I express power? How do I express power?

[17:42]

I was also thinking of another important teacher for me who I studied with here at Green Gulch named Harry Roberts. Harry was a Yurok, Indian, shaman, Irishman, powerful human being who also helped design the botanical gardens at Berkeley and was an agronomist. one of the most educated and influential people in California having to do with Native American plants. And one of the things that Harry said was, he said, do you want to know what this Zen stuff really is? And of course I said, yes, I want to know. And he said, well, it really comes down to three things. So the first thing is to quiet your mind.

[18:49]

So this isn't the most important thing, but this is the first thing. The second is to find your song. And the third is to sing your song. And I thought this was kind of Harry's prescription for Zen, for life, and for understanding what power is. This quieting our minds, finding our song, and singing our songs. And I've also, two other really influential teachers, one is someone from the 13th century, Dogen, who was the person who brought Zen to Japan, said to study Buddhism is to study yourself, and to study yourself is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to awaken or be intimate with everyone and everything. This feels like another expression of power.

[19:54]

And Suzuki Roshi, commenting on this quote from Dogen, said, you know, what's important to remember is that you are your temporal self. You are this self in time and space. And in the next instant, you are not. And he says that we study Buddhism, we study Zen, because we forget this you-are-not part. And all of these teachers, Harry Roberts, Dogen, Suzuki Roshi, are all telling stories. And these are stories, I think, about power and how we find our own real power. what I'm presenting are stories. And I wonder how is it that you engage and interact with these stories? What stories do you tell yourself about who you are and about what I'm saying?

[21:02]

What story do you tell yourself about power and the power of others? I sometimes, my day job these days is as an executive coach working with business leaders in different venues. And one of the things that I find I often ask people to do is to tell their life story, but to tell the life story in a couple of ways. First, to tell your story from the point of view of being a victim, from powerlessness, from all of the things that have you've had to deal with in your life, all of the difficulties. And then I ask that people tell the same story, the story of your life, from the point of view of overcoming power and overcoming powerlessness and overcoming difficulty. And to really enter both of these stories and to see both the way that each of these stories is true and each of these stories is not true.

[22:12]

Each story is complete and each story is not complete. So these aspects of Zen and power, I just wanted to say a little bit about this quiet in your mind, this, as Dogen says, the study of yourself. The study of yourself is to become really familiar with your shadows, your tendencies. What triggers you? What is it that makes you dumb? I mean, I think all of us have things that we are triggered by. And I think power is knowing what gets in our way and to know when to act and when not to act. And Zen practice provides a path for quieting our minds. to pay attention, to fine-tune our ability to understand our own energy and read our energy and the energy of others.

[23:19]

Only through knowing ourselves in this way can we find real meaning and real power. And Zen isn't a way of watering down our feelings and emotions. I think in part what this early teacher was advising me that it was important for me to understand my own emotional life and that Zen practice is becoming completely intimate and familiar with our own feelings and being able to appropriately, freely express the power of our feelings and emotions. And Zazen, our sitting practice, Zen sitting, could be talked about as an expression of power. How it is we feel our own quiet, dignified selves and minds.

[24:23]

A place where we can be powerful enough to let everything in, to let whatever wants to come up, come up. And to be completely present, completely ourselves, for everything that wants to come up and to be completely in our own bodies and to feel the amazing gift of the bodies that we've been given. The second piece, this finding your song, this feels like it's actually more like letting your song find you. And I think this is connected to this piece of Dogen talking about forgetting yourself, getting out of your own way enough, becoming quiet enough so that your own song can find you. This is the kind of mystical side of Zen.

[25:27]

This is Suzuki Roshi talking about that you are your temporal self, And in the next instant, you're not. You are and you're not. And how we not get caught by our own stories, that we totally understand and penetrate these stories of who we think we are and who other people, who we think other people are. I just flashed on this, I just saw this cartoon that I think was in The New Yorker This is a person sitting at a bar, obviously a bit inebriated, and he's the only person there, and the bartender is there. And the caption to this cartoon says, You have no idea who I think I am. And I think this is true.

[26:32]

Most of us... We each have no idea who other people think they are. And this is something, this is really worth asking. I find what I do a lot when I am working in the business world is I, it's funny, I get paid to have people talk to each other. Because people don't talk to each other. Just the most, just the simplest things. Like, who do you think you are? And what do you think your job is? Or what do you think my job is? And how might we work together? These kinds of conversations can be amazingly simple and powerful. And there's this power of the way that our breathing just happens. We don't have to do anything. Our breathing happens. Our heartbeat happens. Can we... Can we be as clear and powerful as our breathing and our heartbeat?

[27:40]

And this power of knowing our own stories and to be free of our stories, but to thoroughly know our own stories. And this third piece of Harry Roberts saying, to sing your song, or of Dogen saying, to be actualized or intimate with all things. This is the power of how we express ourselves in the world. And we do this primarily through our presence and through our relationships. How do you influence others and how are you influenced others? What is it that you feel the power to do? By knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves, by knowing our stories and being free of our stories, we're free and empowered to create new stories. We can create stories in our paintings or our poems or in books we write.

[28:44]

We can create stories in songs or by starting businesses or non-profits. Or we can create stories in how We heal ourselves and heal others and heal our planet. There's so many positive stories that we can create through positively using our own power. And just bowing or just washing the dishes or just looking in the eyes of a child are also powerful stories. And from the point of view of our culture, from our society, what most of our society calls power, Buddhist practice, Zen practice, calls cravings and desires. So wealth, fame, sex, food, these are all symbols of power in our culture.

[29:51]

And these are all temporal, relative, and dependent on changing circumstances. Often the most wealthy people don't feel any sense of power whatsoever. Zen takes a different approach. Zen takes an approach of looking at power through energy and how we use our energy. And I want to just very briefly describe five energy practices about power. And the first is the power of believing in your own way-seeking mind, believing in the possibility of growth and change, believing in your own basic goodness and in the basic goodness of others, just practicing and bringing energy towards this belief. The second practice is the practice of diligence. Because no matter how firm our belief, we will get tested.

[31:01]

We will at times fall asleep. We will make mistakes. Things will happen. And to have this practice of diligence, of keeping coming back to asking this question, what is my power? How can I find my power? How can I best use my power? The third energy practice is... mindfulness practice, or the practice of presence, the practice of precise observations, of paying attention. And one of my favorite quotes in the realm of mindfulness, as I'm talking about it here, is a Thich Nhat Hanh quote, where he says, the real miracle is not to walk on water, but to walk right here on earth. The real miracle is not to walk on water, but to walk right here on earth. And this feels like a real expression of our own power. The fourth is concentration and the ability to stay with one thing, the ability to do one thing.

[32:07]

This may be the opposite of multitasking. This is knowing what it is we do and to do one thing thoroughly. Concentration can help stay with what's important, with what is your purpose, what is your vision, what is important to you, what is your purpose, what's important, and how can we stay concentrated on that. And the fifth practice of energy to find our own power is the practice of insight. And this is the insight in seeing how power doesn't belong to us, that we are a vehicle of power. We can know and feel power. And having insight into the world of birth and death and the mystery of how is it that we are here, how is it that we were born, and knowing that someday that we will die,

[33:18]

and not losing sight of that and feeling the power in the insight of impermanence. So real power is the ability to know ourselves and to forget ourselves and from this place to meet others deeply and to connect on levels that are intimate and in many ways beyond our own what we can understand or grasp. With this kind of power healing is possible. And it's also possible that we can find ways to make the world a more beautiful place. I would also say that power is the practice of being open, present, ready, vulnerable, strong, and flexible. This is what I'm thinking today about power. And I invite you all to join me in this this kind of lifetime question of breathing into this question of what is power?

[34:24]

Where are the gaps in how you see yourself and in how others see you? How can you understand and love yourself completely? And how can you let others love you and how can you love others? How can you truly believe in yourself and engage in these practices in a way that others can feel your true power. I want to end with a poem from Walt Whitman. I was debating, it was really hard to choose between Walt Whitman, Suzuki Roshi and Rilke this morning. They all They all say such great things about power. But I thought it being Labor Day weekend and this being 21st century America.

[35:31]

Walt Whitman seemed appropriate. So this is just a short piece from Songs of Myself from Leaves of Grass. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood formed from this soil, this air. Born here of parents, born here from parents the same, and their parents the same. I, now 37 years old, in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not till death. I'm not 37, by the way. Creeds and schools in abeyance, retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.

[36:40]

I harbor for good or bad. I permit to speak at every hazard. Nature without check with original energy. Nature without check with original energy. So I felt like this was a wonderful expression of Walt Whitman, a gift to us. Thank you all very much. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:36]

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