Does that sound okay? Okay, good. Hi, my name is Dana Belden, and I live and work and practice here at San Francisco Zen Center. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. It is very helpful to see many familiar faces. I haven't given too many lectures, and I'm quite nervous. Here we go. Last night a friend of mine sent me an email and a good friend and at the bottom there was a quote from Gary Snyder and it was a perfect quote for my talk. So I was really happy to receive it and then I noticed after I had kind of worked it into my talk a little bit that, like I said, I haven't given a lot of talks, just a handful of talks, but I know I've quoted Gary Snyder before.

[01:10]

So I was thinking, well, what is it about Gary Snyder that I like? What is it that I respond to? And actually, those reasons also fit in with what I was thinking and talking about tonight. And the first reason is that he has a very... He practiced very deep and very long and very hard. He has a very traditional, well-grounded Zen practice. I think he went to Japan in the 50s or 60s when people weren't really going to Japan and sat long and hard and came back here and started his own... Zendo. So he's got that, he's kind of steeped in the tradition, yet his imagery is quite contemporary and it speaks to our modern lives. He talks about finding practice and finding the Dharma in having a cup of coffee with a friend or you know, fixing your car or changing the baby or that type of thing.

[02:20]

So I appreciate that. And so I have a quote, just a real brief, short one-line quote from Gary Snyder. And it goes like this. Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to to the actually existing world and its wholeness. Maybe I'll leave that again. There's a lot going on in one line. Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world.

[03:20]

and its wholeness. So my work here at San Francisco Zen Center is that I'm the secretary and it's a big job. It's a busy job. I spend a lot of time in meetings and not only am I in meetings with Lots of wonderful people like the Abbots and the directors and my fellow officers, president and vice president and treasurer. But as secretary, you're taking the minutes, you're taking notes. So you can't, you know, you can't just kick back and... kind of check out of the meeting. You have to always be paying attention and tracking the conversation, writing down decisions, tracking decisions and motions and action points. And so it's, you know, you're always on for the whole meeting.

[04:25]

And yesterday we had a board meeting And it was an all-day board meeting. It went from 9 in the morning until 4.30 in the afternoon. And then afterwards, I even stayed on for another couple of hours to be on a committee meeting. So I was packed. My head was just jam-packed that day with words and all sorts of ideas and opinions and suggestions and having to write it all down. I think it was last night, I'm not sure, but I came back from the meeting, and I ran into Mark Lancaster, and Mark used to be the secretary, and he took one look at me, and he kind of nodded his head and said, ah, board meeting hangover. You know, he could just see it. So it was, so I was pretty worn out. And I went home, and I knew I wanted to work on this talk, obviously.

[05:27]

needed to give it some time, and I sat down, and so I had this mind, this board meeting mind, and I sat down to look at and study the Dharma. And so my relationship, I think, my relationship with the Dharma is more of an intuitive kind of instinctive feeling relationship. It's not so much of an intellectual relationship. I do my fair share of studying, but it's more about my feeling experiences. So it's challenging enough for me to kind of pull that in and organize it in a way that I hope is helpful, but to have the board meeting mind, I just could kind of see myself struggling.

[06:30]

And it brought up a question for me. It's like, well, where does the Dharma live? What is the experience of the Dharma? Is it an intellectual experience? Is it a feeling experience in an emotional process? Is it psychological? I even thought about, you know, is it physical? Zazen is such a, in our practices, is for me very physical based. We sit and there's, you know, there's the skin and the flesh and the bone and the marrow. And so I was, you know, grappling with this and wondering... Do I need to shift over? Is it one mind or another mind? Anyways, it was way too much, and I, of course, just did the wise thing and went to bed and got a good night's sleep. But it did speak to what I was hoping to talk about tonight.

[07:39]

And... I don't want to call it relative and absolute, because right now, for me, those terms are a little too weighted. They're a little bit too big. But lately I've been thinking a lot about practicing in the city and what it means to take my life, which is devoted to Zen practice, to the forms of Soto Zen, and... experience them in the middle of the city, in the middle of an urban environment, with all of the demands, the modern demands of a modern life. And I've been practicing here at Zen Center for a while, not very long, just maybe over a decade or 10, 12 years, both as a resident and as a non-resident. I used to live up the street, and every morning I'd walk down the hill to Zazen. I did that for a couple of years before moving in.

[08:41]

But during my time, I've mostly been in the city, but I've also been at Tassajara. And does anyone here not know what Tassajara is? Okay, well, just briefly, and basically Tassajara is our monastery. It's located four or five hours south of here, very, very remote, tucked into a valley in the mountains. Yesterday at the board meeting, Abbott Steve, our co-abbot with Paul, spoke about how he was leaving Tassajara to come to the meeting, and there had been rain at Tassajara, so the ridge right above Tassajara was covered in snow, and he talked about this winter wonderland and how somehow the snowiness of the ridge and having to go through it made Tassajara seem even more remote and even more... tucked away, this kind of image of it being behind the snowy bridge.

[09:46]

So we have two practice periods at Tassajara, 90-day ongos, and it's an opportunity to, or at least it was an opportunity for me to go very deep in my practice. They're very monastic forms. It's very much about the sangha, people doing everything together. We follow the schedule, and the schedule polishes us, and we polish Tassajara, the jewel, the sangha, with the schedule and the forms of Zen. And for me, it was... more possible to drop self-concern or maybe just a few layers of self-concern, that feeling of self-preservation that can keep me distant from people.

[10:56]

my experience of being in tasaharan and being in sangha there was was that that started to shed and go away and there was this beautiful expression of um what you often hear of of of in zen practice of of one mind in many bodies so i found it really encouraging to and to be there and be engaged in the sangha practice very supportive, very nourishing, kind of like I had this image once of the Dharma at Tassajara being like a tall glass of cool water, and you could just drink and drink and drink, and it just never was empty. So, of course, you know, again, Tassajara being, for me, this kind of sangha practice and everybody, you know, one of the things that happens at Tassajaras is that everybody wears a robe.

[12:02]

Everyone's supposed to wear a black robe. But what's also really delightful to me is that, you know, our individual expressions still come through. They have to. There's just, can it be any other way? And so I have a memory of standing in the Zendo at Tassajara, and we had just gotten up from a meal or something, so we were all standing, facing out, facing each other. And I was looking around, and there was, you know, there was this person, and they had the most beautiful robes on, and everything kind of matched, and they had the kimono that went with the robe, and it was like, you know, all geared to the seasons, and there wasn't a tear or... a rip and all the little, you know, collars were all lined up and hair. There wasn't hair. There was a priest and bald head and everything. I mean, just really working it, really looking good. And it was beautiful.

[13:03]

It was inspiring. You know, but then there's all the variations, you know. I tend to be a little more schluppy, and there's little things here and there. And then all the way down to there's this guy in the corner, and he had kind of bedhead and this old gray robe, and it was thrown over a pair of sweatpants and schlutz. So the full spectrum. So we're all doing the same thing. We're all wearing our black robes, and yet we're all still being ourselves. And that opportunity for the form of wearing the robe. and then the expression to come up in the middle of it was very encouraging to me. Another way that recently here in the city that I've seen that expressed was there's a new program starting called Establishing the Path of Practice, EPP. And there was an opening ceremony here on last Saturday in this Buddha hall.

[14:07]

And again, everyone was standing around in a circle. And it was explained on a thorn, explained that the part of this opening ceremony is that everyone was to come forward and bow and offer chip incense, you know, bring it up to your forehead and put it on the floor. charcoal, and I was standing very, very close to the altar, so I saw absolutely everybody come up, and absolutely everybody did absolutely the same thing. They bowed, they walked up to the altar, and they put their chip incense, they offered it, and absolutely everybody did it, looked different. You know, it was doing the same thing, and yet everyone was expressing what that moment was to them. And I really appreciated that, and I found a sense of balance in that, that I thought was very encouraging and very helpful.

[15:10]

So... Being at Tassajara for the most part, I don't think, isn't so much about individual expression. The deep feeling and spirit of Tassajara is much more collective and it's intimate. And it's, again, it's one mind, many people. But most of my practice has been here in the city. And for me, it's been a curious experiment of how I can take what I experience as the depth of Tassajara and bring it into the why practice that's necessary in the city. You know, the city is charged with, you know, individualism and innovation and energy and all this wonderful and distracting shininess. It's...

[16:17]

you know, the question for me is always how to meet that city energy with Zazen energy. And for me, I honestly don't think that there is a more important question for me. So it's important because I believe that our practice has to be relevant and available and possible in the city. While being at Tassahara, you know, polishing the jewel of the Dharma is, you know, important and it's a wonderful gift. It's actually, in my mind, almost a privilege. It's not worth anything. if the seeds of the practice cannot bear fruit outside the monastery.

[17:21]

It has to work in the city. And we're all very aware, I think, and know that we are living in challenging times. There's ecological and financial collapse, wars, genocide, just buckets of suffering and great delusion. Simon sent me an email that had a link to a video of Linda Ruth Cutts, who is our senior Dharma teacher over at Green Gulch Farm. And she was giving a Dharma talk about how the earth is calling us to heal it, to heal it. to take care of it, to act, to respond. And she told the story of Shakyamuni Buddha on the night of his enlightenment, being visited by the demons of doubt, and that his response was to reach down and touch the earth.

[18:28]

And this both supported and confirmed his practice. And she described that moment as a calling response, that... that shakimuni buddha reached down and called to the earth and the earth rose up and responded and likewise um i think the earth is now calling to us asking us to respond so indeed perhaps our whole life is nothing but calling response and so the question becomes you know how how Do we call out appropriately? How do we... What's the word? How do we... How do we call out with appropriate boldness? What is our message out? And what are we receiving? And are we hearing the calls? And how are we responding?

[19:30]

So... I think there's almost... 7 billion people in the world right now. Actually, I wrote it down. At 4.40 this afternoon, there was 6,880,376,569 people on the planet. And they're currently just under 40 people at Tassajara. So while Tassajara practice is deep, And it's important. It's not necessarily very accessible. Not everybody can go there for one reason or another. So for me, the question is, how are we practicing here in the city? What can we do here to cultivate mountain practice?

[20:33]

And I... I think that that's a very personal question, and I would invite all of you to answer it for yourself. Because it could mean making a vow to sit another sushin this year, or maybe for the first time come and do a one-day sitting here at Zen Center. Maybe a commitment to sit every day, like the EPP people are doing at home. maybe it's something that's a little wider to, maybe it's volunteering, helping out in your community. I actually would be interested in hearing from you what you think would be helpful for this. I think it's a very important question. But mostly I go back to Gary Snyder's quote.

[21:36]

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking bring us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness. So as a novice Dharma talk giver, I've ended early. That's all I have written down. But I'm wondering if there's anything that I've talked about that you want to comment on or anything you want, a question you want to ask or something to say around this idea of deep mountain practice and wide city practice. Susan. It's a work in progress.

[22:43]

Sometimes it's, and I'm not sure why I can remember, but sometimes when I'm in the middle of the swirl and whirl of city life running around, kind of caught up in the crazy patterns of my thoughts and my opinions, once in a while, out of nowhere, I can remember just to stop and to look, just visually, just look at where I'm at. It's sometimes great if something wonderful like a tree or a flower is nearby because there's a way that concentrating on something beautiful is helpful, but that's... It's the city. It's not always possible. And sometimes it's what the rain looks like on a parking meter or the color of a car parked on the side of the street.

[23:54]

But just to stop and fully experience that and that I'm able to, by stopping, I feel like I'm able to connect. And then by connecting, I'm less off in thought and more, it's more about my body and my heart. I don't do that all the time, but once in a while. Enough to be encouraged by it and enough to feel like there is hope for city practice. Sorry to use the word hope. Susan doesn't like, well, Susan's examining the word hope. How do you think you are supporting and responding to the world?

[24:55]

Because I support and respond to Zen Center. And I believe Zen Center has an incredibly important message, way of being that is helpful to the world. So to the extent that I can be a part of making sure this practice is available, I find that to be very meaningful work. So even though I'm in this more administrative role, not so much of the classic temple role, I still feel that connection. And also, I really try to do that with my friendships. and the people I know and even the people I see, it's amazing what can happen when two people just cross in a hallway and a smile is exchanged. Sometimes that's all you can do and sometimes that's enough.

[25:58]

You too. Something like that, yeah. What would you offer? Pardon me? What was I offered in the meeting? I think that was a good point. That there is a focus and a mindfulness to note-taking. And to be able to do that is an interesting practice offered in the meeting.

[27:09]

What also comes up for me is what I get from a lot of Zen Center meetings, and I truly see this quite often, is A lot of thoughtful consideration, a lot of seeing people who are practicing, practice with making hard decisions or practice with not agreeing with each other or practicing with being two different kinds of people or two different kinds of thinkers trying to come together. I find that very encouraging. I don't know if that answered your question. Nothing comes immediately. I'll chew on that. We'll get back to you. Anyone else? Yeah.

[28:24]

Mm-hmm. [...] That's a really good suggestion. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting when you've spent time at Tassajara to come to the city and to pass people and not... And, you know, you can feel your body wanting to bow. And, of course, you know, they would have no idea what strangers in the street. Yeah, so internally. Tova? You mentioned when you started your talk that you felt nervous.

[29:26]

But I've experienced you as very warm and grounded and friendly. It's still very much there. yeah um what happened to it i i i feel like i'm kind of rumbling and tumbling with it i'm i'm allowing other things to happen too so yeah well thank you thank you yeah i am on the spot No, I think they often are. But yeah.

[30:33]

I think it like that's a. Approaching life simply with good humor and diligent work and play and walking are all very wonderful ways to, especially from the point of view of environment, from environmental concerns. To me that's pretty obvious. A simpler life, one that is not so involved in the cycle of consuming, especially, is going to have a much less environmental impact. I think, for me, that's kind of a common... I hope it's commonly understood. What do you think? Really? What more would you recommend?

[31:47]

Just, uh, are you trying to know? Now what? Yeah. We? than they were for me. And I said to the person in the office, I'm not going to be able to take the whole box together, but I'll take a few of the time, and it'll be, I'll have it out there or tomorrow, every time I come up to the field. I finished that, suddenly approaches me for the right to accept the box of books,

[32:51]

says, tell me where we need to go. I said, oh, really long, like to stare at them. And he thought, yes, he said. And followed me, but it's where I needed to be at. And for me, it has an environment. Everything is happening. And where did you go? I was, oh, this joy. Thank you. Well, thank you for sharing that story. And it reminds me that, yeah, just looking around and seeing what needs to be done you know, picking up a box and carrying it downstairs. Very simple activity, but can really, you know, can save the world.

[33:57]

Thank you. Okay. Thank you all very much. I felt nervous, yes. But I also felt your support and your connection, and it was helpful. So, thank you.

[34:55]

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