I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. You can't imagine how beautiful you all look. It's great. Sitting here, I see us sitting in this, I think, magnificent wooden building. And this is a day when all of our effort and gratitude and attention is dedicated to remembering the trees. Once a year, we take a day, any day, take a day, any day in the month of February, and go back to our true roots, work together, enjoy each other, children and grandchildren, children, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, taking a spade and going out on these hills that we love so well,

[01:03]

these hills that used to be underneath the Pacific Ocean millennia ago, and putting that spade down into good soil and doing something that we believe in. We need to do that kind of work these days. There's no doubt about it. The returns are in. So, it's marvelous to see you all here, and to think that in our consciousness, in our awareness, the life of wood supports us and encloses us and frees us. And maybe our children or our grandchildren won't grow up with an awareness of wood as their strength and reserve. Maybe they'll grow up with an awareness of creek aggregate, rock, which is cement. Nevertheless, no matter what encases us and encloses us, we have tremendous potential together. So, I want to talk today about the life of the forest,

[02:06]

and I want to talk about our life and our work together, and I'm going to ask your indulgence to hear out a little bit about what's been happening at Green Gulch to the thirteen or so of us who are engaged in a forty-nine-day period of negotiating the way, formal practice, a practice period. And I hope and I trust that this will be very relevant to your lives. In ancient Japanese, there's a word, sorin. It means a forest thicket. And it's the way that a period of practice or of studying the self is actually defined as a time when you go into a forest thicket together with people that are also determined to look at their body and mind and breath.

[03:10]

So, I think this is a wonderful way to describe this kind of intensity. Sorin means a kind of forest where there are many different distinct trees. In fact, I brought this little cloth to remind us of the wilderness trees. Isn't that beautiful? They're right out there around our... I'll hang it here so you can see it. I have to keep the wilderness card here. Okay? So, here we are, a forest thicket, together. I think each of us has a sense of what it means to be in a forest. And to be practicing together, negotiating the wildness, the wilderness of the forest with real intention and deliberation and real joy.

[04:14]

It's hard to talk about joy these days, but it has to be included. It has to be laced to the forest. Can we see ourselves as a forest? The human hand is consciousness itself. And can we remember that the human hand has developed along with the great trees that are in the forest? It's the hand that was needed to negotiate those trees. That just occurred to me, the hands and the trees developed together. So, our own bodies are responding to the great trees that are all around us. And you know, about three miles to the north of us here is one of the greatest cathedrals of trees in the world, I think, the Muir Woods National Monument. My father is visiting from New York, and he'd never been to Muir Woods, so I thought he should see Muir Woods. It's a different kind of high-rise.

[05:17]

And I could feel his amazement, standing underneath those trees. If you ever have the time, in fact, take the time to allow yourself to walk from Green Gulch out to Muir Woods so you can feel the way the land snakes around and becomes the great redwoods. And when you're there, and you're in the forest, remember that in the early part of this century, the President of the United States walked through Muir Woods with a bearded naturalist. No security guards. No entourage. Three days in the wilderness alone. And he spent the night under the trees and described it like sleeping in a cathedral. My dad said, that's amazing, he's the same man who led the charge up San Juan Hill. And I was thinking this morning, well, maybe when Teddy Roosevelt said,

[06:25]

speak softly and carry a big stick, it was... Could it be a redwood bough instead of a bludgeoning club? And they slept in that monument of trees, in that cathedral. And he was convinced it had to be preserved to perpetuity, and so it became one of our first national monuments in 1908, right before the earthquake, or 1907. Would it have made it? Would those trees have made it through the need for redwood trees that occurred after the earthquake? We don't know. In any case, it was preserved. Ancient, stable, old growth, virgin forest. This is how we describe this forest thicket that we all take our source from. And it follows the dinosaur.

[07:27]

Sometimes I imagine the footprint of a giant dinosaur and a redwood tree springing up out of that footprint. Twelve to eighteen million years ago. Following the hardwoods. Those of us who grew up on the East Coast know them. The ash and maple, the chestnut, the ginkgo, the oak, the beech, the elms. Many of those trees are gone. They're just whispers in the wind. Because about twelve million years ago, the conifers knit together to form a brocade of trees. Walk through them and you may feel there's not much life here. They're so solemn and quiet. But the forest is teeming with life. Biologists know that this is a wonderful fact. As many as seventy different species

[08:28]

have been collected from a square foot of soil. That's just the soil. But when you dig down into the duff and the litter, all the trash of the trees, ten thousand organisms. It's recorded. And we're gliding over the top of it. My gardening teacher, Alan Chadwick, always reminded us that life into death into life is the procedure that we follow in the garden, on the meadowlands, walking through the hardwoods, going into the ancient, stable, old-growth forest. It's life into death into life. And a mystery and powerful truth in the redwoods, you know, in that solemn cathedral. Remember that renewal comes from surprise, from a fire that runs along the floor of the forest, from collected stream deposits

[09:32]

that may go through, from fresh soil they regenerate. So if you will, the forest, the redwood forest can get a little bit too comfortable if there isn't renewal. And renewal comes from mystery, from what we don't know and what we don't see. Vitality is from death and decay. Years ago I walked with my husband from Tassajara where we were living. We walked to Green Gulch. We wanted to walk to Green Gulch. We wanted to feel the land that connected Tassajara and Monterey County to Marin County. We wanted to walk along the beach. We managed to walk out of the mountains through the Los Padres National Forest, through the wilderness of Los Padres to the ocean. And then we hitched a ride and we got up to Green Gulch and we followed the road and we walked down to Green Gulch. So we cheated. We traveled on the back

[10:34]

of fossil fuel which is connected to the trees. Remember the organisms that decay to create that moment when we ignite our lives and travel faster than we're meant to go. And we were walking out of the mountains and we stopped for our last night. It was a three-day walk. Part of it Peter had to do barefoot because his boots were killing him. I remember him walking. So it really slowed us down. We walked very slowly across the forests leading from the mountains to the wild volcanic mountains of Tassajara out to the ocean. And along the way we stopped at night, the last night, near the Sur River, it was autumn, actually not so cold but fairly cold. And during the night we were awakened by a wildcat scream

[11:35]

in that forest. And it sunk into my life how wild it really was. But more than that scream even I remember later in the night when everything had gone quiet and the fire was dead and the wildcat scream had gone away, a gigantic tree crashing down through the forest somewhere there in the redwoods. I can still hear that sound. It seemed to go on forever especially the creaking and the cracking until it fell. We have to remember that decay and death and decomposition are part of the existence of the forest. And in fact if society could live following the pulse beat

[12:37]

of a forest, of the ancient old-growth forest then I think there would be no lack. Do you know it takes a tree as long as it's been alive to fully decay and become soil? It's amazing to think of. The redwoods are very old trees. They're ancient trees, the tallest trees in the world. Not to decay but to become soil which is why we seek that wood because it has a resilience and tenacity to it that takes generations to undo. And yet instead of living by that kind of pulse beat our society suffers a loss of some 900,000 acres of woodland a year and 60,000 of that is old growth.

[13:39]

It's devastating. But we have so much mourning right now and we have to do something. I like Nanau's playfulness. Nanau is a modern wild man from Japan and a wonderful poet. He took a Chinese proverb that says the state is destroyed, the mountains and rivers remain. And immediately, playfully and truthfully he said the mountains and rivers are destroyed and the state remains. And echoed by his American voice, his friend Gary Snyder who says how many people were harvested in Vietnam? Some were children, some were overripe using the metaphor of the forest. In truth though, I think, I suggest that the forest is not a metaphor

[14:42]

for our life. There's something truer and deeper to what we're looking at. Lift up one black tree against the sky, skinny alone. With this you make the world. Or lift up one redwood seedling against the sky, vibrant, alive. With this you make the world. Or take a branch of the tamarisk tree growing on the Euphrates River and lift it up against the sky, skinny and alone. With this you make the world. We're not talking poetry. We're talking poetry, actually. Real poetry. This is our invisible and visible work which has to be united. It's united in the body of a tree. Take some time today to stand near a tree and coordinate your breathing with the breath of the tree. Invisible and visible work together.

[15:45]

In the sutras we say inquiry and response come up together. Try to look at the shadows rather than the leaves of the tree. Look at the shadows. Look at the spaces between the shadows and feel the roots of the trees go down into the darkness, into the unknown. This is what we have to do. We have to be willing to go into the unknown. There are the vanguard roots, the little root tips that go right into the bedrock. They invade the bedrock and they bring up water and oxygen and carbon dioxide and all the minerals of the earth and make it available through the body of the tree, through the visible life, through the manifestation, through all of us. And then there are the mysterious root hairs that do a different kind of work.

[16:48]

They have an association with the bacteria and fungi that live in the soil. This is pretty mysterious stuff. Those actual roots fan out from the trees and they're invaded by the little, what we call a mycorrhizal connection, a tiny little life connection where the fungus and the bacteria actually invade the roots of the tree and serve as a living bridge between the proteins in the soil and the body of the trees which are purifying our air, collecting water, reminding us to be alive. This is not a joke. This is the underground world. And then, of course, the revealed world is the tree. And the sky above is another kind of mystery. If your life closes in on you too much, try to go to a rooftop and look at the sky. Maybe you're not fortunate enough

[17:51]

to be surrounded by trees, but you've always got the sky. As a child, the Buddha was taken with his family to enjoy a big celebration out in an open meadow to enjoy the plowing celebration, the first plowing, the first spring plowing. That's what we're doing now at Green Gulch, opening up of the earth. And there was a great spirit of celebration and joy and worshipping of the fertility of the earth. You know, Shakyamuni means, Shakya means oak tree tribe, which I think is great. I have to say, just, our little daughter, our two-year-old daughter, has a monkey that she inherited from her brother, a monkey made out of a sock. You know those monkeys that look like monkeys? And yesterday, she was carrying it. We were going out and preparing for the planting today,

[18:51]

and Elisa was carrying the monkey. She looked at it and she said, Shakya monkey. Shakya monkey Buddha. So, so Buddha, as a child, watched this plowing and he watched how many life forms were destroyed in the celebration of opening the earth. And he felt faint and took his ease and restoration from sitting underneath the boughs of a rose apple tree. And by breathing and synchronizing his body and mind with the tree, he came back to life. He could actually bear to look at what other people saw as pure celebration. I imagine a child today leaning against a redwood tree or against

[19:52]

a flowering locust in Central Park and finding some restoration. And of course, the image that's primary for us in remembering the life of the Buddha is he, determined and resolute, sitting upright against the Bodhi tree or ficus religiosa, determined not to move until he could understand the source of suffering in the world. Understand and do something about the source of suffering in the world. I'm suggesting that we have a path of practice that leads us into the wilderness, into the unknown, through the forest thicket, through the old-growth world, toward a way of living

[20:55]

that is deeply sensible and committed and full of joy. We may have some reservation about negotiating a path. It seems that everything is so regimented. Do I really have to follow that trail? I want to just go off on my own. I'm remembering one of our neighbors who lives out in the outermost headland which juts out into the Pacific Ocean at Muir Beach. Cianophis is her name. For years she was married to a magnificent, raging author. Her husband, Charles Borden, was a marvelous writer

[21:56]

and a man of the sea. And he had a tiny little studio where he used to write, scribble all night long, and then he would come back to the house and bring the pages to Cianophis ''Dang it, you've written this already!'' And he would look at her, she said, ''You said that pages ago and better than this and you're repeating it.'' And he would roar and rage and fume and burn and then trounce back out to the studio and come back at dawn with pure poetry, the truth of his life. This is a man from San Francisco and come back with one mango and they would sit out on the cliffs above the ocean and eat the mango. I try to read his book sometimes, Sequest. It's a beautiful book. He died as he lived, chasing a trespasser

[22:57]

off their land, roaring and shaking his arm and threatening him in very bright language. He dropped dead of a heart attack. He takes care of Spinders Point, a beautiful piece of land that they realized as soon as they got there could not possibly belong to them. And so they donated it to the Nature Conservancy years ago, feeling that it belonged to the world. When I first came to Green Gulch, I had the great honor of working with Cianophis, helping her primarily take care of the trees that she planted on that rocky headland. I've been thinking about her a lot lately. We called ourselves the lowly ground workers and sometimes one of us would be a tree spirit and get to go up the trees and saw mostly it was she. And I would snip up what she cut and all of the boughs we'd take and spread along the path One point I was working with her

[24:09]

and I noticed on the path that we were spreading tiny little white stones. And I said, what's going on here? And I remember she flushed and told me that in his ragings at night she was always worried that Borden would at one point run off the cliff into the ocean. So she collected, you know, over the years she collected these tiny little white stones that are on your beach and she embedded them in the path so that at night when he took his over copious words back to prune them the path was lit by white stones and moonlight. This is the kind of path I'm talking about that we need to follow. It's laid with absolute care it disappears into the moonlight it disappears into the fog on the headland and it's broad enough for horses and oxen to cross.

[25:10]

This is a passionate work. It's not the work as my little son, as my young son Jesse says not the work of wusses and the work of negotiating this way is the everyday effort of all beings. So I want to talk about a couple of aspects that I think are relevant to following this path into the wildness through the forest and to begin by encouraging everybody to follow your passions because it is a path of passion that leads into what you believe in and takes you into the unknown. This is what our world needs now. Years ago I remember asking Kadagiri Roshi

[26:17]

who was one of our teachers at Zen Center what is right effort? And he said we're always talking about the effort that human beings make. What about the effort of the stones and the wind? So we're engaged now in forty-nine days of listening to the stones and the wind. It was Kadagiri Roshi also who thoroughly and deeply taught taught us to take take that unknown step we call it in the Zen tradition in the Buddhist tradition it's called the backward step where you turn your own light inward and look at your life. So take the backward step.

[27:18]

It doesn't seem very efficient. It doesn't seem like it's much effort. But to actually try to take a backward step and examine your life from that point of view is a very different kind of effort. Let's begin by being willing to uncover. We talk a lot now about recovery recovery programs for children of alcoholics children of alcoholic families or for children of gamblers or for children of drug-addicted background or abused children, recovery. But I'm suggesting that taking a backward step and looking at your life from the point of view of the forest is a kind of radical uncovering that we need to do. When you do this kind of stripping down or uncovering you make yourself tremendously vulnerable and you learn that you're not relying

[28:22]

on the outside world to let you know what's happening. Think of the word news. Do you know what it stands for? North, East, West, South? It does. That's that word. That's the acronym. It means look in the ten directions for what's really new. Wendell Berry says there's no news except in the classics. I remember years ago we were with Brother David at Zen Center. He's a Benedictine monk who's been a long-time friend and teacher for many of us. And it was the time that there was an attempt on the Pope's life. And I remember Baker Oshii coming to Brother David and telling him that there'd been an attempt to assassinate the Pope. And I was very moved that he didn't go for news. Instead he went down into the bowels of Zen Center's building in San Francisco and practiced meditation.

[29:24]

This is uncovering your life, primary step, backward step, that begins any effort that you make. And then a much harder one is to actually slow down your life cut into our frenetic activity. There's a wonderful monk whose name is One Action. We asked him, what's the One Action? He said, laziness. Don't try too hard. You don't have to. So uncovering our life, taking a backward step, venerating laziness. Can you imagine dedicating 49 days to doing nothing? It's amazing. And looking deeply.

[30:29]

Ed said last week, this is careful observation of the obvious. Great comment. It means planting your seeds on time. It means looking deeply and being willing to be a little bit fallow, a little bit wild, a little bit unseated, prepared but unseated. And it's the work that we're trying to do in this practice period to actually allow ourselves to look deeply and to reduce our effort and to bring awareness to everything we do. Using my conscious breath, this is from the old Nikayas in the Buddhist time. Using my conscious breath, I guard my eyes for my protection and for yours so that today continues to be a beautiful day and tomorrow we'll still

[31:34]

have each other. So this is a mystery. It's not the usual mainstream work of American society. It's limitation. We have some people in the practice period who are in love with each other. They're limiting their relationship in order to practice in solitude and solidarity during this practice period. And it's inspiring to watch that kind of effort. Not to say that sexual life isn't a kind of expression too, but it can be a distraction. So for 49 days to actually pull out the usual satisfaction and find satisfaction in a different way feels like a very radical movement, radical from root, those vanguard roots going down to the bedrock, to the unknown. The work of awareness is certainly not limited to a 49-day

[32:36]

practice period. It comes from paying attention to the way you walk, to how you eat, to what you eat, to find a way to try to be awake. One of the Buddha's disciples in the old days asked him, How can I achieve enlightenment? What's involved? And the Buddha said, It's really simple. Just stay thoroughly awake for three days. Go out and try. And of course, this monk found that try as he could, his mind did wander and did go off into different realms. So he learned some respect for this work of awareness which we're trying to do together. When we find a way to do it,

[33:41]

we come into a realm that's extremely intimate, a kind of merging of our energies. You'll find that your breath synchronizes with another person. This can happen in the forest, too. You can go outside and find your breath is synchronizing with the trees. Or you might even have an experience like I did recently, driving my car and stopping at a stoplight. You know how sometimes the car shifts down a little bit and I found my breathing was coordinated with the car. I thought, that's pretty far out. Maybe this is a source of wholeness and health if we can coordinate our breathing. And it's certainly something that we're observing in this period of time here at Gringottsch. When you strip down your life a little bit, you find amazing connection with one another. This is the real mystery.

[34:45]

It's that point at which you're going along, swimming in the water, and suddenly you feel your body actually sink down to another level. You have the experience of the newts and salamanders swimming underneath you and the land continuing down into the darkness as you're swimming. And find a satisfaction in the smallest pleasure. None of this works if we try to remove ourselves from the suffering of the world. But I haven't found any way to remove myself from the suffering of the world except to stay aware and to join that heritage of suffering.

[35:45]

You know, we feel it when we think of the trees and when we think of wildlife and when we think of protecting the needle grass on the hillsides of Gringottsch. We can feel the kind of passion and connection that's needed to do the work of the world. I'm asking us this morning not to give up on the work of the world. Find a way to renew your strength like the forest does and to open yourself up to the unknown hard work that we have to do. We have to do it together. What is a culture that can name planes of war the phantom and the mirage? Are these phantoms and mirages? It's our responsibility not to run away from the work of the world. A passion for peace, a dedication to the path. You might find yourself

[36:54]

like the Buddha sitting under a dead tree as armies of war come marching through his land. He went out in the road and sat under a dead tree. And the armies came by and they stopped and they said, What are you doing sitting under a dead tree? I feel cool even under this dead tree, he said, because it's close to my native land. Remember that real peace is not a matter of discussion. You may have to sit under a dead tree. And also remember, it's harder to remember that it may not work. But that's got to be included. The old forest is not afraid to include the fact that it may not work. The trees come down, the forest changes, the elms of the world are, as we know, replaced, supplanted by the other trees. It may not work. It may not work

[37:55]

exactly as we think. That's the mystery of following a path through the wild and taking a backward step. Some people may not accept your peace. What will you do then? You'll have to be real peace yourself. This is lifetime after lifetime, life into death into life. It's not a metaphor. It's the work that we have to do together, and it's big work. I want to read you what we've been chanting in the morning because I've been very moved by this chant. It was written before the time of Christ from the Dharmapada, and it's a collection of sayings

[38:55]

that have been one of the oldest in existence. The traveler has reached the end of the journey, free from all sorrow and fetters that bound him. They're thrown away, and the burning in his life is gone. Those who have aspiration for practice are always making effort. They're not happy to remain in the same place. Like swans, they leave their lake, and they rise into the air. They leave their home for a truer home. Who can trace the path of those who live simply in the present, rejecting overabundance, soaring in the sky of liberation, infinite emptiness without beginning? Their course is as hard to follow as that of birds in the air. And who can trace

[39:57]

the invisible path of the person who soars in the sky of liberation, emptiness without beginning, whose passions are peace, and over whom the fires of desire have no power? Her path is as difficult to trace as that of birds in the air. This person, the person who wisely regulates her senses as a good driver trains her horses, who is free from desire and pride, is admired even by the gods. She is calm like the earth that endures, steady like a column that is firm, pure like a lake that is clear, free from samsara, the endlessly turning birth and death. In the light of his vision he has found freedom, his thoughts are peace, his words are peace, and his work is peace. The End

[41:08]

So this is our forest thicket. We're adding to it today. We're going to fan out on the hills and offer some seedling redwood to Gringotts, to the sky. We're going to hold up one seedling, skinny, alone, and feel the world rise up in that work. A passion for peace, real peace, not a matter of discussion, and up to each of us to do. Follow that little path that leads to the dark trees, the path of white stones, which is the effort of all life. And please be sure today to take the time to go and stand near a tree. Put your arms in your hands,

[42:10]

your hands of consciousness, put your hands of consciousness on the tree and feel it breathing. This is our work, lifetime after lifetime. Thank you very much.

[42:29]

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