Good morning, everyone. My name is Tova Green. I live and practice and work at City Center, San Francisco Zen Center's Urban Temple. And I'm very happy to be here at Green Gulch Farm this morning. First, I want to thank Jeremy Levy, the Tanto head of practice, and my Dharma brother for inviting me to speak this morning. And I'd also like to thank my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, for the support and encouragement she's given me over many years.

[01:03]

What I'd like to talk about this morning is belonging. What does it mean to belong to ourselves, to a community, and to the wider world, to be part of the myriad of aspects of our world and how can we cultivate a sense of belonging even at times when we may not feel that we belong. So I especially want to welcome those of you who are here today for the first time and perhaps wondering whether you belong or not. Perhaps noticing things that help you feel more comfortable, and perhaps some things that make you feel ill at ease. I remember how it was when I first came to Green Gulch Farm. And I had, before I moved to the Bay Area in 1990, I had spent a few years living in Australia.

[02:15]

And during the last few months, I lived on a biodynamic farm that had a meditation hall. It was called Dharma Nanda. And so when I moved to the Bay Area and I was looking for a place to practice and came to Green Gulch, it just felt like home in a way. The zendo that had been a barn and the beautifully tended gardens and fields seemed so reminiscent of the place that I loved in Australia. So that was my initial feeling about Green Gulch, and it has remained over the years. And I was fortunate to live here for a little over two years, as well as having lived at Tassajara and at City Center. So in terms of belonging, what do we mean by belonging?

[03:18]

Recently, I was... fortunate to be here for a four-day sashin, a retreat, led by my teacher Linda. And we were studying the Mountains and Waters Sutra, a very poetic piece of writing by Ehe Dogen, who lived in the 13th century, but his words are so relevant today. And there are a few lines in that sutra that Linda has talked about, which are very pertinent to the theme of belonging. And Dogen said, although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to people who love them. So as people can think of ourselves as these people, when we have an opportunity to walk in the hills here or Mount Tam or

[04:21]

other mountains that we may know and love, we begin to feel a sense of intimacy with these places. And we want to, we naturally want to take care of them. You know, sometimes when I'm hiking, I'll pick up wrappers of things that people have left along the trail. It's a way, a little way, that I can give back to these beautiful mountains. And The character for love that Dogen used also means to care for. So there's a way of expressing our love and perhaps sense of belonging by caring for the places that we love and also for the people that we love and ourselves. Suzuki Roshi, who was the founder of Zen Center,

[05:22]

wrote an essay that was based on a talk called Respect for Things, and it's one that I come back to from time to time. He started out by talking about how we move the chairs in the dining room at City Center. And if you've been to City Center, you might know that the dining room is right above the zendo. So that when we move the chairs in the dining room, if we drag them on the floor and someone's in the zendo, they will hear. the sound. They might not know what it is, but it's distracting. So Suzuki Roshi taught that instead of dragging the chairs, we lift the chairs and then put them down. And he described it as a sign of how we respect the chairs, how we care for the chairs, how we think of the chairs as not separate from ourselves. You know, so we pick them up with two hands and then we put them down. And one of the things that I first noticed when I came to Green Gulch was how things were cared for.

[06:29]

You may notice, too, all the flower arrangements, how beautiful they are, how the floors are swept and the gardens so well tended. And this is an expression of people's caring for the place where they live. the place that they want to share with others who come. And it's one of the things about Zen practice that has taught me a lot. I grew up in a household that was very cluttered, and I didn't have that same sense of respect for things that I've gradually been exposed to and has become much more a part of me so that there's a time and a schedule example, at Tassajara, our mountain monastery, where during practice period, just before the personal day, so there are four days of very intensive study and practice and work, and then there's a fifth day called a personal day, and there's a period of time before the personal day that's devoted to room cleaning.

[07:42]

So everyone stops what they're doing and they take that time to sweep the floors and change the sheets and fill the kerosene lamps and be ready for the day when they can enjoy their clean room. And it's a wonderful practice. We have at all three temples something we call soji, which is community work practice. So after service in the morning at Green Gulch and in the city, And at Tassajara, everyone lines up and gets an assignment from the work leader and sweeps or cleans bathrooms or dusts, fluffs the cushions in the zendo, helps get breakfast on the table. And in 15 or 20 minutes, so much can happen when people work together. And it's, again, it's a way of expressing our caring for the places that we love and practice in and live in.

[08:43]

sense of respect for things. Suzuki Roshi referred to an image of, with a blade of grass, we create a golden Buddha, which is 16 feet high. That is our spirit. That is how we create respect for things. And I think by that he means that... Even how we treat a blade of grass makes a difference, and there's nothing that we would take for granted or treat casually because that blade of grass or that vase of flowers is no different from the Buddha, from something we think is separate from us, but it really isn't. We think of each of us having Buddha nature. And so we want to learn how to treat ourselves and each other and even a blade of grass with this kind of respect.

[09:51]

So when I began thinking about talking about belonging today, I did check the dictionary to see what some of the definitions of belonging are. And there's one that I think is kind of conventional. It's one that I certainly grew up with and think about, which is to be the property or rightful possession of. And it usually, in terms of belong, it's to belong. So we might think of belonging as or our belongings of things that we own. But there's another definition of belonging that I think is more in tune with our practice and understanding of what the Buddha taught, which is to be connected with in various relations, to be a part of. And that definition of belonging, I think, is more what Suzuki Roshi and Dogen were talking about when Dogen said,

[11:06]

The mountains belong to those who love them. The mountains belong to those who feel connected with them, who feel that they're part of the mountains, and that we are not separate from the mountains. And the way Dogen describes mountains, they're very much alive. He talks about mountains walking, and we know that over time mountains change. We may not be able to perceive that they're walking, but that mountains are living beings. which is not how I grew up thinking of mountains, but it's a wonderful way to think of mountains or waters. And when we think of mountains and waters in those ways, we want to take care of them. We are concerned then about ecology and global warming and what's happening to our mountains and waters and fracking and some of the ways our land and waters are not being treated with respect. Because when we feel that they're part of us, certain things become untenable.

[12:14]

And I think it's from that sense of love and connectedness that we can really effectively speak out and take care of the things that we love. So... But I think there's more to a sense of belonging. Sense of belonging can come also from feeling part of a family or a group or a community. And that sense of belonging can come and go. Sometimes it's not a static thing or something like we might... sometimes feel we belong and sometimes not. And I can remember a couple of times, I'm sure there have been more than that, but when I was thinking about this, preparing for today, I remembered vividly my first day at high school.

[13:24]

I grew up in New York City, and in New York at that time there was a I don't know how special it was. I think it was fairly common, where you could do three years of junior high school in two, and then you would start high school in 10th grade instead of 9th grade. And I was admitted to the High School of Music and Art, which was a public school, but for children who were involved in music or art. And at the time, I was a cellist. I still am. And so I went... to school the first day, and music and art at the time was in a very large building at the top of a hill. There was a park on that hill, Morningside Park. We called it the Castle on the Hill. And I remember approaching the school that first day and seeing what seemed like everybody hugging each other and talking about

[14:31]

their summer vacations and feeling so alone and so much that I didn't belong. And starting in classes where people knew each other because they had been freshmen together. I hadn't been a freshman at that school. And it took a long time before that feeling dissolved and I started to have friends at Music and Art. And then later on, the feeling came up again when I started being invited to the homes of some of my friends. And music and art had students from all over the city. And I had grown up in the Bronx in a small apartment, shared a room with my sister. And my father worked for the post office and had a second job in the mornings at Macy's department store as a stock clerk. And some of the people I got to know at Music and Art started inviting me to their homes for dinner.

[15:31]

And the other thing was my father worked at night, so my family never really had dinner together. And I would be invited to homes of friends whose parents were professional people, lawyers, artists, writers, and where the family ate together and had a conversation at the dinner table. And I just felt so shy, really like I didn't belong. And it was only later that I learned about class differences. And then instead of feeling ashamed of my family, I started to notice the values that I learned from my family that I could be proud of. So there are many ways in which we can feel coming into a situation that we either belong or don't belong. and noticing how we might be different, whether there are people like us in the room. We might think about that in terms of gender or age or sexual orientation or race, culture.

[16:39]

Are there people there that we can feel some connection to in ways that we might feel different? Because of this awareness that sometimes people coming into a new place feel they don't belong, at City Center we've started having a number of what we call affinity groups. So the first one that started was meditation and recovery, which has been going on for over 12 years, I think. And that's for people involved in recovery from any of the areas covered by 12-step programs, drug or alcohol addiction, overeating, or any of those areas where it can be really helpful to have support, but combining that with Zen practice, and that group has been thriving over the years.

[17:45]

We also started a queer Dharma group six years ago, And a couple of years ago, Young Urban Zen, which took off like wildfire from the very first meeting, they had 50 or 60 people coming. And this year we've started a group called Good Old Zen for people 55 and over. And you might wonder why that might be important, but I've talked to some older people at City Center who said they sometimes feel invisible. And I think that can be true for people in any group where somehow you might feel marginalized. So those groups can help people feel a sense of belonging. And we think of them, I think of them as Dharma gates, so an entryway that helps some people then feel more and more engaged.

[18:49]

and able to participate in all the programs offered at City Center. But there's another way, I think, in which belonging is something that goes beyond what, a sense of belonging goes beyond what social groups we may feel part of or not part of. It's a sense of belonging to oneself. And I think there are a few ways we can cultivate that. One is through a meditation practice, through zazen. Another is through the practice of forgiving oneself for our mistakes. And a third is reconciling different parts of ourselves. So I want to talk a little bit about each of those. starting with zazen practice, I think when we sit, and particularly when we can sit day after day, we kind of learn to show up for ourselves no matter how we're feeling.

[20:05]

Whether we are tired or alert, whether we might feel a cold coming on or notice aches and pains, whether we are in a good mood or upset about something or depressed or anxious, just sitting and being able to notice what's going on and meet that with acceptance, I think develops an incredible sense of compassion for ourselves, which of course carries over to how we encounter others who are going through similar things. But over time, just a sense of being at home in our own bodies, in our own minds and psyches, and also an ability to recognize that however we're feeling, it's going to change.

[21:13]

And it's that basic Buddhist teaching about impermanence But I find it really helpful as I'm growing older to not assume if I have an ache or pain that that's a sign things are going to get worse. But just to say that's how it is today. Or to know if I'm irritable, that that's just how I'm feeling now. It doesn't mean I'm going to stay in that place all day. Or if I am feeling it, irritable to be aware of it and then to be a little careful about what I say to other people because I don't want to say something I will later regret. Or knowing that sometimes if I'm in that space I can take a walk and things may shift. So it's the practice of zazen I think is a way of developing a greater self-awareness and self-acceptance.

[22:15]

And recently I was in the City Center bookstore. We have a new bookstore manager. And she was telling me that one thing she loves doing the most is helping people who come in to buy their first Zafu. And there are people who don't live at City Center. They live at home and generally work. And they are... And like many of you who come to Green Gulch on Sunday, they try to develop a practice at home. So buying a Zafu is a very significant step. It's a commitment to sitting at home. And she really sees it that way. And she really wants to help them find the most comfortable Zafu or meditation bench or whatever will enable them to be comfortable because she sees that... practice of sitting at home can help them feel at home in themselves and have that sense of belonging.

[23:20]

So I was very touched by her approach to selling Zafus because it's more than selling a Zafu. For some of you who have bought Zafus or have created a space at home where you can meditate, feel that sense of that that space in your home becomes precious. Maybe you put some flowers there or a favorite photograph, but it's a place where you come back to yourself and find that sense of home inside yourself. So I think establishing a meditation practice is one of the best gifts we can give ourselves. And actually, it was very hard for me to do. For years, before I lived in the Bay Area, I lived on the East Coast, and I would go to 10-day meditation retreats at the Insight Meditation Society and come home determined to sit every day.

[24:27]

And after a few weeks, it would get harder and harder, and then gradually it would fall away, and then I'd go and do another 10-day retreat. be highly motivated, but it was really hard to sustain. And it wasn't until I was living in the Bay Area and practicing at, I lived in the East Bay, so I would go to Berkeley Zen Center, but I came here quite often on Sundays, and eventually I asked Linda Ruth to be my teacher, and she agreed on the stipulation that I sit every day. And that's what it took for me to develop a daily sitting practice. But then I could really see my life started changing. And it was because I think I was getting more in touch with that part of myself that perhaps the part that felt connected to

[25:37]

everything, not just to myself, but to everything and to softening and developing more compassion. And, you know, Suzuki Roshi talks about not having gaining mind when we sit. So we don't practice to become a certain way or to feel better necessarily. There's no guarantee that we will feel better. But I think nevertheless, Things do change when we sit. So without aspiring to a particular outcome, I would just encourage you to sit because it's beneficial. So that's one way of developing this sense of belonging. And another is forgiving ourselves for our mistakes. I think we can all be our own harshest critics. And there's a way of developing a practice of appreciation.

[26:44]

Christina Lane here, who's our abiding abbess at City Center, gave some homework one time in a class where, at the end of the day, you take some time to think about the things you've appreciated that day and to include one thing you've appreciated about yourself that day. It's a wonderful practice. And this period of time right now, for those of you who are Jewish in background, and I'm Jewish from a Jewish family, though I didn't have a religious upbringing, Judaism has become more important to me. This is the time of year between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and they're called the Days of Awe. And it's a time when we... think about people in our lives who we might have hurt or offended during the year and ask for forgiveness, and also practice forgiving ourselves for the mistakes that we've made.

[27:51]

So it's a time of year that's devoted to that practice. But in our practice at Zen Center also, there's a chant that we do about recognizing, let's call it all our... all my ancient twist and karma that starts. So recognizing our things we've thought, said, or done that we may want to avow, just recognize, and then perhaps ask forgiveness from others and also for ourselves. So we can... start each year or each day with a clean slate. There's a beautiful quote from someone named Estelle Frankel.

[28:53]

One of the key qualities of Rosh Hashanah or the key concepts is teshuva or repentance and She says, the key to teshuva, according to the rabbis, is knowing how to harness this very moment in time, the now. When we live in the now, we are always free to change the course of our lives. Now that sounds to me like it could be the Buddha speaking, you know, because, or Dogen, because really one of the qualities that we develop when we practice is a presence and awareness of what's happening moment to moment and the sense of living in the now. And when we live in the now, we do have the ability to begin anew in any moment and to make a vow or to set an intention to speak kindly or to...

[30:02]

not avoid a difficult conversation with someone we might have, who we might be in conflict with. So it's a wonderful reminder, and the new year can happen any day. And actually, I was talking to someone at Zen Center who said, there's so many new years. Which one do you know? Almost every religion has a different new year. And so... Any day can be the new year. Why wait? I wanted to talk a little bit about reconciling different parts of ourselves that sometimes may be in conflict, and I thought the best way to approach that would be to tell a story. It's a story that is embedded in a Zen koan.

[31:06]

It's Case 35 in the Gateless Gate. And it's called, Which is the True Qian? It's based on a Chinese folk story. And the story is about, it starts with two young children who are cousins. One is called Qian. And her cousin's name is Wang Zhou. And they are best friends and playmates growing up. And they love each other so much that Chen, the young girl's father, says, someday I will marry you too. I will marry the two of you. But as they... become older, a wealthy man asks Qian's father for her hand in marriage.

[32:08]

And he feels he has to give in and give his daughter to this man. And when Qian and Wang Zhou hear about this, they're very troubled and upset. And Wang Zhou decides to, he's so upset, upset and angry, he leaves that night and goes down the river in his boat. And during the night, he hears someone calling him, and it's Qian. She comes running up to him and says, I want to go with you. So they travel down the river to a town where they live for six years, and they have two children. And at that point, Qian says to him, I'd like to go back and see my parents and ask for forgiveness because I ran away. And I want them to see our children. And I hope they'll welcome us back into the family.

[33:09]

So they make the trip up the river. And when they get to the town where they grew up, Qian stays with the children by the boat. And Wang Zhou goes to see her parents. When he gets to the house, her father welcomes him and says, where have you been? I've just been so concerned. And Wang Zhou says, I'm glad you're welcoming me, but I don't deserve it. I ran away with your daughter. And he says, what do you mean? My daughter has been in this next room ever since you left. She's been lying there sick, and she hasn't... woken up and hasn't spoken to anyone. And Wang Zhou can barely believe it because he knows his wife and children are down by the boat. But father takes him into the bedroom and there is a young woman who looks just like his, like Qian, but she isn't moving.

[34:17]

And then suddenly she gets up and she follows them down to the river, and when the two qians meet, they become one. So what does that mean? Which is the true qian? And I think, for me, what that means is there are times when we may feel divided, when there's a part of us that we can't find space for in our lives, or we may feel caught between two roles, or between conflicting interests. This came up for me at one time. Do I want to be ordained as a priest? And that meant living and working at Zen Center for five years. That was what Linda Ruth asked me to do. Or do I want to go back to my job at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and continue my activist life?

[35:22]

And it was really hard to choose. So those two parts felt so conflicted. And perhaps you can resonate with that story. But there's a way in which sometimes when we can recognize both parts or find a way to express both parts, that they become one. And we have that sense of belonging to ourselves, which is really not leaving any part out. And I'll say for myself, Zen Center for the last several years has marched in the Pride Parade, and I'm someone who came out when I was quite young, and before the days when there was gay pride, and before people were very open about being lesbian or gay, and when they were actually... There was a lot of stigmatization at that time.

[36:25]

It's hard to imagine now. But for me, the first time I sat on our floating zendo in the pride parade and waved as we went down Market Street to all the people bowing to us and cheering, we had a big Buddha at the head of our procession, the same one that's used at Green Gulch for Buddha's birthday. And... Our senior Dharma teacher, Blanche Hartman, was on the float. And it was for everyone. There were many families marching with us. And it was not only the LGBT people that I felt that my practice life and my identity as a lesbian came together in that moment. So there may be times when we can bring parts of ourselves together in a way that we feel no parts left out, and we belong. We belong to ourselves.

[37:25]

We belong to our communities. So I just want to say a few more words about belonging and why this came up for me today, to talk about this today. So this month of September is membership month at San Francisco Zen Center. And our theme this year is, you already belong. So why not become a member today? And when we feel motivated to become a member of an organization, it's usually because we feel nourished by that organization or place. We feel supported by it. And becoming a member is a way of giving something back. So whether it's a museum or a school or a place like Zen Center where you may come on Sundays or take classes or just want to support because you think it gives something back to a world or it has values that are in harmony with yours.

[38:42]

I just didn't invite you to consider becoming a member if you are not already one. And if you are a member of Zen Center, thank you. It's a wonderful way of helping us keep going and offering programs such as this. And if you're not, think about stepping by the membership table and talking with Jeff or George, who will be there today, to answer any questions. So I'm going to close with some words from that talk of Suzuki Roshi's about respect for things. He says, I think we have a very good spirit here in this sendo. I am rather amazed at the spirit, but the next question is how to extend this spirit to your everyday life. You do it by respecting things and respecting each other. because when we respect things, we will find our true life.

[39:47]

Though love is important, if it is separated from respect and sincerity, it will not work. With big mind and pure sincerity and respect, love can really be love. So let's try hard and find out how to make a blade of grass a big Buddha. So may we all meet every blade of grass and every mountain as if it were Buddha and ourselves and each other included. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[40:54]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:57]

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