This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. I'm currently at my house at the end of Spring Valley, and this is the first time I've given... a talk from this room. So thank you for your patience. I hope you're all well and able to get access to a vaccine sometime soon. It's as if we've jumped into the future with this long-awaited possibility of protection from COVID becoming a reality. We're on the cusp of something tangible after a year of isolation, struggle, and social and political upheaval. I wanted to talk today about the history of these coastal mountains and its many dharma and land stewards over time, to offer a sense of place, of history, of the hearts and minds which led to the present-day Green Gulch.

[01:15]

Hundreds of years ago, this valley was covered by willows, alders, oak, and in the deeper canyons, hopefully some redwood. Some of the original inhabitants of this land were the Coast Miwok, a hunting and gathering culture which lived lightly on the land and shore, harvesting salmon and other sea life. The Miwok were some of the first known stewards of this watershed. Their obsidian blades and arrowheads are still occasionally found in the fields today. After the Spanish arrived in the 1700s, The coast Miwok population struggled to survive. Their lives were deeply affected by European introduced diseases and Franciscan mission culture. The story of these native people is a very difficult one. What we know of them as individuals is now is gleaned from some of their names in Franciscan mission baptism records.

[02:25]

In the 1830s, Portuguese cattle ranchers began settling here and buying property. They eventually formed several conjoined dairy ranches in the Redwood Creek watershed. In the late 1940s, after World War II, George Wheelwright, a physicist and inventor of a Polaroid, purchased the land we now call Green Gulch and began to alter the landscape to accommodate his vision of cattle ranching. Wheelwright straightened and channelized the previously natural meandering creek and built a system of reservoirs to sustain the needs of his cattle. These systems helped control the natural ebb and flow of storms and flooding in the valley. Unfortunately, the engineered concrete creek bed inhibited native species such as cohead salmon and steelhead.

[03:26]

In the late 1960s, after Wheelwright's wife, Hope, passed away, he began looking for new guardians to care for the land. He was a progressive and altruistic man and donated generously to the Nature Conservancy. With the help of Huey Johnson, who was then the Western Regional Director of the Nature Conservancy, the San Francisco Zen Center became the next in line of land stewards of this property, which we named Green Gulch Farm, or Green Dragon Temple. When the property transferred to the San Francisco Zen Center in 1972, the deed required us to farm the land and to allow passage on the trails, which wind down from the ridge through Green Gulch to the Muir Beach. The original buildings at Green Gulch, including the barn and family house, have been renovated into the Zendo, student housing, kitchen, dining room, office, abbot's quarters, etc.

[04:35]

The old dilapidated water cisterns, wheelwright created and needed for cattle ranching, can still be found along the hillside springs of the highly fractured Franciscan formation, which these coastal hills are made of. We continue to use several aging reservoirs built by the Wheelwrights to irrigate Green Gulch's organic farm and garden. Our drinking water comes from both a spring in the north end of the valley by the guest parking lot, if you're familiar with the land, and from a slow, very slow pumping wells in the fields by the packing shed. We're completely dependent on the land for our water needs. During these times of sustained drought, we're rethinking our planting strategy and irrigation infrastructure to adapt to our increasingly warm and dry coastal conditions. We're in the same boat as communities like Stinson, Bellinas, Invernus, Point Reyes, with these super dry conditions that we're not able to perhaps have adequate enough water to farm.

[05:50]

We have tried to live lightly on the land and to conserve its resources, but we can always do better. In the last decade, we've built sustainable energy-efficient housing and completed restoration on the lower section of Green Gulch Creek, which flows into Redwood Creek and then finally drains into the near beach estuary and the ocean. Both the Redwood and Green Gulch Creek watershed provides critical habitat for coho salmon spawning. This area also provides year-round rearing habitat for juvenile fish species, birds, amphibians, the red-legged frog, invertebrates, and many, many native plants. Huey Johnson has long been revered as a giant of environmentalism. His clear vision and integrity has helped save irreplaceable open spaces from development, protecting wildlife and their habitat from degradation, and keeping natural resources sustainable for future generations.

[06:58]

We take these parklands around us for granted, but they were created by Huey Johnson through great and persistent effort. He helped acquire the Marin headlands and other significant parcels along the California coast. These acquisitions became this huge, Golden Gate Recreation Area, as well as Point Reyes Seashore. We're so fortunate to be surrounded by these extremely biodiverse lands. Huey Johnson helped transform California from exploitive to a sustainable resource manager. He finished a memoir just weeks before his death in 2020. It's called Something of the Marvelous. lessons learned from nature in my 60 years as an environmentalist. It's a wonderful and uplifting read. This one person has had such a huge impact on the preservation of public land.

[08:03]

He was initially inspired by the reading, the writings of Aldo Leopold, who died in 1948, who urged us to think like a mountain, to move beyond our human-centric point of view, and see the natural world as a community to which we belong. The mountains and waters of the immediate present always surround us. In this valley, we rely on the natural resources from the spring where we get our drinking water to the reservoirs which enable us to irrigate our fields. We're completely dependent on the delicate balance of these natural resources. We can't and don't take them for granted. These coastal mountains offer us incredible gifts, and we do our best to be worthy stewards of this land. We do this through wholehearted and continuous practice. There is a fluidity in mountains, just as in water, as well as our hearts and minds.

[09:16]

We normally think of mountains as durable, solid, reliable, until they aren't. The California coastline has a complex geological history. It's predominantly made up of the Franciscan formation, a millage of shales and conglomerates, serpentine, which were formed at the North American and Pacific Plate boundary. These coastal mountains aren't stagnant. They are constantly moving, as we often feel just at earthquake last month. And they are constantly walking, these mountains. In Buddhism, mountains often symbolize karmic consciousness and water enlightenment. These coastal mountains came from various terrains just like each of us. Our bodies and minds, our karmic consciousness, are constantly being shaped by our thoughts, our words, our actions and intentions.

[10:20]

and views through every experience we have. Think of these coastal mountains, the Franciscan range, as our karmic consciousness. It's difficult to track how we got to this point. We may have a story of our crucial life events. We might learn something by writing an autobiography, but it's just one view of a constantly shifting narrative of our lives. Each of us has our own karmic consciousness as well as an infinite wider group karmic consciousness. Our hearts and minds are malleable, inconceivably evolving in each moment. We become clearer and more grounded as our practice matures. Appropriate responses arise more easily with more grace. We have all felt and appreciated the maturation of practice in some way.

[11:27]

Our responses evolve into Avalokiteshvara's thousand arms of compassion or Manjushri's sword cutting through delusion with wisdom. This is the wind and water eroding our fixed views in the ways of perceiving the world. The coastal fog in the summer and cold in the winter are part of experiencing these mountains, the evolution of each of our karmic consciousness. Dogen, the 13th century founder of the Soto Zen School, wrote the Mountains and Water Sutra in 1240. This sutra tells us a bit about continuous practice. and these constantly moving, fluid mountains. The mountains and waters of the immediate present are the manifestation of the ancient Buddhas.

[12:38]

Abiding in their true Dharma position, they cultivate the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. Because they are events, Prior to the eon of emptiness, they are the livelihood of the immediate present. Because they are the self, before the emergence of subtle signs, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate activity. The virtue of riding the clouds is realized in these mountains, and the subtle work of following the wind comes forth from these mountains. There is always flowing in these mountains, these streams, and in our mind. Even if we are sitting for hours each day in the Zendo, we're not stagnant.

[13:40]

We are meeting whatever shows up in the present moment. There is walking There is flowing. And there is a moment when a mountain gives birth to a mountain child. Buddha ancestors appear in this way. They are not separate from us. I wanted to say a few more things about Huey Johnson. He recently wrote this book. that I spoke of, and it was an amazing experience reading it and knowing his altruistic and deep love and reverence for public land. He created this idea for parks in cities that every

[14:50]

Every resident of a town should be 10 minutes from a public park. And I don't know how many cities that involved, but I felt like, yeah, I would like that if I live a minute from a park. But to live 10 minutes from a park, if you live in the city, that would be incredible. He helped when the area across from 360... Page Street burned down, a Victorian burned down. And he created the support to put a park in its place instead of rebuilding Kochlin Park. And his way of working, except for one occasion, was not to spend the money himself from his organization. It was to be the middle person. He would find a person who wanted to have their land become public or... He convinced them that that would be a good idea. And then he found donors who, mostly through tax breaks, were encouraged to buy the land for a third party, usually a city or, in our case, Green Gulch Farm or, yeah, all over California.

[16:13]

Yeah. He also created the Grand Canyon Trust and was responsible for the creation of that park at that time. It was just endlessly interesting projects. And he had what he looked for, three attributes he looked for when he was looking for staff in his various positions. A curiosity to learn. A personality that projects confidence. And commitments to a life purpose. And I thought, those are excellent qualities for every leader. 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 sfzc.org and click giving.

[17:15]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[17:18]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.14