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 from people like you. Welcome everyone, both those of us who are, those of you and me who are here in this Buddha Hall and those joining from your homes. near and far. Today is an auspicious day. This morning, many of us in this room celebrated the winter solstice and lit candles and offered words of the season. And there was this beautiful circle of light. And I think that Image has stayed with me all day today.

[01:02]

And, you know, thinking of the importance of ceremonies like that one and various ways in which we come together during the season in which sometimes people can feel very alone, paradoxically. It's a time both of gathering and... Sometimes even when gathering, we may feel alone. So the title of my talk today is, Are We Ever Alone? And this question came up when I was studying one of the stories in the book, The Hidden Lamp, which is 100... stories about our women ancestors, and each one has a commentary by a contemporary woman teacher.

[02:02]

And I was studying this with a student, and the story is called The Old Woman's Relatives. The student had chosen this particular koan, and I wasn't familiar with it before. So it's very short. Once a monk on pilgrimage met an old woman living alone in a hut. The monk asked, do you have any relatives? She said, yes. The monk asked again, where are they? She was living alone on this mountain. And she answered, the mountains, rivers, and the whole earth. The plants and trees are my relatives. So, Florence Kaplow, who's a Zen teacher and one of the editors of the book, The Hidden Lamb, commented on this story.

[03:11]

And she said first that it was very unusual to find a woman... teacher or woman living alone on a mountain. Most of the stories or what we know about hermits, and this story comes from China, most of the stories we hear about hermits living in the mountains in China are stories about men. So that this woman was quite unusual. And then Lawrence's commentary was investigating this experience of aloneness and who are our relatives. So as she wrote, she said she was sitting on a log in the twilight, and was she alone and unsupported?

[04:20]

and maybe so, and maybe not. And she said, there's no one who will make dinner for me tonight, on the other hand, because she lived alone. There's no one who will make dinner for me tonight. On the other hand, the food in my belly was grown for me by many human hands, by earth, by sunlight. This log grew for a hundred years or more, upright in the rain. And is now home to countless creatures other than the one who sits here for a while. I have felt more alone in a crowded room than I feel now. And perhaps you may resonate with that experience. So she decided, Lawrence decided to ask the old woman in the story a question. Florence asked her, were her relatives out there beyond her skin or somewhere closer by?

[05:21]

And she closed her eyes. Florence closed her eyes and the old woman said, come closer. And Florence leaned forward and the woman said to her, even closer until they were face to face. And Lawrence wrote that in that moment of meeting, I understand that relatives are not just out there. They're through and through. Mountains and rivers and faces and eyebrows and guts and the very subtlest stirrings of mind. So the sense of not being separate from this old woman who lived centuries ago and not being separate from the log she was sitting on. Or... mountains and rivers. So who are your relatives?

[06:23]

How would you answer that question? Perhaps you've had that experience of feeling that the mountains, rivers, and the whole earth, the plants and trees are your relatives. Poets often express this sense of connection with the natural world. I thought when I heard this story of one of the first poems I ever learned by heart. It was in high school. And our English teacher encouraged us to learn some poems by heart. And this one is one you may... No, it's William Wordsworth's poem, The Daffodils, and I have a prop in case I need it, but this is a book that I got in 1958.

[07:25]

Some of you weren't alive at that time, but I've treasured it, and it's kind of worn, but I can still see the very small print here. So I'm going to share this. poem. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or vales and hills when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils beside the lake beneath the trees fluttering and dancing in the breeze continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way They stretched in never-ending line across the margin of a bay. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, fluttering, tossing their heads in sprightly dance. And I'm going to skip to the end of the poem.

[08:27]

I gazed and gazed, but little thought what wealth to me the show had brought. for oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude, and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils. So although Wordsworth was, at the beginning of the poem, lonely as a cloud, his feeling changed as he saw these daffodils. And not only was he enriched by that experience as it was happening, but it stayed with him later. And I think at times we can be really encouraged and nourished by remembering something beautiful that we've seen or a person that has

[09:34]

inspired us in some way. Just having this inner eye, which many of us may treasure time alone. Silence and solitude can be a great gift. And yet not everybody has that feeling about silence and solitude. And certainly there are moments when I... I'm alone when I don't feel that sense of connection. But when we can access it, it can be so deeply nourishing. I listen every morning to a podcast called The Slowdown. It's a poetry podcast. And for the last couple of years, Ada Limon, who's now our poet laureate, has been offering some reflections on a theme, and then she reads a poem by someone else on that theme.

[10:41]

And she commented in one of her segments of the slowdown, she was investigating the concept of relations or family. And she started by talking about Once, when she was teaching a workshop, a student asked her if she had a family, and she had the sense that the student meant whether she had children, whether she had a husband or children, and she did not have children. But she said, yes, she had a husband, a dog, parents, two brothers, a lineage, birds, and trees. and asked why must we limit the word family to mean only one thing? Family is a word that is expansive, undefinable, full of connections that go beyond time, beyond the grave, beyond the future of possibilities.

[11:49]

To be human is to be part of a lineage, to be interconnected with each other. And You know, that just reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh's talking about the way we inter are. To be human is to be part of a lineage. And Ada Limon went on to say, we think we come into the world alone, yet all around us signs point to the opposite of our aloneness. Is it strange to point to a bird or a tree and call it family? I think not. That's the idea of reciprocity, community, and it's something we so desperately need to recognize right now. Simply to live is to be part of something bigger than our own needs. During the fall practice period, we chanted...

[12:53]

Dogen self-receiving and employing samadhi during noon service every day. And Dogen speaks of the kinship between Buddha and any one of us when we're sitting zazen and earth, grass, trees, tiles, and pebbles all engage in Buddha activity, awaken, and spread the Buddha's guidance. So that sense of interconnectedness is also a sense of being connected to our ancestors and feeling that support. I had that experience, maybe you did as well, during the Sashin of feeling, you know, There were times when I was very aware that I was supported by everyone in that Zendo who was sitting, as well as those who have sat there before us.

[14:08]

And when I felt tired, it helped me to just feel that connection with everybody who was there. Perhaps you had some moments like those as well. Currently, I'm reading a book called Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. Maybe you've heard of it. Suzanne Simard grew up in rural British Columbia. Her father and grandfather were foresters, and she spent a lot of time outdoors from the time she was very young. She was very... and loved to walk in the forest and to see the different species of trees that grew together. And the way her family forested, her father and grandfather would cut down trees, but they would leave all the undergrowth and other trees

[15:22]

other large trees in the forest. And later, she became a student of forestry and spent many years researching how different species of trees communicate through the mitochondrial web, the web of fungi that are invisible to most of us. And she conducted many experiments and realized that and learned could prove that older trees help young trees and healthy trees send nutrients to sick trees. And the different species of trees really need each other, help each other. And she wrote that ecosystems are so similar to human societies.

[16:28]

They're built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever-changing. because its parts, the trees and fungi and people, are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. She says, our success as a productive society is only as good as the strength of these bonds with each other individuals and species. So although we may feel... connected to and supported by the natural world, sometimes we may feel estranged from other human beings. And I think to some extent this happened for many of us during the pandemic.

[17:34]

The enforced solitude was difficult. And some of the caution and fear of others that many of us experienced during the height of the pandemic has carried over. I think many people are still slow to come out and especially be in crowds. We noticed here at Zen Center that people are slowly coming back. It's still sometimes more comfortable to stay home. And yet there is a wish, I think, for me, when we were able to meet again in the Zendo together, to sit together, and then to have service in the Buddha Hall, and now to be able to invite people to join us for Dharma talks and one-day sittings and the Sushin.

[18:53]

find it very nourishing. And yet there's still a kind of caution because people are still getting sick from COVID. And so there's some hesitation in gathering. And estrangement can also occur after a trauma or a loss when we're turning inward to heal or grieving. And many people feel alone at this holiday season, particularly if they've lost loved ones that they spent holidays with in the past. So what can help us at those times, at these times? Last week, Abbot David encouraged us to reach out to one another during this holiday time and also to do things that nourish us.

[19:59]

So, you know, can we reach out to someone else when we're feeling disconnected? It's not always easy to do, but I find when I do that, my sense of separation is So, can we see one another? I'm just going to check the time. My question is, can we see one another and the now leafless Japanese maple in the courtyard, the crows, the pigeons, the occasional hummingbird, each person we encounter on the street, can we see everyone and everything as relatives? Last week, several of us went to another candlelight vigil, a memorial service for people who died on the streets of San Francisco in the last year.

[21:19]

There was a... Well, those of us who gathered for the most part were strangers, but we were each given small candles, not real candles, but the kind with a bulb inside. And there was someone who led... some singing intermittently as the names of each person who died and their age was read aloud. And each time there was a Buddhist priest, Elaine Donlan, who's from the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, who was there with a large bell. And after each name was read, she rang the bell. And the name and the age and many of the people who died were in their 20s. There was a lot of grief there in that circle of people, and yet this sense of interconnectedness with each other and with all of those people whose names were read aloud.

[22:39]

I don't know how many there were, but the reading went on for probably half an hour. It was quite moving. to be there. The singing actually helped a lot. There was a wonderful song leader named Melanie D'Amour, and she taught the songs so that we could all sing them. They were very simple songs, like this morning we sang This Little Light of Mine. That was one of the songs that she shared near the end of the vigil. Sometimes being together and sharing some experience like that can lessen the sense of loss we may have for those who've died.

[23:42]

Sometimes when we're not able to be with family or friends at this time of year to reach out to people we don't know may provide a kind of connection and surprise us in how nourishing it can be. I noticed that Jeffrey who's our outreach coordinator, sent an email about opportunities to volunteer on Christmas Day. So for those of us who may be alone on Christmas Day or around that time, that's another way of connecting with people that can be really...

[24:47]

The word heartwarming is what comes up and connecting. So I want to end with a story poem by Naomi Shehevnai, one of my favorite poets. She grew up in Ferguson and in Jerusalem. Her father was... Palestinian and her mother American. And she's a children's poet laureate. She teaches poetry in schools around the world and has traveled quite a bit, especially before the pandemic. This poem is Gate A4. Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal after learning my flight had been delayed four hours.

[26:22]

I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. I'm going to... So these words are in Arabic, and if any of you knows Arabic, I apologize because I probably won't pronounce them correctly. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying.

[27:39]

She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, no, we're fine. You'll get there just later. Who is picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I knew and let them chat with her? This all took about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamul cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts, out of her bag.

[28:47]

and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single person declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo, we were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free beverages from you. from huge coolers, and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice, and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves, such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant, always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in.

[29:55]

The shared world. Not a single person in that gate. The crying of confusion stopped. Seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other people too. This can still happen. Anywhere, not everything is lost. So, thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:54]

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