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. Take a minute to show up in our bodies, to actually feel that human embodied experience. Maybe we can feel our breath. Maybe we can feel something solid underneath us. The cool air. We can hear things. We don't always have the opportunity to line our consciousness up with our embodied reality, you know.

[01:12]

So here we are in these bodies and we're in this barn. What's a zendo? You know, human beings decided to make it a zendo. And like years of that thought and various activities that spawned from that make it a zendo. It was a barn and and other things, I imagine. And this land was occupied by other people. Bulls, I've heard, lots of bulls were here before it was Green Gulch. Coast Miwok Native Americans were here at some point. And before that, there was nobody at some point, you know? There are parts of this land that were here before there was anybody here. And sometimes it's good to remember that and actually feel that so that we open all the contrivances we put upon wherever we are a little bit.

[02:26]

But coming back into the contrivances we put, now we can say, okay, we're in Muir Beach, we're in Northern California... United States. And in the convention of this country, today is a day called Mother's Day. So if we locate ourselves in the, you know, it's not even the dominant culture, the national convention, today is Mother's Day. So I want to talk about that a little. But before I do, I want to offer the context that Zen practice, it supports us to live in reality. And reality is bigger than what a human mind can grasp. Bigger doesn't really do it justice. It's just too complicated for our brains to get around the fullness of reality. And, though, we can use our minds

[03:29]

to open to it, and I feel like practice supports us to do that. So we can remember this land we stand on, maybe that belongs to San Francisco Zen Center, and also not. And the fullness of the history and the conditions all the time, but like right here, right now, are immense. And even using our small or kind of limited minds to do that opens our reality a little bit beyond our myopic, small view that we often have. It's not our fault that we have that. Don't get all self-blaming. It's just the way human beings have evolved. We are like flowing in permanent myriad conditions And we've evolved to really, most of the time, think like, I'm solid, I'm permanent, I know what I am.

[04:36]

I got it. I'm me. My me is over here and you're over there and us and them and the rest of them. Most of the time we live in the view of the world that comes from belief in being separate. from the massiveness of how we're all connected. So that we can abide in our practice and feel the support of it and then turn toward the conventions that we have and open them up. It's not that we're not going to necessarily see like a Buddha sees, but we can liberate them a little bit or a lot. So I've been thinking about the convention, for example, of Happy Mother's Day. I'm a mom. And that's an extremely complicated thing to be.

[05:44]

Happy, you know, just doesn't cut it. And I've had a complicated relationship with... Mother's Day, with mothering, being a daughter, being a mom. So I want to start with the word happy. It's so important to pause and appreciate. As I was thinking about this talk, as I was thinking about just Mother's Day, celebrating Mother's Day, I come back around to a thought that I often have, actually, when I think about the way women are treated in the world and in this culture, which is there is not one of us, not one of us here, not one of us on the globe, not one of us throughout human history that has come into existence without a female human womb. Maybe someday that'll change. So far, that's not the convention or the reality, forget convention.

[06:50]

And we should pause. And whether or not we were raised by our biological mom or whatever that relationship is, we can pause and have a moment Mother's Day and every day to be like, wow, I exist. And one of the conditions is the woman who birthed me into the world. Thank you. I love my mom. I could just say she died a long time ago. So I remember Mother's Day being not fun for a while when I was young. Thinking of that, like how every human being depends on a human female womb, and then thinking about misogyny and violence against women, and by that I mean everything that ranges from overt physical sexual assault all the way to like... tiny moments of diminishment of girls and women, it doesn't make any sense.

[07:54]

And I think if, I mean, I guess it does in the sense that we don't pause to realize our lives depend on women, every single human life, ever. Doesn't matter what your gender is. I guess because we have eliminated that practice of gratitude, maybe it does make sense that there's so much violence And I would say Mother's Day and old days are a good day to question that conventional reality. There's a lot of other reasons that Mother's Day may not be happy for people. Like I said, I remember the first Mother's Day after my mom had died. It was only a couple weeks before the first anniversary of her death. She was younger than me. I was 22, and people assumed, because I was young, that I had a mom. What did you get your mom today? And I was like, not so in touch with my grief yet. So I just carried around a bunch of rage.

[08:57]

But there are other reasons. If we are parents of children who have died, Mother's Day is a mixed bag. If we wanted to parent and that wasn't possible, Mother's Day is not cause for celebration. Or it's a mixed bag. And maybe we didn't have a mom, beyond the biological. That's true for many people. And the conventions that we have just plow over the diversity of our experience. Of course you have a mom, you're 22. It's like, no. So we can deconstruct the happy. We can also deconstruct the idea of mothers. So I don't mean to diminish the importance of honoring our mothers, but I think it's also important to open this to every time anyone ever is nurturing, is sustaining, is protecting, is nourishing, that is mothering.

[10:15]

caring for anything in this world, human, non-human, plant life, the planet herself. Those qualities of nurturance are extremely important and not respected, let alone honored and celebrated enough in this culture. And maybe the only problem I have with the word day is, why only one? So if I'm breaking that down, every day we can honor these qualities in ourselves and in other people. I was thinking, if I really broke it down, something like the full complexity of the maternal archetype to you every day. Like on a greeting card. Oh, my God. But I mean it.

[11:20]

That would be good if we didn't just have like a Mother's Day section, but we had the full complexity maternal archetype everyday section in the card store. Yesterday I was here also at Green Gulch. In the afternoon we had what's called the Ceremony for Children Who Have Died, or the Jizo Ceremony, traditionally. And... It's an important ceremony honoring children who have died. It's a ceremony that means a lot to me in many ways, in part because we need to honor mortality. I also am a parent of a child who's died, an infant daughter. And that comes up on Mother's Day. And every day. And I was thinking about my daughter lived, so my second daughter, my middle child, she lived for one day.

[12:25]

And I was contemplating this because I wanted to bring it forth because her life was and continues to be an extremely important teaching in my life. But it makes people uncomfortable or sad or feel like they should say they're sorry. my daughter, her name is Sati. I've felt at the time, and I still feel so supported by Zen practice to have encountered her life as it was and to continue to learn from her. You know, which doesn't mean... that we didn't try really hard to keep her alive and do stuff and have big interventions, big medical interventions, but when it became clear that that was just not her path, she was gonna die, that was what was happening, I really felt like, oh, that's why I practiced for, at that point it was probably, I don't know, 15 or 18 years or something that I had done practice, and I was like, oh, all of that was so that I could be here right now and not miss it.

[13:44]

because a 22-hour life is quick. And we were able to be there with her. And the teaching of that, that continues to go on. It's the teaching of any parenting, actually, or any nurturing in this world. It's the teaching of loving someone impermanent. But it was really condensed, so it's a really potent one for me. And it was very obvious. Like, change was happening quickly. This was not what I wanted. This was not what I expected. And yet, if I wanted to not miss my child's life, I had to show up. And that those teachings are what parents have to deal with all the time. This is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted. This change is happening too fast. I was laughing with Timo yesterday.

[14:45]

I saw Timo, who's the director here, and his kids were there. And I haven't seen his kids in two years. And I was like, oh, oh, wow. I mean, I tried not to say, oh, you're taller. But I said something to him like, gosh, they're taller. And we were laughing about how, you know, when we were kids and people would say that to us, you'd be like, duh. But as adults, we just can't help ourselves, you know, or we really could. I was not able in that moment. But I think it shows up something about us. It shows up a number of things. One is that we think as adults that we're not changing, which is hilarious and not true. So we can open up that myth. And I think it also shows up something very wholesome, which is like, it's amazing to watch people grow in that phase of life. I mean, we're all growing all the time, but in that phase of life, it's so vivid. I feel like my son grows at a rate, like sometimes I I don't see him for a day, and I come back and I'm like, you've elongated.

[15:46]

But it shows up, actually, that our tendencies to keep plopping an idea of permanence down on our lives, to overlay impermanence with the delusion of permanence. When I I have been in different settings, so it's not just in this region where I've met other parents who have children who have died. And so I've heard this phrase, and I've also heard it in the realm of hospice. And if any of you are parents of children who have died, maybe you've heard this. People say this thing. Well, so what they're attempting to do, if they're also a parent of a child who's died, is to reach out in community and be like, you know, you're not alone. But the phrase is, We're part of a club that nobody wants to be a part of, or something like that. Some variation of that. This is a club that nobody wants to be a part of. And every time I've heard it, I was like, that's a little weird.

[16:50]

And for a while, but the warmth was there, so I wouldn't point that out. But it took me a couple years to realize, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are part of a club that everybody's a part of. And so maybe actually the club we're in is the club of people who can't pretend it's otherwise. All of our children are mortal and susceptible to death. Not even susceptible, they will die. Each of us is mortal. We will die. That's not a morbid thought. It's a factual reality. Just as certainly as we were born, that's true. And whether we're aware of it or not, if we are loving in this world, if we are engaged in the activity of love, we are loving impermanence.

[17:50]

And that is like an incredibly courageous thing to do. And I think because we like, especially in the dominant culture in the United States, we like to really do that overlay thick. And nobody's dying, and everyone's going to live forever, and everyone's going to stay young forever. And we miss the strength and vibrancy and intensity of our love when we do that. And sometimes we think, well, I can't think about that. I mean, I've heard people say that. I can't think about my children dying. I'm like, I understand the fear. But it's the truth of your children. And if you can't think about that, then you can't hold them in the truth of their lives. And you can't even hold yourself. So it's important, I think, to pull into our consciousness that we are impermanent.

[18:56]

The people we love are impermanent. Everything we love is impermanent. The planet herself is impermanent. And if we can open to the teaching of that, we're more likely to, first of all, have an appropriate level of urgency in our love and our relationships and our caretaking, you know, from our own selves all the way up to the planet. It's appropriate to feel urgent. We are running out of time. We are running out of time. I think if we can open to that, it also opens us up to change. We don't resist change when we remember that the situation we're in is impermanent. There's an expression in Zen, we practice like your head's on fire.

[20:02]

I used to think I was pretty cerebral in my encounter with Zen. So, you know, I often have, like, burning in my brain. I didn't get it. I mean, eventually somebody explained it to me that our heads are on fire. You know, we are impermanent. There's another image that Dogen uses in a fascicle called Sky Flowers. Cougue. the and this is an old image it wasn't his the blue lotus that blooms in the flames this is the blue lotus I think he's I think it's probably technically like Bodhisattva vow or wisdom it's us this rare thing the beautiful blue lotus is it's us it's our love it's a thing that blooms only not just like circumstantially sometimes in the flames of impermanence.

[21:06]

It only blooms in the flames of impermanence. We only have our lives in this impermanent situation. I was born in the early 70s, so I was sort of weaned on television. So I'm... inclined to be susceptible to advertising. And I see it more and more lately, because I don't really watch a lot of television now. So I can see when those things come in, and I'm like, I think I need that. I think I need that. So I pulled out, and our mail, you know, mail has gotten very sad for many people, at least for me. I pull out the mail, and it's like, there's nothing really personal happening in there anymore. But there was a flyer, and I think it was I don't know, it was probably from, I think it was from the Whole Foods. I'm embarrassed to admit they target me.

[22:08]

And it was a flyer of like Mother's Day gifts and like brunch items. And I was watching how I was like, that pink champagne, like I don't even drink alcohol. And I was like, I spent 10 minutes being like, that just sounds wonderful. After a while I was like, wait a second, wake up Sarah. And I woke myself up a little, and then I was thinking about the convention of Mother's Day brunch. I was like, I never get a Mother's Day brunch. But more importantly than that, I was thinking, what if I opened my mind? What would be an appropriate event to honor mothers? And by that, I mean to honor people that love fully in the flames of impermanence. So I found myself thinking, Fire rituals. Or maybe even coming down just to the convention of mothers in this world. Maybe walking on hot coals is more or more aligning with what it means.

[23:17]

Climbing mountains, moving boulders. My husband offered a 400-pound deadlift. Lifting heavy things, you know. carrying heavy things. Whether we are bringing the fullness of reality to our minds or not, we are loving impermanence. So even if we can fake it all we want to, we are still actually, I mean, actually, we always know when we're pretending. We always know when we're deluding ourselves somewhere in there. We know about death. We were born into that. That's in us. So we know we're pretending when we pretend that people are going to live forever. And it made me realize that whether that's in our consciousness or not, we are fierce in our love.

[24:24]

It's like a fierce and extremely powerful thing in this world. that we love, given all the evidence of impermanence. And that we love, given that we, again, we might think we can control things and get them down into tidy boxes, but we know we can't, because we are this. We are this interconnected mess of things, complicated, unfathomable. So we already are extremely fierce whether or not we are allowing that into our conscious awareness or not. I think a lot about, and I'm aware of, the kind of epidemic levels of stress and anxiety and addiction and death by overdose and death by suicide.

[25:26]

That's like a real public health reality. Mental health issues are epidemically overwhelming in this country. And I imagine I'm not alone in just, you know, what is it? What is it? Why is there so much strain? I often think, like, I think it's the cell phones. just too much coming too fast all the time. We never get a break. I love telling my kids, I'm like, you know, when I was a kid, you'd leave the house, you're just gone. You were just gone until you came back. They were like, well, what if people wanted to reach you? I'm like, it didn't happen. Many of us survived. It was hilarious. You went to the store for buying groceries. That's it. Whatever was on the list was what you're getting. Nobody could call you. It's kind of amazing. I also like pre-even answering machines.

[26:30]

You call the house, let it ring, nobody's there, don't talk to anybody. That used to be a reality. So there is a strain of the intensity and the rapidness with which information's coming. But there's also this way that our information coming so quickly and so availably means that we can't really deny things that we used to deny. We're connected and the ways that we're connected is more obvious and immediate. We do feel things that are happening around the country, around the globe. And more and more I think that the strain and anxiety and need to numb and like craving to turn away in this culture has more to do with the energy required to collectively hold down reality. So there's the reality of impermanence. There's also just the reality of the violence and oppression and dehumanization that made this country.

[27:38]

And, you know, some people here may not even be American and are just visiting, but right now we're all in the stew of it. We're all impacted by what's happening here. if we think about the energy required just in our personal lives, just to generate a deception, let alone to maintain it, you know? Has anyone ever had like a pretty big lie and then you're like trying to, you know, tend that lie? It's a huge amount of energy. And more and more I think that what's happening in the dominant culture in the United States is that we need to have a full reckoning. with the history that's here. And we know it's there, just like we know we're impermanent. We know it's violent and difficult, and we need to do it.

[28:44]

We need to reckon with it fully. I spend a lot of my practice life learning about and thinking about and talking about whiteness. So if you're a person who lives in the United States and is identified as white, to us particularly, my white American siblings, I want to say this is needed. The energy that it takes to try to repress the heritage and the legacy of violence and dehumanization is destroying us collectively. And I know, I really appreciate this idea of white fragility, because I think it points to something super important. And if it's a term you haven't heard before, I really recommend checking it out.

[29:45]

Robin DiAngelo has a book called White Fragility, It just names things, especially if you're white and have been raised that way. It points to the obstacles, particularly around race. And these skills apply to all kinds of oppression. To why, if we're in a position of privilege, it's so hard to look at these things. Maybe there's kind of like youth fragility, why we don't want to look at impermanence. But I feel like it's important to point out we can do this. We already do the fierce work of existing and loving and tending and nurturing this changing world, our changing selves. And if we can call on the strength of that,

[30:49]

this will not destroy us. In fact, it will free up our energies for stuff that matters and is true versus stuff that is false and consuming. If we are in the kind of dominant groups, if we're white particularly, it does mean we'll be uncomfortable There's a lot of uncomfortableness. It does mean we have to let go of some privileges or all of them. Let go of all the privileges. It means we have to let go of knowing that we're good or something, those kinds of things. So it's not easy, but we are able to do it because of the

[31:52]

cultivation we already do because of our capacity to live with impermanence and change and reality. I wouldn't, you know, it's painful to be a parent that can't, I can no longer pull up a delusion that my kids are immortal because one of them isn't or they all aren't and one of them has already died. I can't One of the things that happens, actually, if you have a child who's dead, is that you go to worst-case scenarios a lot. So I wouldn't say that it's not a comfortable thing, but it is a liberating thing. I can look at my kids, and I am not burdened by trying to overlay them with permanence. I know they're impermanent. I know I'm impermanent. That actually is freeing.

[32:54]

So my recommendation is for us to use the strengths that we already have. But to pull them into our consciousness so that we can utilize them, so that the full force of them is available. And to take the lid off of all of these webs of delusion that we create for ourselves. individually and collectively. We didn't come into this world to be happy. We came here to participate. We came here to love. And we are able to do that fiercely. Thank you. 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.

[34:02]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:11]

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