I'm a little nervous to be sitting in this seat here in the Buddha Hall, where I've never sat before. But I'm also very comforted to be among many old friends here. So I have warm feelings for this place and the people in the Sangha. So thank you. I've never given a Dharma talk to a dog before either. That's a whole new experience. So I am going to talk today about getting old, which is a subject of increasing interest to me. And I'm still kind of a baby at getting old, but I figure it's a good time to start paying attention. And so that's really why I wanted to write this book, too. I wanted to just look in the face of what's difficult. which is something that my Buddhist practice has been encouraging me to do all along.

[01:04]

And I hope this talk will be of interest to people who really aren't old yet, some of whom are in the room with us. But even if you're not old, you probably know somebody who's getting old. And even if you're not old yet, you're getting old. We're all doing it all the time. So we can remember that, and we have that in common. And as you well know, old age is one of the three sufferings that Buddha observed when he left the palace. He saw old age, sickness, and death, and he was shocked by them, which tells us that it kind of gives us permission to admit that old age isn't necessarily just a bowl of cherries. Even Buddha was disturbed when he saw an old person. So... Buddhist practice has really helped me with the whole awkward business of getting old.

[02:08]

And it's just something I notice gradually. Different things happen to me. But I think it's important to keep sharing with each other and to remember that we're really not doing it alone. And in my case, one of the most notable things is arthritis in my knees, which is why I'm sitting in this chair. I really can't sit cross-legged on the floor anymore. I also can't go backpacking or do hip-hop dancing or play basketball or do some of the things that I never did before anyway. So it's not that much of a loss so far. And Buddhist teaching really does encourage us to just be present with what is, and if you just look it in the face, it turns out maybe not to be as bad as you thought. So the reminder is always just to be present right this moment, right as I am, in exactly the age I am right now, and to appreciate the incredible miracle of being alive right now.

[03:18]

And indeed, it is a miracle. So my granddaughter, Paloma, who is, she's three and three quarters, as she will tell you. And she wants credit for every moment of her life And so I'd like to borrow that attitude and just think, yeah, I'm 67 and 512 and proud of it. So just to really be the age we are, there's a, in the Grey Panthers office in Berkeley, which was our neighbor of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship when I was working there, there were posters all over the wall of portraits of people of different ages, and under each face were the words, The best age to be is the age you are. So that applies to all of us. And also, if you really accept things as you are and start where you are, then you have a better shot at adapting and going forward and being fully present.

[04:19]

And you can adjust to the situation. It's a constant improvising. So if you can't play tennis anymore, you can play shuffleboard, maybe. In fact, maybe Zen Center should put a shuffleboard court in there. in the courtyard here for the demographics of the population here. Because, well, I never actually played shuffleboard, but it's probably fun even if you're nine years old. So one of the most whined about effects of aging is loss of memory. And young people also forget things. You don't have to be old to forget things. And I wanted to read from one of the essays in the book about memory. And the book is actually a collection of about 20 of my essays or so about different aspects of aging from my own experience. But hopefully they are of interest to other people as well who share some of these experiences.

[05:26]

And it's divided into three sections. So there's a section about the effects of aging on the body and the brain. And then there's a section on the effects of aging on social relationships and how people see you and how you relate to people and becoming a grandmother is in there. And the third section is effects of aging and how I've noticed aging changes my spiritual life and my inner life and opportunities that arise there. So anyway, this memory essay is from the first section, Changes in the Body and the Brain. And this is excerpts from the essay. It's called, Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl? The other day, as I was filling out a form, I couldn't remember my Social Security number. I made a running start at it several times, but I couldn't get past 013.

[06:26]

I had to look it up on last year's income tax form. To reassure myself, I recited the books of the Old Testament in order without a pause. My great aunt paid me $2 to learn them when I was 10, and they've stayed in my head for over 50 years. She said it would come in handy to know them by heart, and so it did, though not in the way she had expected. Of course, memory loss is a normal part of aging. I bet Buddha sometimes forgot where he put his bowl down in his later years. But normal or not, it's inconvenient, even disabling. More than once, I've had to enlist a friend to walk the streets with me, looking for where I'd parked my car. My mind, like my bladder, is shrinking with age so that it doesn't hold as much at once. I now put people in my Rolodex by their first name if I think I'm going to forget their last. Forgetfulness eats away at people's names, starting at the right end. And sometimes I find myself clinging to the first letter of the first name like a person at sea hanging onto a splintered piece of the mast.

[07:38]

My mother went through a period of time when she said she couldn't remember ordinary words. She began writing them down, after she did remember them, in a little notebook that she carried around with her. Catalogue. Vascular. Pollen. She thought she might be able to look them up when she needed them. Now it happens to me, too. I know there's a good word for the thing I want to say, and I just can't get hold of it. If somebody else says it, I know what it means, but I can't seem to get it on the hook and reel it in to put it in my... What do you call those wicker baskets that fishermen use? Some memory loss is normal. It's what's happening. I have a different brain now, but as long as I'm grasping for the mind that I had 20 years ago, I suffer. Then, too, there's the remembering. I may not remember the last names of lots of people I know, but I remember seeing my father standing in the doorway of our apartment in Chicago, looking like a stranger in his brown army uniform and hat, silhouetted against the light from outside.

[08:41]

I must have been about two and a half, and he was going off to the war in the Pacific. The older you are, the more of your life is in the past, and the more historical your memories become. It's part of the job description of an older person to tell stories about times that are gone, about what it's like to have your father disappear into a war, for example, or about stepping off the Greyhound bus in Biloxi, Mississippi, 45 years ago to work on voter registration and being greeted by the sheriff saying, now don't you be causing any trouble in our town, young lady. History is not what really happened. There's no such thing. It's what people remember and tell each other. but it is good if you don't go on too long in the telling. Sometimes I tell a story more than once, forgetting that I've told it before, especially when I'm talking to my children. I try to remember to say, stop me if I've already told you this, because I know from listening to my own mother how annoying it is to sit through a story you've heard before, pretending to be surprised at the punchline.

[09:46]

Well, actually, it's only annoying if you remember the story. LAUGHTER And this is one reason why old folks should hang out together. When I tell my old friend Bill a story for the second time, it doesn't matter because he's completely forgotten the story. This is what you call beginner's mind. Memory is plastic. Whatever age you are, what I remember isn't necessarily what happened, and how I remember it changes depending on my changing focus of attention. The body memories, like how you button a button, seem to be the last to go. A long-time Dharma sister has advanced Alzheimer's and is no longer able to come to the Zen Center to practice. But she did come for a long time after she'd forgotten how to manage her life. Someone from the Sangha would pick her up at home and bring her to morning Zazen. She didn't know where she was going or why or who was helping her. She had to be guided from the car to the Zen Center.

[10:51]

and she had to be helped into her priest's robes. But once she was inside the zendo, the forms of her 35 years of practice were held in her body. I was moved to see how, during service, she was right on track, manifesting dignity and devotion. She recited the Heart Sutra from memory, along with everyone else. She bowed when it was time to bow, and she exited the zendo when her turn came, greeting the abbot with a gasho on her way out. Outside the Zendou, she was lost again. It's disturbing. Sometimes, driving along one of my familiar routes, I suddenly can't remember where I'm going. Then I'm in a dark place, even in broad daylight. I keep driving, slowly, hoping I'll remember where I'm going before I get there. So far, I always have. Zen Master Dogen wrote, To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

[11:52]

What does he mean by forgetting the self? Could forgetting my social security number or where I parked my car be steps in the right direction? If I lose my memory, will I stop being me, or is there a me beneath the memory? Is there a look in my eye that will stay no matter what I forget? I believe that Dogen is talking about forgetting self-concern. And as I grow older, I notice what an excellent time it is to practice this kind of forgetting. It's all about letting go. I can forget about accomplishing all my ambitions. It's too late for that. Sometimes, for a moment, I taste the relief of letting this self fold gently into the next self, moment by moment, like eggs into batter. It's time to forget some things and remember others. As a matter of fact, the planet needs all of us human beings to remember our history and to remember our own accountability in it.

[12:55]

History is a process that we keep on making out of the stories we tell each other about the past. Before written language, people had only their own brains in which to store their knowledge, and so they were much more dependent on their memories than we are today, and they gave their memories more exercise. Buddha's disciple Ananda, for example, had a particularly prodigious memory and recalled every single thing he heard Buddha say. He passed the teachings on after Buddha's death, and for centuries the monks and nuns of the Sangha recited the sutras to each other until they were finally written down. Now, if you forget the books of the Old Testament, you can look them up on the Internet, but there are still some things that the Internet can't remember for you, like where you parked the car. and the stories of your life. They aren't on the internet either. How it was, for example, to be sitting in bed nursing your newborn baby when you learned on the TV news of Martin Luther King Jr.

[13:58]

's assassination. Oh, by the way, it's creel, that wicker basket for fish. So one of the things I've noticed about aging is a kind of circling around that as I get older, I feel more connected to my child self. And I think this has to do with the fact that I'm not building up a life, building up a career, having family responsibilities at home. And also, in my case, I'm retired from my job. So there's just more opportunity to be following my own nose and following my curiosity and really being present in the way that a child is.

[15:01]

And there are other ways that I kind of loop back and connect to my child self. And I wanted to read a part of another essay that touches on this, which is called The Secret Place. When I was a child, I found a secret place in the Bayberry bushes. It was summer when my family floated free from the known world, the world that was measured by carpools and sidewalks, and went to the seashore. I was lonely there, alone in my separate self, in my dungaree shorts, with dirty knees and poison ivy between my toes. I would put my jackknife in my pocket and wind my way through a scratchy gap in the bushes into a clearing the size of a small room. an almost flat place on the flank of a hill overlooking Manempsha Pond. The bayberry bushes were taller than I was, and my parents couldn't see me from the house.

[16:03]

They didn't even know the secret place existed, but I could see far across the water to the shimmering dunes of Lobsterville. In this bushy room, I practiced cartwheels and handstands, turning the world upside down. I sat on the grass and whittled sticks. I could see time passing by watching the sails move across the pond. Back in the house, my father was depressed, shut up in his study writing something all the time. My mother tied her hair up in a bandana and tried to keep us kids from bothering him. My little sisters chased each other around the house, screeching. I felt the tension of our family life, a sadness I couldn't cure, couldn't even name as sadness. I lay on my back on the ground that was crunchy with lichen while the sky did cartwheels around me. As the day came to an end, the sun's light turned a thicker and thicker yellow, and clouds rushed away from me into the void on the other side of the horizon and disappeared. This daily ending, staged with the smell of the bayberry and the crying of the gulls, gave me a lump in my throat, a shout I couldn't shout out.

[17:10]

As I get older, I find myself coming back to childhood's yearning. I both seek solitude and fear it, just as I did at ten. Upstairs in my study in the quiet house, I'm drinking my green tea and sitting sideways in my favorite chair, with my feet hanging over one arm like a teenager, looking out the window at the redwood tree. I'm wondering who I am and what I'm doing here in this bag of skin, as the old Chinese Zen masters called it. Why am I still the only one inside? Twice I wasn't alone in my body. I could feel the company inside as I watched the bulge of a foot move across my belly. I liked having someone else with me for a change in the small apartment of my body, though of course I liked it even more when each of the babies came out to meet me. If I had a partner, I expect it would take the sharp edge off the longing, but I'm talking about something other than being single here, a more essential separation. I'm not talking about being alone in my bed, that's another conversation,

[18:16]

but about being alone in my head. I sit in meditation at home, and I go out to sit with others in Buddhist practice places. Sometimes I sit in the teacher's seat, sometimes I sit in the seat of a student, and always I sit in longing. In that slow turn between the out-breath and the in-breath, the question sometimes arises, how do I get out of this separate self? In the Zen tradition, we usually face the wall and so can't see each other. When I sat recently with people from the Theravadan tradition, we sat in a circle facing each other with our eyes closed. I snuck a peek at the others, all of them seeming to sit so peacefully, and I thought, what are they all doing, and how do they know how to do it? A wave of longing vibrated in my blood like a shot of brandy, and I felt hot prickles all over my skin. I said to myself, hello, longing, I know you. And in that moment, I suddenly felt happy. I liked the prickles. And for the hundred thousandth time, I returned to my breathing, letting the air in the room come into my lungs like the tide, the same air that was flowing in and out of all the other bodies in the room, joining us together.

[19:28]

Longing is its own satisfaction. It's already complete. All my life I've felt this longing. I guess it's how I travel in the world. It's what takes me where I'm going. The longing for connection calls forth a life of connection. The longing that took me to the secret place in the Bayberry bushes is the same longing that has taken me, as an adult, to spending months in a monastery, joining a voter registration drive, and setting the table for family and friends. My small self continues to reach for something beyond myself. The girl practicing handstands in that secret place is still with me, keeping me company. If that little kid can bear the longing, I can bear it. I remember that this is who I am, the one who wonders. I want to read another piece which has some of a positive effect of aging and it has to do with my relationship with time and so I'll read from this one.

[20:50]

And this is called, I'm reading this partly because this is the first reading I'm doing for my book. And I'm doing, I have a number of things scheduled at bookstores, but because I'm reading at a Zen center, I'm taking the opportunity to read this piece, which is more, one of the more Zen of the essays. And it's called For the Time Being. And it begins with a quotation from Dogen's fascicle. the time being, which says, the self is time. Do not think that time merely flies away. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. When I was 49 and my sons were more or less grown, I kept a promise I had made to myself to go on a long retreat before I turned 50. I arranged a leave of absence from my job. had a set of robes sewn for me, and went to a practice period at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, deep in the coastal mountains of California.

[21:53]

For three months, I followed the strict monastic schedule, meditating, studying Buddhist teachings, and working in silence at whatever I was assigned to do, whether it was chopping carrots or cleaning kerosene lanterns. I didn't get in a car or hear a phone ring the whole time. Zen monks are called to zazen by the striking of the Han, a heavy wooden block that hangs from a rope beside the temple. The Han is hit with a wooden mallet in an intricate pattern that lasts for 15 minutes, and at Tassajara, where the monks' cabins stretch out along a narrow valley, a second Han, known as the Echo Han, hangs partway down the path to pass the signal along. You can tell how much time you have left to get to your cushion in the zendo by listening to the pattern. The crack of wood on wood runs fast through the valley, Written in calligraphy on the block itself are the words, wake up, life is transient, swiftly passing, be aware, the great matter, don't waste time. One evening, somewhere in the middle of the practice period, it was my turn to hit the echo horn, strike for strike.

[23:01]

I stood on the dusty path, mallet in hand, like a frog on a lily pond, waiting for a fly. I faced the garden where the evening sun came through a gap in the mountains and landed on a pair of apricot trees. I was poised in the brief interval between hits, waiting, and the weeks of the practice period stretched out before me and behind me into infinity. And when that next hit came to my ears, my arm lifted the mallet and whacked the board, no holding back. And then it was quiet again, and the light was still on the apricot trees, and I was ready for the next hit. A couple of years ago, when I was a few months shy of being 65, I packed up my things at work, I loved my job. I had loved it for 17 years. But editing a magazine with a quarterly deadline meant that I was under constant time pressure. I wanted to retire before they had to gently push me out, before my brain whizzed up right there at my desk with the phone in one hand and the mouse in the other. I wanted to have time for other things before I died, quiet time, deep time, for writing, dharma, family and friends, and for something new and unknown.

[24:09]

The part of me that wants to lower my bucket into a deep well and draw up cool water is sabotaged by another part. I suffer from a condition that a Zen friend calls foams syndrome, F-O-M-S, fear of missing something. It's a form of greed, the urge to cram as many interesting activities into the day as possible, coupled with the impulse to say yes to everything. To put it more positively, I'm curious about everything and everybody. And so, when I first retired, feeling rich with time, I signed up for all sorts of activities, classes, and projects. Each separate thing I was doing was worthwhile. I loved my Spanish class and my photography class, for example. But soon I was busier than before. Where was my deep time? When I get too busy, old habits of mind kick in. I try to solve the problem by readjusting my schedule, which only makes it worse. I change one appointment in order to make room for another. I stare at my week at a glance calendar, looking for white space, and when I find it, I pounce.

[25:15]

Ah, a delicious piece of time. I write down, 2 p.m., meet Jean at cafe, and the white space is gone. Whoops, no more time. Then I feel like an animal flailing around in a trap made of netting, getting more and more tightly bound. As I get older, time gets scarcer and scarcer. First of all, there's less of it in front of me than there used to be. Second, each year swings by faster than the one before. Third, I'm no good at multitasking anymore. I can only do one thing at a time. I think I have vent practice also to blame for this. And fourth, it takes me longer to do each thing. So age is forcing me to slow down. I'm not the only one. There's got to be some biological reason that old people drive so slowly on the freeway. I just saw a bumper sticker that said, old and slow. I remember impatiently watching my grandmother making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic.

[26:18]

She got the jam out of the cupboard and put it on the blue linoleum countertop, and then she walked back across the kitchen to the same cupboard for the peanut butter. It took forever. Well, not quite forever because she did make the sandwiches and we ate them on a plaid blanket down in the meadow. Here's the amazing thing. Aging is giving me back the present moment. It's only linear time that's shrinking, and as it does, I have a better chance to enter deep time. It only takes a few seconds to slip through the crack between two hits of the Han into a timeless garden. This is what Zazen is all about. It's time out of time. It's stepping aside from activity and slowing down to a full stop. While I'm sitting Zazen, Even if my monkey mind is swinging wildly from branch to branch, at least I'm not accomplishing anything useful. As the Heart Sutra says, there is no attainment with nothing to attain. It's easy to get nothing done while sitting zazen.

[27:20]

A person of any age can do it. But now that I'm getting older, I'm learning to accomplish practically nothing in the rest of my day as well. If the trend continues... My next-door neighbor will think I'm doing standing meditation in the backyard when I'm actually taking in the laundry. I like to bury my face in the sunny smell of the sheet on the line before I take it down. I like the slow squeak of the line through the rusty pulley as I haul in another sweet pillowcase. The laundry lines of my childhood made exactly that noise. I'm not saying I'm ready to quit. In spite of what the Heart Sutra tells me, I still have things I want to accomplish in the world beyond the laundry line. And then I want to go on to something new, something I can do with other people to help this feverish planet. I want to keep working. I use the word working broadly. I'm learning that slowing down is the way. I have to pay attention to my natural rhythms. I try to let each thing take as long as it takes. And I'm trying to put some white space back into my appointment calendar.

[28:24]

Still a work in progress. Now layers of time live in me. I think of this layering as vertical time when all time flows into the present moment as opposed to the horizontal timelines that used to appear on classroom wall charts showing the Pliocene epoch all the way down to the present moment. When old people get the generations mixed up and call a grandson by a brother's name, they're not really wrong. They're living in the deep time that Dogen calls the time being. Quote, each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. End quote. I think of time as the landscape I'm traveling through on a train, and the train is my life. I can only see what's outside the window. Yesterday was Naperville, Illinois. Today is Grand Junction, Colorado. Tomorrow will be Sparks, Nevada. I just see the piece that's framed by the train window, but it's all there at once, all those places, the whole continent.

[29:28]

I was visiting my granddaughter Paloma on her third birthday. We went to the neighborhood swimming pool and played in the shallow end, and she poured pailfuls of water over my head, pretending she was washing my hair. She looks like her father when he was a small child. When I sat on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom while he took his bath, watching him fill graduated plastic cups with water and line them up along the edge of the bathtub for Snow White and Peter Pan to swim in. My three-year-old self was there too in the swimming pool with my granddaughter on another hot summer day, filling a wooden bucket from the hand pump in my grandmother's garden in order to paint the garden chairs. Playing in the pool with Paloma, I didn't think of those watery, long-ago moments consciously. I didn't need to. As Paloma turned her bucket upside down over my head, long-ago disappeared, and those other childhoods, those other summers, flowed over me and soaked my skin.

[30:31]

Before we left the pool, Paloma went over to the lifeguard sitting in his elevated chair. She held up three fingers and called, Hi, lifeguard! I'm three! I'm three! Threeness was in me, too. I can't be in more than one place at the same time, but I can be in more than one time in the same place. Time is not something I have, it's what I'm made of. So, I have one more little piece to read, and I just want to say that I'm really aware of the idea that my life is doesn't belong to me alone, that for all of us, our lives do not belong to us alone. And as we get older, we have a certain responsibility to take care of ourselves and to be who we are as fully as we can, to model that for other people, to encourage each other and to encourage younger people, and to just demonstrate and manifest dignity and appreciation and gratitude for our lives as we go along from one stage to the next.

[31:41]

So I just wanted to end with a little piece from the introduction coming back around because endings and beginnings are pretty interchangeable. It annoys me when people say, even if you're old, you can still be young at heart in order to cheer up old people. Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good. What's wrong with being old at heart, I'd like to know. Old at heart? Doesn't it have a beautiful ring? Wouldn't you like to be loved by people whose hearts have practiced loving for a long time? Old age is its own part of life.

[32:46]

In 13th century Japan, Zen master Dogen wrote, do not think that the firewood is before and the ash is after. Firewood is a stage unto itself, and ash is a stage unto itself. We are in the stage we are in. Let's not think of ourselves as has-been young people or as about-to-be-dead people. But even the venerable Zen teacher Robert Akin Roshi, in an interview about being old, he was in his 80s at the time, admitted with a laugh, I often feel like a young person who has something wrong with me. It takes a while for the self-image to catch up with the body. Glimpsing my reflection in a shop window, at first I don't think it's me, but someone much older than I am. When I went to my 50th grade school reunion, I thought I had wandered into the wrong room. Who were all those codgers? And then the amazing recognition, in the white-haired old man's face, the boy who used to pull my braids at recess.

[33:48]

My mother, Alice Hayes, a poet with a fondness for doggerel, put it this way. In her old age, a rickety miz took up learning the isness of is. Since it's not what one does, she just was and she was. Now she's gone off to be in Cadiz. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese expression for the beauty of impermanence and the imperfection of things that are worn and frayed and chipped through use. Objects that are simple and rustic like an earthenware tea bowl and objects that show their age and use like a wooden banister worn smooth by many hands are beautiful. I sew patches on my clothes and I glue broken plates back together. I love mended things. I like to take pictures of old things the spider web of cracks in the windshield of a truck, bright mildew on the wall of an abandoned railroad station. Teenagers pay good money for shortcuts to wabi-sabi when they buy designer jeans that are pre-faded, pre-frayed, and pre-ripped.

[34:56]

But the true wabi-sabi look can't be made in a factory. It depends on the passage of time. In Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, things... Flowers that wilt quickly are particularly valued because they demonstrate the beauty of impermanence. The very fact that they fade makes them precious. I'm turning wabi-sabi. I study the back of my hand with interest, the blossoming brown spots, the blue veins becoming more prominent. With my other hand, I can slide the skin loosely over the bones. Can this be bad? As I get older, I am turning into myself, job gone, children grown and living far away. Parents dead, can't backpack, can't do hip hop. Who am I really? Now I get to find out. So I'll stop there.

[35:48]

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