talking about Harry Roberts, who was one of the primary teachers here in the early 1970s. And then we spent a day celebrating the life of Alan Chadwick by listening to stories from different people who knew Alan Chadwick, which was wonderful. Usually a couple of us do the history. So I'm glad Peter's going to help me today. One Mother's Day present I asked him for, although not his mother, I never will, but I asked him to... treat me lovingly and come and help me do the history which is rough for him because he's very much involved in this land still so you'll have you'll get a little bit of that roughness and i think humor too and a sense of how we worked how we how we all work together um sun center purchased the um seems amazing that we bought this piece of land in 1971 we came to green gulch um Suzuki Roshi always had a dream that there would be a place that Zen Center's practice complexion would be enriched by having a place where students could come after practicing at Tassahara.

[01:20]

It would be a place that would be open to families, that would be open to a more diverse population, that would have some farming component. We talked about that. Kind of like a village or a temple. You know, a temple village, a village temple, I guess is more appropriate. Tassajara, of course, being the monastery, Page Street being the city center, the place, the urban center. And then the fortuitous discovery of Gringold Farm as a possible rural site rounded out the picture. Suzuki Roshi had died by the time this place was discovered, was made available. But one thing that's good to know, too, about his dream, about Suzuki Roshi's dream, is he also, and I think this is very significant, he also thought... that there should be a place for people who weren't stable. And Reb is very strong about this. He remembers quite well. And for people for whom practice was a stretch, either they're, for whatever reason, they didn't function in a mainstream way in American society, and yet they had a great offering to make because of their love for practice.

[02:27]

And there ought to be a place where the schedule wasn't so rigorous that it would be impossible for them to participate. And there ought to be... a place for their gifts to be offered, to be made available. So I think that's quite interesting. And in the early years of Zen Center, we had a number of people living with us and practicing with us for whom practice was a real stretch and for whom their love of Buddhism was undeniable. So it was very interesting. Zen Center was, I speak to my opinion again, this is just my opinion, but in the many years, that I've been at Zen Center, I remember that in the early 70s, the place had a little bit of a more raw edge. Dan Welch, who's one of the great teachers and friends and guides of Zen Center, came down to Tassajara riding on a motorcycle with hair as long as Rachel's and longer, down his back with his sweetheart behind him on the motorcycle, and they stayed for 30 years, became some of Suzuki Roshi's primary students.

[03:29]

They came in, they were interested, they were looking, he's an artist, and they ended up staying and practicing and being primary teachers at Zen Center. So the gates were a lot more open, there was more fluidity and more kind of renegade quality to our life, was less structured. And Zen Center was a kind of haven for many people who couldn't find their place in American society in the 1960s and 70s. So I came here with Peter in 1975. I think some of you probably were born after 1975. Is that true? A couple of you? How many? Papu and Sanchara? Great. So I've lived here as long as you guys have been alive, and probably a little longer, which I think is incredible. I mean, I think it's in a way, and it blows me away that I've lived half my life here. I'm 50, and I've lived here for 25 years.

[04:31]

So that means that I came roughly, those of you who were in the mid-20s, I came at your age. Oh, I should show you. Prove it. I have a picture. Here I am with Jesse, if you'd like to look at that. Golden girl. How old were you in that picture? Let's see, I was 29. He came late. Well, that was considered a late birth. So that's 1977. Actually, I was 30. So we were really excited to have this place. The story of the place is quite extraordinary. This valley, as you can see, is quite unique and rich. For many years, it's been cultivated as dairy land. And in fact, when a friend from California Academy of Sciences came to Green Gulch to help us look at and create a landscape ecology plan, he stood on the deck and he said, it's all oak woodland.

[05:33]

It's been grown to, it's gone to eucalyptus, he said, but it used to be gray and it's been grazed. And now the eucalyptus have taken over, but it used to be old sweeping oak woodland. And I think that's true. So he could feel the actual... history of the place. You know, not like in the Sacramento Valley because it's never been that warm, but there used to be beautiful oaks on the hills going down to the beach. But because of the use of this valley for close to 100 years, it's been used as a place for cattle and for ranches. It's part of the history of the place. Let's go back to... I want to get my dates right because it's important that you learn this better thing. Yes, these are sections, and I'll read to you from some of them today. Okay. Well, let's start with the real human ancestors of the place.

[06:36]

Of course, would be the Miwok native people who fashioned this stone obsidian knife. and lived here for generations, generations and generations. Two huge shell mounds out at Muir Beach discovered, indicate a culture of people who regularly gathered on the beach and caught mussels and clams and ate them. So the mounds indicate inhabitation and presence. The fact that Peter behind Snippin' Jerry turned up that arrowhead as he was plowing, working in a way that was... close enough to the land, near enough to the land, so that he regularly turned up obsidian tools in our fields. Indicates that they probably hunted and traveled through our fields, that this was one of their home places. I'm sure it was a wonderful place to sit and to gather because of the extraordinary bounty of game and, you know, the beautiful nature of the valley. And we know that the Esalen people lived at, at least they used Tassajara as a medicinal place, as a medicine.

[07:42]

So we know that in two of the sites, and perhaps even in San Francisco, I don't know about the ancient history, the buried history of San Francisco Zen Center, but we do know that Native people inhabited this valley and did not cultivate crops, but drew from the extraordinary bounty of the land. And we could have a whole day talking about the practices of Native agriculture. Maybe it'll come up a little bit when we celebrate the BPF, when we do that ceremony on the 31st. But, you know, tremendous presence and integrity of the Native people. We know that they were complex hunters and gatherers. They knew a lot about the landscape. They cultivated the oaks for acorns. They knew how to live very lightly on the land. They left very little trace. But make no mistake, even though they didn't cultivate crops, Really, it's important to think of them as farmers because they did farm the land, and this is rather new and fresh and I think compelling research that's coming out lately about the Native people actually managing crops.

[08:45]

Harry Roberts, one of our teachers, always reminded us that Native people cultivated crops that even though they were somewhat nomadic, that they had certain trees that they tended, certain wonderful acorn trees, and in fact, those of you that know a bit about Native agriculture will know for sure that Native people would watch would watch the oak trees and would notice the drop. The first drop of acorns is usually pretty wormy. And under trees where the acorn drop was heavy and rich and worm-infested, the native people would gather, spread dry grass on the ground, rub sticks together in light of fire and burn out all the worm-infested acorns so that the next drop that fell, which was usually clean, fell on ground that was clear of the worm. So under the great trees, there are rings, old rings of fire. around the base of the great trees, the great productive trees that belonged to certain families within the confederation of peoples. And we're talking about extraordinarily complex, richly cultured people.

[09:49]

They were incredible basketers. They knew a great deal about native medicine, about their own medicine and how to maintain health and vitality by using their own medicine. And they knew a lot about... the landscape and how to draw food from it without leaving a trace of their presence, except the occasional glint of obsidian knife. We wouldn't feel their presence here unless we were walking, unless you're walking on the hillsides on a foggy day in July, and the movement in front of you, ahead of the trail, you might imagine was a Native woman beating into a woven basket the seed heads of red maids and clarky eyes. Tidy tips and all those wonderful plants that in late summer make a rich meal. A meal, a ground meal of flower seed was one of their staple crops. So you might encounter her on the trail, and you still may. You don't know in the summer.

[10:50]

You don't know when the shapeshift and the land shifts, and you drop into a time that's not your time. You may encounter her and learn something about this place. I think some of us have had experiences like that, being here and remembering how it was. Not out of nostalgia, but out of a sense of living tradition. There's a wonderful ranger at Point Reyes National Seashore, Lanny Panola. He is Kosmiwok and Pomo. He's a great teacher, a great interpreter. And in the summer, there's a two-day festival. up there at Kule Loko at the Native Village. Last summer Lisa and I attended it. It was wonderful dances and Native food served and a sense of connection with the culture. So I'll be sure to check the date of that and put it on your schedule so that you can perhaps organize a trip and go up there if this interests you. It's a very important part of life here that I wish we emphasized more.

[11:52]

And some of us know a good bit about it. In fact, every child in the Mill Valley school system who's gone through third grade has to learn about it. Lisa's been studying it for five months, studying Native culture. And it's been great to participate with her. So, prior to the way, prior to the presence of the Native people, you ready? Are you ready? Okay. There were other beings who walked this land and made it their own. They called it their home. This relic we keep on the altar, it's really a testimony to mindfulness, I think. Zen student Rob Weinberg, while walking in mindfulness many years ago on the one day off that we had a week, we worked like wild dogs here, cultivating and culturing this place when we first came, trying to tame it and being driven down into it by the genius of the place. Anyway, he was taking a day off and walking in the creek above the Sunday parking lot, noticed this rock poking out of the ground,

[12:54]

Bent down, dug it out. It was actually in a sandy spit. Picked it up, incredibly heavy stone. Took it to Harry Roberts, whom you're going to hear about a lot today. Showed it to him. Others had looked at it and puzzled over it. It's incredibly heavy, just like iron almost. Harry said, oh, it's a mastodont's tooth. Harry's a very wild character. We thought... And we went and asked other people, and they had lots of different theories. But Rob was a kind of scientifically-based fellow and got arranged to go over to Berkeley, took it to UC Cal, UC Berkeley, excuse me, paleontology. They said, not only was it a mastodon's tooth, it's the top third of a mastodon's tooth or tusk. So hold that in your hand and imagine the scale of the being that pooped and fertilized and grew from this valley, you know, thousands of years ago. When it was a warm place, warm inland sea, and the horsetails that we now find poking up in the green in the glasshouse, you know, all along the edge of the glasshouse, to me they are the most extraordinary, you know, vigorous harbingers or reminders of an era gone by.

[14:13]

You know, they used to be 100, these are the most ancient plants in our ecosystem. They used to be... during Cretaceous times, during the time of the dinosaurs. They used to be 150-foot-high trees that grew in an inland swamp, warm tropical sea, and actually shaded and protected this valley. So, hi. Yeah, you didn't know. This is fine. We searched. Welcome. We haven't missed much. I'm talking about the horsetail. They used to be 150-foot tall trees. They did. You can see some wonderful renditions. National Geographic has some great renditions of how it looked around here. I wish I had one of those at hand. I don't.

[15:15]

very primitive-looking plants. And if you look at them carefully, you'll see that they're spore-producing, and they propagate by spore rather than by seed. So they're very ancient plants. I like them coming up in the greenhouse because we went to great efforts to have no plants come up through the floor of the greenhouses. And I think it's far out that the horsetail ferns poke through the ground cloth and have found those edges that carpenters can't even, you know, can't make a seamless world, really, if you've... If it's not made of the world, if it's the stuff of the world and not the earth itself, it's hard to make a seamless monument. Anyway, the horsetails have found that crack between their world and ours, pushing up through the floor of the Greek Nelson. They're wonderful. They're one of the highest sources of silica in the plant kingdom. Wonderful plant to have. Interesting that they're so high in silica, impervious to rot, and yet they grow in a bog. They're magical. I think. Anyway, they predate this Mastodont, the era of the Mastodont, which I don't know when it was, obviously colder times, at being to walk around here.

[16:23]

It's like an elephant, like a small... It's actually a little smaller than a mammoth, yeah. And the Cal Academy has a great display, which I should obviously have studied better before coming to you. to differentiate between the mastodonic and the mammoth. So this was curled? Yeah, the tusks come up, and this is part of the tusk. I think so. I don't know. Something like that. I don't know. It's part of it. Who knows? It's the third. You know, he said the top third. Then obviously the creature went down into the creek to drink and probably wallowed in the creek and died there. So that means... No? Mm-mm. Would not excavate it, though. Not by how long? No, it's closer. It's right by the road. You found it right by the road. And then those of you who've been here through the winter know the creek changes quite a lot in there. It turns into a large bog.

[17:23]

So this is part of the dream, to remember, to realize, you know, the dire wolf, the saber-toothed tiger, were all the creatures of this valley, this area. Yeah. Maybe not the Green Gulch Canyon in particular, but in our midst, in our landscape. They wandered millennia ago. And at that time, too, the coastline was like, what? 30 miles out. 30, 40 miles. That's correct. The Fairlawn Islands was the western edge of this continent. Yeah, next week. National? Yeah, next week. You'll close your eyes and we'll do a spell. I'll spell you into that. It was hotter then. There's been a whole series of heating and cooling. There's been both. It's been dry and flooded. The waters have subdued.

[18:28]

I don't remember. I'll have to go through it. I have it all written in my notes. This is one of the most un... unstable or most dramatic of geologies. It's much more dramatic in Alaska, but the coast of California is an incredible geological zone, wonderful field, place of study. So, you know, all of this just is by way of introduction to the place, and what does it mean to us? In 1838, an Englishman named William Richardson received a Mexican land grant of almost 20,000 acres for this coastal region.

[19:29]

No, he wasn't. He was English, but he received a Mexican land grant. I don't know how that worked. But anyway, apparently he wanted to farm or to run cattle in this area. So he was given a land grant of 20,000 acres. What year was that? 1838. Could it have been because of the Mexican-American War? Yeah. People who fought. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It'd be good to know more about it. I don't. I'm just giving you the most. But I think that's right. So anyway, he received this grant and established Rancho Sausalito, which is the town of Sausalito. And he hired Portuguese ranchers from the Azor Islands to work this land because George always mentioned that the Gringot coast and this whole area is very similar to the Azor Islands. Off the coast of Portugal. It's a strip of small islands out of the Atlantic off the coast. Portuguese ranchers are extraordinary ranchers, very well schooled in cattle raising, and also they're great fishermen, fisherwomen.

[20:37]

They know a lot about the ocean because they're island dwellers. So Portuguese came over here from the Azores and began to settle. And Richardson was a broad-minded person. He sold the ranches to the Portuguese people when they raised enough money, and he made it possible for them to have land stakes. And there began to be a chain of five interlocking dairies. Now, I'm hoping that we'll have a date with Yvonne when she's around that we'll be able to go down to her house and meet with her and have tea, not on one of our Sunday afternoons, but maybe on a weekday or some other time. For those of you that are interested in learning more about the history, every time I meet with her, I learn... quite a bit, because she's certainly senior to Maine. She was involved in the original purchase and entitlement of this place. She's a wonderful, wonderful teacher. So these Portuguese farmers and dairy people began to set up distinct ranches, and our area is known as the section of five ranches. That would be the Golden Gate Dairy, which is where we go down to gather manure, where the horses are.

[21:45]

right opposite the Pelican Inn, that's the Golden Gate Dairy, or what we called Tinkers for many years. And then there's Green Gulch Dairy, because we were one of the dairies. We get them all right. Slide Ranch. Frank Valley Dairy is right near Muir Woods. Next time we go up there, I can point it out to you. And then on the other, above the woods, there's going over to Homestead Valley. What's the name of that dairy? Yeah, the homestead region, or the Diaz Dairy, on the upper flanks of Mount Tamal Pais. So there were five dairy operations that were interlocking and created a kind of culture owned and run by different Portuguese families. But the strongest and most prominent landholder was a man named... Constantino Bello. And in fact... He was able to purchase all of the available dairy land in Muir Beach and connect the dairies between family members.

[22:51]

Muir Beach used to be called Bellow Beach in honor of him. Until when? Until the early 1900s when Muir Woods was purchased by William Kent and gifted to the federal government and the beach was also named after the naturalist and conservationist John Muir. So John Muir Beach and Muir Woods. But before that, it was Bellow Beach, and a rough-and-tumble place it was, too, during Prohibition. It was one of the primary places for unloading contraband liquor. And, in fact, I think there was a big still out there on the beach. Muir Beach has always been known as a rough-and-tumble place with a kind of edge, slightly dangerous, kind of wild people, not unlike Bolinas. So our history is strong history that way. There was a tavern out at Muir Beach called the Muir Beach Tavern or the Bellow Tavern, Bellow Beach Tavern. And it was pretty nip and tuck. Yeah.

[23:52]

Illegal liquor would be brought into your beach and then kind of would infiltrate from your beach into the other communities, nearby communities, where it wasn't so easy to infiltrate. So during the war, during the Second World War, bunkers were established on the hills above Muir Beach, and in fact enlisted men... were housed in the Muir Beach community, which was always a kind of individualistic, iconoclastic community of pretty intrepid, you know, single-minded people living out there on the cliffs, you know, in the buffeting of the winds. And they opened up their houses and let the soldiers in. The San Francisco Bay was guarded by North American military for all the war years. If you've not visited those bunkers, treat yourself to a walk up to the Muir Beach Overlook and go into the bunkers and stay there for a bit. Bring a book. See what it feels like to overlook the ocean from that vantage point to imagine how it would be for our country to be worried about having to protect and have a warning system to protect the Bay Area.

[25:03]

All along the coast, there are bunkers built into the hills. It kind of indicates a little bit about how we're put together. It's kind of I mean, it's just interesting to know how the place was. So this place was a dairy ranch for many years. Many, many years cattle ran through here, and that's why the landscape's been so altered and changed, and it's been somewhat eroded. But the real altering of the landscape really happened with the person who sold us Green Gulch, and that's George Wheelwright, who came here in 1945 with his second wife and the love of his life, Hope Wheelwright. They had... just gotten married, and they were looking for a place to settle in the Bay Area. George is, because he's still very much alive, quite an extraordinary human being. Mr. Wheelwright, I called him. I called him.

[26:06]

Here he is with his prized bull notability. Hope and George were driving along the road and along the coast highway, which was in itself somewhat of a feat during those times. And they noticed this extraordinary place below. And Hope said, why, George, I want to move there. And he said, well, fat chance we'll be able to move there. But she said, I really want to. So they came down, and lo and behold, they met Mr. S.E. Button, Ray Button, who was the person who sold and made his living running gated horses, raising gated horses. The war years had taken quite a toll on his business. People were not so interested in drinking mint juleps and looking at gated horses. They'd lost their loved ones, and the country's heart had been ripped open by war. And he wanted out of here. He sold the place to George on the spot. George bought 650 acres of land. Guess how much he paid for each acre? Sixty-six dollars.

[27:08]

This was rough land. It wasn't a yuppie challenge. It is not. It was rough land. It was, you know, it was rough. I mean, the beach was rough. There was a reputation of it being a very tough place. There were brawls, fights, punch in your face, get the out of here kind of stuff going on at that beach. It was not easy, and it was also a sub-community of Portuguese people. For many years, the language, the main language was Portuguese. This fall, we will treat you to an unbelievable treat. we will have what we call the geezer's evening. We'll invite Amadeo Banducci, third-generation Italian farmer, and Joe Ponte, who was a Portuguese farmer in his 70s, and Turo Richardson, George's stepson, to tell you stories of how it was. And I am really looking forward to it because I will be as young as you are to me when I hear these old farts line up

[28:12]

And apparently it's awesome. It should be a very awesome event. So we'll have some living oral history. When the hell is that going to happen? They say, well, we're coming over there. I want to go over there. So I don't know what we're going to expect. They're not 13 people. They're from a different world. And when you get them started, I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to jumpstart them without a little red wine. But maybe we'll disguise that in goblets and get them going. Or prime them first and bring them here. I don't know how we're going to do it exactly, but I trust that they will get going. And we'll be their audience. Wendy, how much? Yeah. I can't imagine, Matthew. Well, of course, it's not for sale because it's in the federal park right now. Oh, it's some of the highest real estate in the country. Well, that's a different story. So stay with me, and I'll tell you. How did George get his money? He's from a wealthy family. He's kind of an old money family in Boston, a family of wheelwrights.

[29:17]

They made wheels. They had a mill, a wonderful, successful mill. He was groomed to take over the mill. He was a renegade, a complete renegade, wouldn't hear of it. One of the most charming books to read, and I hope that we'll get a copy of it because I'm not about to let my copy out, even to you guys, is a book that George wrote called Dead Reckoning, which is really the story of his life. It's very inflated. and very rich in tales and stories. Basically, he makes fun of himself to let everyone know that he's the smartest thing on two legs. And actually, it's not untrue. Quite an incredible person. So he didn't choose to continue in the family mill. Instead, he went to Harvard at quite a young age and ended up teaching physics at Harvard. In one of his later classes, there was a 17-year-old in the class, a young student who had early entry to Harvard. George said he realized after the first quarter of a semester that the young man knew far more than he would ever know about physics. Pulled him aside and said, I can see you're bored.

[30:18]

I'm bored too, and I should be learning from you instead of you learning from me. Would you like to start a lab together? And Edwin Land said, yes, I would. 17 years old. He was 17 years old. They started, I think he was a little older by the time they actually got the lab going. But Polaroid Land Camera came out of that lab. They discovered the polarization of light. The camera happened to be an incidental. Land was a brilliant, brilliant physicist. And they were working on the polarization of light for, you know, for war use, too. So they were doing a lot of really interesting research. The fortune was made. Their lives were made. And so George was able to retire at the rather early age of, let's see, 1945, so 50 years ago, when he was in his 40s. He met Hope. At the time of his retirement, he was a pilot for the United States Air Force. He developed a system of navigation that was based on shooting off of, taking bearings or dead reckoning off of the position of stars.

[31:22]

So he knew how to fly. This was far before radar. So he figured out a system of navigation that allowed him to cross the Atlantic and to be very involved in pretty high secret stuff during the war. Brilliant man. So he was a great navigator. And he knew how to make these instruments and how to follow them and read them. So the book is just a charming read. It's about 100 pages. It's, of course, not published, so it's a loose-leaf binder. I'm going to try to get a copy so you can have a look. It's a great, great thing. So he came with enough money in his pocket to buy Green Gulch and to settle here with the love of his life. Hope Wheelwright. She had been married before, and I think her marriage ended because of her affair with George. He was not mild in any way, and certainly not mild in that way. He had a number of passionate, problematic affairs. But after he met Hope, it all cooled down, and she had a couple of children.

[32:24]

Turo Richardson, Arthur Richardson, is the person who built Hope's cottage. He built it for his mother, so that when they were living here in the ranch, he'd have a place to go. Because quite early in her life, and she's a beautiful, beautiful woman, quite early in her life she developed lung cancer. She was a strong smoker, outspoken dame. Ended up teaching English to all the Portuguese kids in the neighborhood. Kind of a saint, actually. They still talk with her. They can hardly talk about her to this day. She must have been something. Because this family is not mild. She's a great lady, apparently. And very loved in the neighborhood. And George drove her nuts because he talked so much and he just had so many ideas. And he probably never should have left Harvard, but he did. He would have been happier if he'd kept talking and teaching, because he did it to everybody else, no matter what. And he loved this place. They lived here, you know, quite dynamically. He influenced the land extraordinarily. Here's some pictures, giving a sense of how he cleared and tamed the land.

[33:25]

He was a very interesting mix of conservationists and developers. He straightened the creek. Greenwich Creek ran in a sinuous pathway. There's an old picture in one of the lower rooms, you might remember, Nora might know, and take care of the rooms, of the creek winding through the floor of the valley like a snake out to the Pacific Ocean. He wanted to farm those lower fields and to raise cattle, prize cattle. So he straightened the creek into a concrete sluice way and planned to irrigate the fields off of that creek. And that also included going up on the hills and burning the brush. He sprayed to defoliate the hills so that they could be used as pasture land for the cattle. He did aerial spraying. Recommended by the University of California in the Extension Service, he did aerial spraying of 2,4-D. He went in the helicopters to do it. Sometimes I think that our primary purpose here, besides saving all sentient beings or...

[34:26]

as part of saving all sentient beings, is to clean up the environmental degradation that George Will Wright wrought upon this beautiful place. And he sprayed 2,4-D on the hills, straightened the creek, burned the brush, you know, created this house, colonized the place, created the pond systems, these interlocking ponds that are here, created an underground dam below the third field where the reefer is, There's an underground dam. Peter will tell you about that. Ask him when he comes in. I forget. There's an underground reservoir below those fields. One reason it stays wet down there. And the ponds are all indications of them. He was put together to discover how to store water. So he created these reservoirs so that he could irrigate the field so that there could be cattle here. Then he imported grasses from New Zealand, again on the advice of the California Extension Service. And planted the lower fields to really exotic grasses, marvelous grasses. In fact, when our dairy cow was unloaded from the truck, years after George left, her name was Daisy.

[35:29]

She had a better name than that. Daisy Mossrose. Steve Stuckey unloaded her, backed off the truck, and Daisy surged, nearly pulled his arm out of the socket, surged toward the New Zealand grasses and fell on them. George watched with delight. She pooped and ate and pooped and ate. We could... We could not get her off these grasses. They're really incredible grasses for a paddle. He studied. He's a brilliant man. He was a navigator. He never wanted to stay still. So he got himself in an airplane and went to New Zealand, went to Israel. He followed the parallel. He went along the 36th parallel to see what climates would produce grasses that would do well here. So he introduced a number of very exotic grasses. Planted a lot of the trees. around here, followed the advice of the Extension Service, which included the advice that he sprayed with 2,4-D. Asked him if he intended to have children. He said he did.

[36:30]

They said, you'd better get started because he had really done some genetic damage to himself. Not genetic, but some damage to himself because of the spraying. He did a lot of the spraying. He observed the spraying. He watched while they sprayed the hills. He drank in a lot of that, and I'm sure it didn't help hope. They knew that he continued to spray? No, it was years after he'd done it. He wasn't feeling well. He wanted him to be. In fact, he and Hope never had children together. He has two sons by his first wife who live on the East Coast. I love George Woolwright. He was a really important person to me. He lived here. He adored this place. It was really the... the most incredible time of his life to live here. When Hope died in 1968, 67, it became a very lonely place for him, kind of a haunted place. They were far out people.

[37:30]

They had decided before her death, and they knew she was ill, they had decided to give this land because they always felt that this place was too special to be in the private domain. And they ran it as a place where many people could come. So they donated the land to Synanon. Do you know Synanon? Synanon was doing some very radical research during the 60s with drug addiction and with, you know, as an alternative program for addicts. The Synanon Center was up in Marshall, about 20 miles north of here, 25 miles north of here. George liked the work they did. It was encounter therapy, you know, direct... one-on-one contact with the addicts, trusting them, expecting them to come together, get their life together. It was kind of the prototype of encounter therapy or direct psychological work. So they liked the work. They believed in it.

[38:31]

They let them do some trainings here and decided to deed the place to them and, in fact, did that. When George found out that Sinanon was planning to sell off the Green Gulch parcel in order to pay for additional land purchasing, he rescinded his offer and changed Hope's will and made it impossible for Sinanon to come here. After her death, he tried to give the place away to a consortium of Native Americans. On the way to the signing, they got into a horrific fight about how the land would be managed and never showed up. Finally, his lawyer, who was a great friend of Zen Center and a great friend of George Wheelwright, said to him, I think you'd do better to try to sell the place to people that are going to care enough to buy it for a bit of money and take care of it well. Huey Johnson, then the founder of the Nature Conservancy and the member of the Nature Conservancy and the founder of Trust for Public Land, Secretary of Natural Resources in the Jerry Brown administration, said, what about Zen Center?

[39:35]

They have a good track record of Tassajara. That means that we were able to purchase a wilderness track of land and take care of it in a non-developmental way. We didn't develop it. George was interested. He met Richard Baker, Zantassi Richard Baker, Abbott of Zen Center, Yvonne Rand. His lawyer, Dick Sanders, was a Dutchman. One of the people in the Baker household was a wonderful Dutch woman named Renee Detome. They began to speak in Dutch. Sanders said to George, I think you should go with them. They're good. They're good people. I think a lot of the way, a lot of the success, and Yvonne pointed this out last time we met, a lot of the connection, kind of radical and direct connection between Zen Center and George Wilwright and the then Virgining Park Service, which was gathering around, came from one-on-one connection between the people. a dynamic sense of a shared vision, a sense that this place could not belong in the hands of one private family.

[40:43]

It was too important a place in the jewel of this area, and that it belonged in the public domain in some way. Now, by then, George owned about 1,000 acres. He sold off that acreage. It was developed as you're driving into Greenville to that last development on the left-hand side as you're coming up the crest. Those of you that know the road well, that was land that George Wheelwright owned. He sold it to developers, and they developed it rather nicely for that period of time. Oh, what's it called? I can't remember. I should know. I want to say Muir Meadows. That's one of the common names for it. It has some other name. I'm sorry, I don't remember. Laurel. I think it's Laurel High. I don't remember. Anyway, it's right. As you're driving into Green Gulch. It's on the left-hand side of the road. It's a huge development in there. He basically sold off most of the acreage to developers, made a lot of money. And I think the Green Gulch was his heart place, and he wanted to keep it in the public domain. Felt that it shouldn't be sold off.

[41:44]

What was the acreage that was for you? Thousands of acres. I mean, here? Yeah. 108 acres. 108 acres. No, 115 acres. I don't know how much it was for. Not much. Where was the original 650 that he bought? It includes the hillsides, the headlands, a lot of headland land, all of which is now in the hands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. So in the early 1970s, Huey Johnson introduced Baker Oshie to George. They liked each other. People in the neighborhood thought he had lost his mind. He was already considered quite an eccentric coot. But now he's sold this extraordinary property to the Zen Center. God. At the same time, and this shows an extraordinary thoughtfulness on George's part. At the same time, the place had been, this whole area, thousands of acres were being considered as purchased as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

[42:49]

Send Center happened to slip in right underneath the wire and purchase this place so that we are quite unusual. a private landholding, this is really important that you understand this, a private landholding within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. In this area, one thing that's significant, because on Wednesday, the third meeting of the Watershed Council of all the different shareholders or stakeholders within the watershed will happen in this room. In this area, there are two agencies that have water rights, Green Gulch Farm and the Marin Municipal Water District. That means Muir Woods, the community of Muir Beach, and any slide ranch. None of the other agencies in this area have water rights. That means they're all owned by the federal government, which tells you a little bit about why water politics is so hot here. It tells you a little bit, too, about the unique and problematic place that Zen Center holds within the Caribbean. So George was very smart.

[43:52]

He agreed... When he lived here, he signed up for a tax-exempt status under what's called the Williamson Act, which means promising to maintain this land for agricultural use, not develop it, in exchange for tax exemption and in exchange for perpetual ownership when the park took over. There's famous photographs of George going to Washington and signing the Williamson Act or signing this property over to the Williamson Act, which just means exactly what I told you in 1965. There's pictures of him in the archives of Marin County. He was, again, a very interesting person. He was both a developer and a conservationist. Going down the stairs, you see the mock-up of what it would have looked like if Highway 1 had been widened and created into a major two-lane, four-lane highway, which is what they were considering. He was ardent campaigner against that. He pulled up the stakes. He pulled up the surveyor stakes.

[44:54]

He helped finance that drawing, which so freaked people out that it was nipped in the bud and it never happened. We nearly had a huge highway through here. People wanted to develop it, to open the coast. So anyway, it was very interesting, very interesting time. So he sold the landed antenna for a small amount of money, a modest amount of money, felt that we would do a good job. And then moved to Tiburon in Belvedere, where he lived with his third wife, Helen, whom he regularly, daily referred to as Hope. And she was a tough, you know, briny old bird. And, you know, upper class dame was having none of this. She was not at all wounded by this, just annoyed by George's nostalgia. Couldn't bear to live here. This was George and Hope's place, not she and George's place. She was hoping, he was, you know, a cultured person, was hoping to get him away from here. His heart was here, though. After he sold the place, he lived with us. He basically was here every day. He had a lot to say about everything.

[45:57]

He lived through a racer. He taught skiing in the Austrian Alps. He continued to fly. Very vital person. Naughty, naughty-minded, great raconteur, great storyteller. We loved him. He was here all the time. We'd get a call in the middle of the night. I think the rain means that you should be out there now. I hope you're lifting the damn boards. Yes, we are. Thank you, Mr. We're right. And, you know, he was our donor, our benefactor, and our teacher. And how extraordinary for him to have this able-bodied community of people who were interested in what he had to say. Here's a picture of him. I really think of him more like this. Moving down the path. He had two... Standard poodles, sorry, I think she fell off and broke. He had two standard poodles called Ptolemy and Cleopatra that moved through the valley. They were the only dogs we let in the field. They regularly ran across the beds.

[46:59]

Ptolemy would lift his leg and pee, marking his territory here, and Cleo would squat on the compost pile, interestingly enough. She'd jump up on the compost pile and mark her territory. And he had this penetrating whistle, you know, kind of, you know, a mechanical whistle. He would look, whoo! to call them, and he was going quite deaf by that time. We were going quite deaf by his whistle. So we would know, we'd hear the whistle, we'd go, oh my God, Mr. Wheelwright, oh my God, hide. And we often do, ah, he'd tell us what to do. In the mid-80s, he wore Helen down. She wanted to move to retirement home. She was sick of the rough life. We really took care of George. Our maintenance crew cut wood and brought it over to him. We stopped their fireplace. We fed him whenever he was here. We listened to his stories. We featured him in all of our events. It was a primary part of his life. The last decade, you know, his really cogent life, he was very much involved with us. Did he practice that?

[48:00]

No. He practiced. We were right. But he went to all the Dharma talks. He thought some of them were quite stupid. He would just sit there in the front. He was going quite deaf. And he would sit there and he'd nod. And every now and then he'd go, ah. But he was sharp. Really smart. Really smart. And funny. Quite funny. And naughty. He had a very naughty mind. Anyway, in the early mid-80s, he came back and lived with us. We lived in Room D. She left. She went to Carmel Valley. She said, I've had enough of you. I'm getting out of here. Fine, he said. By then, he had a little dog about the size of Rossi. who kept him company. His other poodles had died off. He was almost blind. He was losing his sight, which was a great source of sadness to him because he loved to read. Quite a character. So he lived in the Wheelwright Center. Actually, it was the later 80s because Elisa was born. Into the 90s, he stayed with us for two years.

[49:02]

Jerry Fuller took care of him. It was great because he had a rolling population of people that went through him. care for them listen to his stories which was nice for us okay so that's gives you a sense of that part he's not dead he's 97 years old he lives in he's charlotte's age he's alive in tiburon in an old age home how did you and charlotte relate to you they loved each other he had uh yeah we had nakamura sensei whom you know died last year on the winter solstice Dr. Morsensi, George, we were right in Charlotte's over to me and my grandmother. They're all the same age, 1903. Peppery old thoughts. Peppery old, you know, beings. Extraordinary beings. And they got along great. Do you ever see him? I haven't been to see George. He's deep under the well of Alzheimer's.

[50:03]

Deep, deep, deep. But he has a body that won't stop. Very athletic person. He always wore a tweed coat and these little leather boots. Oh, those are his rubber ones. He had rubber or leather boots. And he'd wear that cap. That's the hunting cap that he's wearing. And he walked with a cane. He loved shard. He'd go out in the field and pick shard. And he would go home. He'd know he'd spent the day at Green Gnomes all day, and he'd have to go see Helen. So he'd say, I'll take her a little shard. He'd go out in the field and... I remember he went out once, and it was so muddy that he got stuck in the field. He was leaning on his cane, and he had his foot pulled out of his foot. His foot was like this. I wet my pants. I was laughing so hard. Let me compose myself. And I said, Mr. Weller, I'm coming. Somebody help me. Somebody help me. Somebody help me.

[51:04]

I forgot that. Anyway. I pulled myself together. I was screaming with laughter. I thought, I'll never make it out there, too. And it was hard making it. I thought the bud was going to pull me down, but I kept moving. Pulled his boot out and put it on his foot. He said, that was terrible. Stumped off with a chair. Oh, God. He tied the dog. Totally stuck. Anyway. When he was the little boy, he was here. That's his great-grandson, George's great-grandson. The way it goes is Turo, George's stepson, who built Hope's Cottage, had four children. Anyway, those children are my age. And then their children are... Actually, they're a little younger than I am.

[52:04]

Their children are... Piers of Elisa's. So their children are George Wheelwright's great-grandchildren, and they're in Tan Valley School together. So the family's been around for a couple of generations. They were Hope's children? They were on Hope's side, yeah. They were not really George's blood. Their matriarch is Hope Wheelwright. So, yeah. I was going to ask, you mentioned last week that Zendo was a barn. It was a barn that was here beforehand. But George kept it as a hay barn. And underneath, in the lower barn where you all are, there were cow stalls. So the hay chutes would open up and the hay would drop down to the cattle underneath. Yeah, when we came, it was a very rough hay barn. And we repaired it. And you have to ask Peter more about that. He can tell you more about the actual place. They were old stalls. And it was full of harness and, you know, just...

[53:06]

unbelievable amount of junk, window panes. You know, we built the first greenhouse out of old window panes that we found. It was a kind of wonderful structure, kind of ramshackle old thing that you've never seen that we took down in the early 90s, just a sec. And it was just from all the found stuff that we discovered here when we first came. Yeah, Laura? I was just going to ask. Yeah, so we did that, and we always loved it. When we first came, Zen Center was, I think, a group of us. The group that came here was very rough and tumble, very much back to the land, feeling of wanting to meditate hard. It was the height of the Vietnam War. There were a number of people. There were 75 people who were living here when I moved here, which was quite unusual. But there were no guests. There were no guest facilities. This building wasn't built. The guest house wasn't built. The tea house wasn't built. We all lived in the meditation hall in the Gaitan. It was very rough and tumble then. There was no, you know, we didn't make any money.

[54:08]

I think we made $25 a month, each of us, something like that. We worked really hard. We all slept in the Zendo. If you were, I mean, the single people slept in the Zendo, and the newer people slept in the Zendo. Michael Sawyer slept in the Zendo for five years, five or six years. He was, you know, that was his place. The older people got to sleep in rooms, in the stalls, basically, that were converted into rooms. That's what the cloud hall rooms are. There's a lot of memory around that, how it was, how it was set up. There were no facilities in the lower barn. We experimented. We had, I think, a marvelous person who was our teacher at that time, a student of Suzuki Roshi's, Richard Baker, very bold thinker, problematic person. rich, imaginative, creative, iconoclastic thinker himself.

[55:11]

George Wheelwright and he respected each other. They saw each other as, you know, kind of peers. Maybe because they both went to Harvard, I don't know. Anyway, they were... They kind of sniffed each other out and knew there was something there for them. Richard Baker was very interested in learning how to take care of this place and developing it according to... the real political and environmental standards of the times. You know, Earth Day had just started. It's a time of upheaval and change. Back to the land movement was strong. A lot of homesteading going on in California. A lot of pulling away from mainstream society, really questioning. The Zen Center is set in that time, in those years. We did a lot of pilot projects for the Office of Alternative Energy. We had a windmill. We experimented with wind power. We experimented with composting toilets. We experimented with a number of alternative technologies to see if they would work.

[56:18]

What happened to this? Well, I'm hoping that when Peter comes, we'll talk, you'll ask him then, ask him a little bit more about that. Because I want to talk to you more about the people, if you can bear it, if you can bear more of that from me. We, as I told you, we cultivated with horses. We kept chickens, we kept cows. The idea was that we would be self-sufficient. We would not join the mainstream. You know, from the very beginning, this is in honor of the people who are hoping to listen to this tape, from the very beginning we kept our finger on the covenant of this place, which is to keep the doors open to the public and to meet the public and to take care of the public. So we were... Hellbound, having a really good meditation place, and also having a working organic farm, because that was part of the covenant. Part of our outreach was to create and grow beautiful food for ourselves and for others. This was before Green's Restaurant, before the bakery, before a lot of the businesses that Sun Center is now famous for.

[57:20]

In the early 70s, we wanted to have this farm. And I think a number of people came here to kind of escape from modern society and to have a kind of homesteading alternative, primarily urban people. I've often thought that the way the population shifts down at Zen Center is very much like the national population with about 2% to 5%. Mimi and I were talking about this the other day, right? About 2% to 5% of the people actually understanding how to farm and understanding something about agriculture. That's about what the percentage has been at Zen Center. You know, some very strong people have gone through. Peter and I worked with a man named Steve Stuckey, who's a priest at Zen Center, continues to be, now makes his life as a landscape contractor, was raised as a... by a Mennonite family, very strong Mennonite family, knew a lot about farming, was the primary farm person at Greenwald Sheep. He was responsible, he was a student who came here, was responsible for really, became responsible for training us and introducing us to farming. Very good man. His father disowned him when he ordained.

[58:21]

It was a very big, you know, his father always hoped he'd be a Mennonite preacher or that he would be involved in the Mennonite religion, wouldn't speak to him. They've since regained or restored relations, but it was a very heavy time. A lot of people were quite unhappy with us that we were living here, not going to college. A number of students dropped out. The joke was that if you went to Reed, you'd drop out in the last quarter of the last semester, which is what Laila and Jim Bacchus did and the many other people who came through here. Some of the best students at Zen Center came from Reed College in the last hours of their, you know, arduous travel through that institution. It was like the joke. They would come in the last semester and Never go back. They end up being at Zen Center. People were being drafted. These were dangerous times. Many of us wondered if we could live in this culture. I just got the shakes just thinking about it. For me, it was a big question. Does Zen practice stay connected with the world? The teacher, I think one reason that I stayed at Zen Center in those years was because of the teacher.

[59:23]

Richard Baker really did make an effort. He was involved in international relations in Russia, going over and trying to work as a peacemaker, you know, a bridge person between Americans and Russians, you know, was very active in nuclear politics and trying to protect him as a worldly person, a very worldly person, which was one of the faults that got in his way, I think. For some people, a meditation life couldn't be that expansive. But the Thakistan Center has always had extraordinary properties. that we've taken care of, and complex properties that demand a rich mosaic of talent. And we drew from an incredible pool. I want you to understand, in the early 70s, we had a carpentry crew, 15 people who were incredible carpenters. They built this place. They lived here. There were 10 students. They trained under Master Carpenter Paul Disco, who was a student of Suzuki Roshi's. Practiced temple carpentry in Japan for five years. Michael Sawyer was one of the carpenters. Ken Sawyer, his brother, who will do the student housing. Marvelous, marvelous human being.

[60:24]

Sawyer brothers are incredible. They're sons of a carpenter, a great carpenter in British Columbia. Before Michael had his Parkinson's diagnosis, he worked, a brilliant carpenter, really good in Japanese joinery. He studied Japanese joinery and made this building. So there were about 10 carpenters, and they weren't all men. They were mostly men. There were two women who worked in the crew. hard on them, but they did it. And they were journeymen carpenters, or journeymen and women carpenters. They went around to the different parts of Zen Center. They helped build Tassajara. They helped build this place. They helped build the city center. They built Green's Restaurant. They did the flooring. They did a lot of that work. We knew how to do a lot of work in the first year. And we drew people who were heavy workers. A lot of physical skills. We dug ditches. We packed a lot of manure from here to there. We've gotten, our complexion has changed as a community in the last years, you know, in the last couple of decades, in the last decade. We used to be much more physically minded in those first years. And we worked hard and everybody practiced.

[61:26]

We were young. Our children hadn't been born yet. It was pretty much the people that are now 25 years, you know, you're senior in their 50s. Many of us lived at Zen Center in those early years and were helped create the dream and stayed on. There have been a lot of people who have gone through since. To have a place where the public would be welcome, where meditation would always be central, and it still is. I would never say anything other. And to have that place include a working organic farm where we grew our food and offered that food to hungry people and offered it to a restaurant and offered what we know about farming and meditation to the public was always a dream of the place. And to do the work ourselves. and to train other people to do the work and to live lightly on the land, all those great values that for some aging hippies are still primary ones. They still fire us up when we think about it. What do you think the shift has been to? I think the shift has been to more urban population, more intellectual.

[62:31]

People have had to, you know, we're not drawing such skilled physical workers. They've gone on to start their own businesses. Ken has his own. Peter Vandersteer, they have their own carpentry businesses. Frank Kilmers and Ted Howell are plumbers. They trained at Zen Center. The people who are really involved in physical work have gone out and are now doing it in the world. Steve Stuckey, great landscape architect. You know, he's out there making gardens. A lot of the farmers and gardeners who've been through here are out starting projects. I've got the shakes just bringing this up because this is really my tribe, you know, and it's... Interesting. We were not, there weren't so many people working in offices. There were no computers. There were no computers anyway, but we weren't, you know, everybody did communal work. Every morning we went out in the fields from May until every day. Not just, you know, every day. We went out from 5.30 in the morning until breakfast. You know, that's wrong. We got up earlier. We meditated from 3.40 until 5.30. Yeah.

[63:32]

Then we'd go into the cloud hall. We'd have a snack. out there in Cloud Hall. We'd have hot zucchini, but we had a lot of, I am made of zucchini bread. I'm living testimony. More zucchini bread. I got, so I could smell, when I could smell the smoke, the steam coming from the vents, I'd know it's zucchini bread, I can tell. Or biscuits, you know, we'd have hot biscuits and tea, stand around stamping in our dirty, muddy boots. It was, you know, a boot that she was on kind of place. I don't know what slicker. It used to be funky. We were up in the upper barn, you know, stamping our feet, drinking our tea. The bell would ring. We'd all go down to the fields. We worked for an hour and a half. We brought in, sometimes we'd bring in five, five-yard trucks of manure a day. We, David, you know, we worked really hard. We built this place. And then in the 80s, when the whole shakedown happened with Baker Oshie, we retreated, I think. This is just my take, probably. I don't even like to have it on record. Okay.

[64:33]

Oh, never mind. It's just my dad. You know, and that, it's okay. I won't censor myself. I won't censor, you know. It's just, we worked really, we worked really hard. And in the mid-80s, we suffered because we, you know, the place was restructured, was reorganized. And Baker, she'd gotten way too big for his, you know, his vision was huge and his empire was huge. And it depended on a lot of us working really hard to support it. And when it fell apart, It was rough. A lot of people left. We began to search our souls and really ask ourselves, what are we doing? What's the primary purpose of what we're doing? And Sand Center was built back then. Certainly Green North was built. The infrastructure was here. And we have not built anything since then. Think of that. It's wild. Because I came here as part... We were building all the time. So I think it's extremely significant that we're building... I mean, we can't even cover the deck. They would have covered that deck over the pool in two weeks.

[65:35]

I mean, that's nothing. We're building this building. But we've kind of put a moratorium on developing, and we've turned a lot inward. And we've created the guest program, which was built during those years. We developed the guest program really well. But in fact, we've not innovated. We've not upgraded. We've not taken care of the place. And that's changing. It's been changing for the last five years, I think. So that was nine years? Yeah. It was a real, like, I think of it sometimes like Sleeping Beauty, you know? Like the briars grew over the place and we turned in. We didn't go to sleep, but we turned in. 1983. That's another story, and I'm very happy to tell you my impressions if you're interested. He, I am... will always be a student of Richard Baker's. I learned a tremendous amount from him. I was treated very well by him, with a great deal of respect. I'm very grateful to what I learned with him.

[66:39]

I think it's very significant that I learned so much from an American teacher. It meant a lot to me. I thought he was smart and deep and kind of nutty, too. My impressions of him are very strong, but he made possible for me a very rich environment. You know, that we would create Lindisfarne Hall so that these scholars and thinkers, great scholars and thinkers of the 20th century, could meet together, could have a place to meet, was very important. And who are the Lindisfarne Fellows? Do you want to know who they are? You probably know. Some of you may know. You can help me calling out their names. In the early 1980s, this hall, Wheelwright Center, dedicated to George Wheelwright and Hope Wheelwright, was built, largely financed by Charlotte Silver, her generosity to help have a place where sensory awareness could be practiced and where people could meet. We deliberately made the hall small so that groups of 25 to 50 would be the maximum numbers. We never wanted to exceed the carrying capacity of this valley. At the same time, there were a group of scholars meeting and thinking, and they said, we're going to need to think boldly about what's ahead for our culture.

[67:44]

Included among them, Sin Vanderen, Richard Baker, Brother David Stendhal-Rost, William Rowan Thompson, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Keith Critchlow. Help me, those of you who know. I wish Peter were here. Kathleen Rain, the National Poet of England. Hazel Henderson. Paul Hawken. And they met in this room to think together. And they designed Lindisfarne Hall so there'd be a place where they could think about our culture. And they would come and meet. And you know what the original idea was of Lindisfarne Hall? What is that? Lindisfarne Hall is the guesthouse. Lindisfarne is an island off of the coast of Scotland, which was a monastic community where scholars and monastics got together and dreamed of, you know, culture, dreamed of plant culture. Is it part of that time? No, it's an old monastic culture, Lindisfarne, L-I-N-D-I-S-F-A-R-N-E, Lindisfarne.

[68:50]

Their idea was to meet here for one month out of the year, probably in June. And they would come, and they would live in that hall. And when they weren't living here, the hall was originally designed as a place for people to come and be guests, but also the student housing. Students would live over there. Students would live for a period of time, and guests would also live there. It was just a way to increase the vision. it became clear that we needed to build a good financial base and that Greenbelt was a great place for people to come. And because of the success of Tassajara, by the early 80s, in the beginning of the 80s, we converted it to a place for guests. Tassajara was actually 10 years old? Yeah, Tassajara was thumping. I understand what's the income outcomes of the guest house. We say that, but you have to remember that the reason the guest house is successful is because of... because of the whole place, because of the meditation on the farm, because of the whole life. So it may be, but I sometimes feel that that's extracted from the wealth and beauty of the whole place.

[69:56]

We were terrific. We were 100% unsustainable under Richard Baker's tenure. He was an entrepreneur, a risk taker, a very bold thinker. He was kind of wild. He did crazy things like welcoming Harry Roberts, a Yurok Indian, a shaman. to live here and teach us, calling and beseeching Alan Chadwick to come home and help us, to help to come to us here in the last years of his life, last year of his life, and making the whole fleet of rooms underneath this room be available for Alan Chadwick so that he could die here. He had a great vision, and it took a lot of people working hard, a little team of Oompa Loompas working hard to keep the fire going so that this vision could keep up. You know, he had a vision of creating a restaurant where people from all over the world could meet and they'd be fed vegetarian cuisine. We may think that's pretty ordinary, but it was not ordinary in the 70s. And to be awarded the contract from Fort Mason to be the restaurant of Fort Mason and have it be a vegetarian restaurant.

[71:04]

People from all over the world, when they come there, they can't get a hamburger. Are you kidding? Zen Center was really trusted, you know, and known for quality. I think it's remarkable. And you think now, how many vegetarian restaurants are there in the city? There's a lot of little ones. But on that scale, you know, in that order and magnitude, and the dream was always to have the farm fit and produce the food and to have the restaurant be a model place with model bathrooms. I mean, jokingly, Richard Baker would say, well, she's doing this and he's doing that and he's thinking about this part of it and I'm responsible for the bathrooms. But he was modeling. We had... six different kinds of composting toilets or low-flush toilets in that restaurant when it first opened in the 70s. Yeah, to show different ways. One of them included a very amazing toilet where you would flush and the water would come up from a spigot and you'd wash your hands before it went down to flush. That one we got rid of right away as soon as they got rid of. Because people thought it was weird. What, I'm washing my hands in toilet water?

[72:05]

I didn't get the principle even though we had descriptions. I mean, we looked at it as an opportunity to teach. Give me a better sense of why some of us have stayed at Sun Center. It's really modernized now. Isn't it wild, Sunshine? Can you believe it? There's some weird stuff in the bathroom. I don't know. To Greens? I don't know. Maybe so. I think so. I think so. Ask Emola. They serve a good salad. Yeah. Great. Great reference. So think of it. You know, our carpenter crew built that place, did the work. We had an incredible place. And so the guest house was, Lindisfarne Hall was designed by the Lindisfarne Fellows. They made that design, and they collaborated on its execution, and then the Zen Center carpenters built the house. That's impressive. Why did such a potent ecological consciousness not... Wain? Why did it wain?

[73:07]

I don't know. I don't know, except that I think it's, you know, partially the commitment behind that, the drive behind that. I mean, we had, we were one of the only licensed facilities in the state of California that was licensed. We were licensed to do experiments with composting privies. It was in the 70s. They were miserable experiments. I could, you know... We'd be under the table screaming at laughter if I told you some of those things. The urine, the urine brigade. I mean, we did all kinds of incredible things with composting toilets and with the horses and with alternative energy, with wind energy. You know, it took a lot to power that, and eventually people got sick of it. It was so much work. And I think there was a reaction, kind of a lash, to that kind of I don't want to say global because it isn't global, but that kind of expanded consciousness. And people started saying, hey, we're really here to study Zen, not to do all of this other stuff. So we reacted and came in a lot closer, I think a lot tighter than we ever meant to be.

[74:12]

And now I think there's some willingness to filter out. And a lot of it is led by those of us who practiced in the 1970s and remember how it was and are still committed to that vision, the vision that includes a broad-based ecological vision. presence and awareness. Yeah. How does the new building and new development fit in with the whatever that was that was something that there would be value in the development? I think what you have to realize, and I heard Pat explain this really beautifully the other day, and that is that no new housing is being created. Old housing is going to be taken down. So we're not increasing. We're replacing. We're replacing the funky trailers that we pulled in here. And we got a little funky in here during the 70s and 80s so that we could sustain the population of people who wanted to work and build the place. And so that we could also take care of our children because babies started being born.

[75:17]

You know, suddenly people were popping around with babies inside of them. And, you know, I mean, within a period of... The abbot of Zen Center, Richard Baker, and actually his child came later, Lisa, right around her time. No, that's wrong. No, I'm spacing. Anyway, during the 70s, late 70s, Reb and Russo had a child. We all lived here. Reb and Russo, Peter and I, Richard Baker and Jenny Baker, Norman and Kathy. And, you know, that's the Abbot of Zen Center and the Tonto, Rebus Tonto then. And, you know, people that were working on the farm, people that were working, and Norman did everything. He did all different kinds of stuff. He was working on the farm, too. Susie Clymer, just students who'd practiced and lived together for so many years, began to have children together, too.

[76:19]

And so that upped the ante and changed the housing situation significantly. It also represented a kind of... grounding in the community. A lot of questions coming up about, well, are we a land-based community or are we a meditation practice place? So that's another topic. But I tell you, they have been challenging, rich, provocative years. We've learned a lot from that experience. And always the assumption was we are not a community, we're a practice place. We don't want to have, this is not a home, this is not your home. Richard Baker was one of the strongest people to say that, and yet there was also a kind of groundedness that came from being at home in the place, although that was always considered attachment, something you didn't want to do. So I still feel like a guest here, no doubt about it. And it's interesting. I mean, we all practiced in a very similar way.

[77:22]

Even when we had children, we were expected to go to every period of meditation. One person went around and looked in on the babies in the morning while we meditated. It was a terrible time for me. I was exhausted from being up all night nursing. It felt really strange to leave my child. I knew perfectly well how to sit. I could have sat. You know, I love to sit. I could have sat like a rock at home. It would have been much better for me. I felt like I was going against my nature. And I could hear my kids scream. Child Watch was, there were a lot of kids here. So Child Watch would go down and look in on Jesse. We lived in the trailer where Jordan lives. Look in at Jesse. And always the Child Watch would trip on the porch and wake him up by the flashlight shining in the cradle. Meanwhile, they'd be walking in walking meditation style up to the bullpens where Arlene and Dagon lived. Now to look in at Stephen, Leah's baby Hannah. And then they would go down to look in and They didn't have to look in at Kea because Russel was at home. But, you know, that was a long time in between them.

[78:25]

And then what happens if the baby's crying anyway? They're going to come get you in the zen there, but we never missed a period of time. And now and then we took our turn doing child watch. So it was intense. Children were always somewhat of second-class citizen hearing. Well, evidences of attachment, you know, although people loved them. Most people here didn't really want to have kids, so it was kind of an interesting time. It's just my take. You have somebody else and you'd hear a whole different story. But it was, you know, they were intense years. We were building this place and trying to learn more about each other. I want to tell you a little bit about the teachers and then about the outreach. And we had two primary teachers in our years. When Zen Center started, In 1971, Richard Baker was very good friends with Professor Paul Lee, Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Great teacher.

[79:26]

He spoke here last summer. Remember, Laura? He had everybody falling on their backs. He's a wonderful, wonderful teacher. Anyway, Paul Lee was a very strong fan and devoted supporter of Alan Chadwick, who helped establish the UCSC Farm and Garden Project. And Alan Chadwick eventually wore out the University of California. He was booted out of the University of California and made his way slowly and irrevocably up the coast of California. And Paul Lee directed him to Richard Baker, directed him to here. So he came here in 1971 and helped set up the original gardens. 71? I think it was 73. Where is Suzuki Roshi? Suzuki Roshi was dead by the time Greenwatch was purchased. Okay. He died in 1971. He never saw Greenwatch. He died in the winter, on December 4th, as you know. And Green Gaunt was purchased in the next spring, 1972. So Alan Chadwick came here, and he proceeded to create extraordinary gardens.

[80:29]

In the upper Spring Valley, never would build a garden on the flatland. With fear of gardening where we're gardening now. Only wanted to build on hillside, as you'll see when we go to UCSC. Set up the gardens here, and had a strong core of apprentices who worked with him. was a pretty amazing gardening teacher and stayed until about 1973, at which point I think it became clear to him that he wasn't going to make it here because the vision was just too different. And he chose, with common accord and good understanding, he decided to move on and did move on and worked his way up the coast of California, continuing to... to found and establish the Round Valley Garden Project, one of its greatest projects, actually, up in Covalho. Not a sign of it left. Beautiful, extraordinary, amazing garden. We went up to visit it. I've never seen a garden like that. He had about 50 apprentices working there with him.

[81:34]

He was by then a legendary figure, a marvelous teacher. I'll give you a peek at that. British. I'll tell you about him. I'm really a student of Alan, so I owe you. I'm going to torture you with my writing about Alan. Not right now. You need to understand the way the routing went. He was here to teach us gardening, but he taught much more than gardening. He was a great theatrical person, Shakespearean actor, and a person who had a sense of the regeneration of culture happening through young people working the ground because of what he believed in. He had a strong effect on this community, a very fundamental effect. The other person who had a very strong effect was Harry Roberts. Harry Roberts was a Yurok shaman.

[82:35]

He was a good friend of Yvonne Rand's. He was introduced to Zen Center by Yvonne and began to live with us. He lived here, he moved here in 1975, and he lived in the TV room, part Yurok shaman, part Irishman, helped to pretty much single-handedly establish the native plant section of the University of California, Berkeley, knew a tremendous amount about native plants and native culture, having been raised by Robert Spot, who was Kroeber's main informant, those of you that know a little bit about anthropology, great anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, had one primary informant, Robert Spot, who was a Yurok shaman, great medicine man and teacher in the Northwest Coast. Robert Spot was Harry's adopted uncle or his mentor. So Harry knew a lot about Native practices. In the group of people that were living here,

[83:38]

In this group of Zen students, people studied with Harry very closely. He was like a shaman within the ranks. And I think both Harry and Alan taught Zen in their particular distinct way. And they were affected by our life here, even though they weren't Zen practitioners. They were respectful and interested. And the Zen students that worked with them were some of the finest Zen students at Zen Zen during that time. The young men that worked with Harry were pretty amazing, and he bought Rand. Harry would take Yvonne Rand and her family into the mountains around the Smith River for what he called a camping trip for a month out of every summer, where they had just lived in the woods, and they learned about the plants and the animals in the river. And we were blessed with the opportunity to study with him. So I'm the product of both of these teachers. They unloaded on me a lot, and I did a lot of work for them, particularly Harry, whom I was really close to. But I think of myself as a primary student of Alan Chadwick's. because it was really his philosophy and his vision of the garden that affected me the most strongly.

[84:42]

Although I think my interest in the natural world and the garden evolving out of the natural world and in connection with the natural world really does belong to my connection with this Europe, medicine man. He was wild. Harry Roberts was wild. He loved to make trouble. He was very naughty. Both of them were naughty. Alan was grandly naughty and disrespectful and irreverent. They were both... Irreverent and reverent at the same time. An interesting combination. Have you seen? I have Harry too. No, they're both dead. 1981, a year after Alan. They've been dead 15 years. Three, two years. Appreciate it. I'm happy to release. This is called Gardening for 500 Years. So I've had two great gardening teachers in my life, Harry Roberts and Alan Chadwick, both of them raw and ragged prophets, both of them now dead.

[85:44]

I say they're dead, but sometimes I wonder, even though I helped bury the ashes of both of my teachers, are they really dead? They were dead. In January, when I'm thinning the crowded spurs of the espalier apples alone in the orchard, I still hear Alan hiss over my right shoulder, not... That spur sausage. Take the whizzicky one growing into the tree. Obey the apples. Often it seems to me that my teachers are more alive than ever. I'm not the kind of person who seeks a teacher to complete myself or to learn a craft or to deepen my knowledge. Quite the opposite. I run away from teachers. The more they know, the faster I sprint. I smell them from a mile off, catch their seductive whiff, especially when they pour out their unctuous syrup of distilled truth to lure hungry people to the table. Harry and Ellen never taught me anything. They never gave me anything. They were not prospecting for students, and yet they each showed me unabashedly and distinctly a fierce love and uncompromised passion for the natural world in spite of myself and with a full fuel box of questions.

[86:48]

I followed them in through the garden gate. Okay. Is this okay? It's all right. I first met Harry Roberts in 1976 when Peter and I had just come to Green Gulch. It came in 1975. The place was five years old then. The original handwork garden up in Spring Valley had been begun by Alan in 1972. Alan was a restless renegade, and he had moved on by that time. A wild-eyed maverick, Alan Chadwick, was burning his way up the coast of Northern California, leaving a trail of extraordinary biodynamic gardens in the live ash of his path. In the early years of the sense of the place pulled in a rough harvest... of eccentric artists and thinkers. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I forget that. I've met Harry Roberts early on in my life at Green Gulch. He was a craggy beast of a man walking on aluminum crutches. He had fallen 40 feet from the eucalyptus tree and broken his back when he was a young man.

[87:52]

He was also dealing with brucellosis. that he claimed he caught from digging barehanded in earth laced with live pig manure. Parasites from the pig manure claimed his health, permanently inflaming the joints of his hip and causing him to walk on crutches. Actually, he worked at Cal with a number of people who handled this pig manure, and a number of them died from this disease. He made it through. But he was permanently disabled. That's why he worked from the pig manure. Yeah, brucellosis. nasty disease. He was this kind of rough kind of person. Stuff it in the ground. He'd say to me, Harry, how should I plant? Stuff it in the ground. And if other people got rough with plants, he'd go, how dare you plant that plant like that? Pick it up with reverence. So he was completely unpredictable. He played off with the students. If you were too reverent, just stuff it in the ground. If you were too cavalier, you had to toe the line. He was precise. He insisted that gardeners wear gloves because he nearly dies from brucellosis.

[88:52]

Harry was a good friend of Yvonne Rand, a student of Suzuki Roshi and one of the main teachers at Green Gulch. This is great. He was a good friend of Yvonne Rand. She was a student of Suzuki Roshi and one of the primary teachers. She brought him here, felt that we'd learn from him. We sure did. In the late 1920s, Harry had run cattle for the ranchers of West Marin. When we started to work together, Harry told me that when he first saw the Green Gulch Valley in 1927, with the unchanneled creek meandering in slow serpentine loops along the valley floor, he thought that Green Gulch was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen in his life. And he was a wilderness man, so he made an incredible impression. He never forgot it. Harry was raised at the mouth of the Klamath River in the tiny village of Recall. He was part Native American, part Irishman. Harry's mother was a legend in Del Norte County. As a young woman, she met and married Harry's father, who ran a fish cannery at the mouth of the river.

[89:57]

Harry worked with his father, learning the fishing trade, but early in his life was adopted by Robert Spott, a high-medicine man of Yurok culture who became Harry's uncle or main teacher. So Harry's primary lineage line ran with the old blood of the Yurok nation. So I'll hear a little bit about him. Harry was a hardworking man with a passion for the plants and animals of Northern California. He was well-trained in the Yurok tradition and in the lineage of hard, honest labor. He knew how to work, and he worked hard. He was a master fisherman and lumberjack, a trained horticulturalist, and a nurseryman who helped establish the native plant section of the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley. Harry was a welder and a machinist, a rum runner and a turquoise trader. and a person with an equal passion for cooking and for embroidering fine tea towels. He was also a cowboy and an inventor. During World War II, Harry collected spider webs to be used in the creation of precision instruments and gun sights. He was also once Ginger Rogers' dancing partner.

[90:59]

Loved women, ooh. All types. It's a renegade. Harry's name role at Green Goats was to help us slow down enough to see the land that we... ...culture. And he was intent on helping us develop our practical worldly skills, especially as they related to the craft of farming and gardening at Zen Center. Whenever you do something, anything at all, Harry used to say with an old drum, tobacco cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Make sure you ask yourself these questions. What do you want... How much does it cost? And are you willing to pay the price? Once you can answer these questions, get to work. So what do you want? How much does it cost? And am I willing to pay the price? So it was wonderful to work with him. Every Sunday afternoon we had a session where he'd come down to the garden. We'd go in through the gate and he'd stump along in his crutches and we'd go sit in the Orpal Circle.

[92:03]

And he would just reminisce. He would study. Somebody would bring him a plant and ask him, how did this get like that? And he would just associate and tell us. We had these wonderful studies. We would sometimes go. He had a truck called Buttercup. It was a yellow Ford truck, rumbly old beast. And we'd go up on the headlands in the truck because he couldn't walk. And all along the way, he'd have us sitting in the back of the truck and calling out all the names of the native plants. This was our training. Can you believe that? Zen students were trained with this kook. And so the abbot of Zen Center thought, this guy is a great, you know, he's a great teacher. And we should train with him. We trained not only with Harry, we also trained with a refined, renegade tea master, Nakamura sensei, Mrs. Nakamura, who, you know, was incredible. She was discovered by Gary Snyder because she was living in the attic of the house that he rented in Japan. What? Who was this old lady up there practicing tea? She'd left her husband after she raised her children.

[93:04]

She left her husband, that's that, I've had enough of this. He was a banker, very prominent banker in Japan. She left him to study tape. She was up there in the attic, very aristocratic woman. Gary Snyder said, what's going on here? Took her under his wing, introduced her to the Zen beatniks who were interested in Zen. And she somehow connected with the Baker family and came here and lived in their house, which is the ranch house. Lived in the back part of that house. and practiced tea and taught tea. There was quite a collection of people, and we were expected. Those of us who were serious about Zen were expected to work with Hare and expected to work with Nakamura Sen, so we worked with some weirdos, you know, with some long shots. They're great teachers. So, I'll have to hear more. Anyway, he was terrific, and we met every Sunday, and studied with him.

[94:04]

And he taught us a lot about how to see a land. He talked about having a vision that would last for 500 years. When you look at a piece of land, imagine not how it's going to be in your lifetime, but how it might be over 500 years, how you take care of it. So he thought long thoughts. He dreamed long thoughts. And he often talked about being green-gulched. Don't be green-gulched, he'd say. Don't be caught up in the present moment only, but live and think for the long haul. live and think in a broad, bold way. And he taught us a lot, a lot of physical skills. He was really good. He died of pneumonia, I don't know, probably from smoking too much or some, I don't know, he was sick for quite a while. He died, pretty resolute, you know, resolved life. In 1981, in March, he died down at Yvonne's house where he eventually had to leave Green Gulch and he moved down to Yvonne's. He was responsible for helping to set up Arbor Day. He and George Wheelwright did the addresses for Arbor Day for many years.

[95:08]

They talked a lot about the planting. I miss it. I mean, I never worked on an Arbor Day without planting with George and Harry and Alan. Alan, no. George and Harry. So there was a tradition of taking care of the place that was passed on to those of us who happened to be in that place. Always an understanding that people who studied farming would be studying Zen. You wouldn't do either or. But at the same time, we developed, because of our connection in the wider community, we developed a very lively place in the non-profit sector. I mean, think of, if I say to you 2 to 5% of the farmers, 2 to 5% of the population of Zen Center is interested in farming, really interested in farming, in organic horticulture and agriculture, then about... 1% of that population, or maybe 1% to 5% of that population, people interested in farming, this is on the national level, are doing it in the nonprofit sector.

[96:14]

And you're going to meet a lot of them this summer. You're going to meet people that are doing nonprofit farming. Because what distinguishes us is we're involved in teaching, in outreach, in growing food, not only for financial profit, but also to teach the craft of growing food. And we are, most important of all, we are endowed and supported and, you know, suckered by the wider community that want us to do this kind of thing. And it's our job. So to use that status well is also part of our Zen training. Because we're farming in a Zen center, we're expected to also teach farming and to demonstrate ecological farming and to offer it to the wider community to give back. And that's part of our practice. It's part of the covenant of being able to be in this place. Am I haranguing you? Okay.

[97:18]

It's a radical dream, don't you think? It's a radical dream. From the very beginning, we've had a sense of service. And this is really for Rachel and the development office, I promised her. Poor thing, she's had to listen for two hours. But from the very beginning, I worked, I remember when I was first here in 1975, working with the California Corps for the Handicapped, working with handicapped children. And they'd come down the road with their crutches and canes and walkers and wheelchairs. They were mentally and physically handicapped. There were some very out there kids. I remember they were looking at me and they would look at me like, who are you? They'd look at me like, and I was supposed to work with them. I wonder, how are we going to do this? They were hardly standing up. They were teetering around 1975. They came every week. I looked forward all week to working with these kids. And they would fall on the beds and on the plants and pull out a few weeds. And they loved it. They'd eat the earth, and we'd have to pull them out of the earth.

[98:20]

Stop eating the earth. We want you to cultivate the earth. Don't eat it. And I remember introducing them to Sea Dog, our dog. And I'm saying, she's a watchdog. And one little kid said, where's her clock? We'll never forget that. She's looking at her legs. I don't see her clock. It was wild. It was wild working with those kids. And we worked with, you know, inner city kids. I remember Baker Oshie bringing kids from the Page Street neighborhood and saying, we're open, you know, we're open to you. We want you to see where we live, you know, being very, show them around, treat them really well. These are kids from the Page Street neighborhood. Well, when we weren't looking, they went in the gaitan rooms and cleaned us out of everybody's wallets had been scoured after that tour. So we got a little savvy. We thought, that's not helping the kids. leaving our stuff around like that. We trained Catherine Sneed from the San Francisco jail project. She said, can I come here and receive training?

[99:22]

We said, you bet. She lived in the lower barn, unheard of. She came and talked to, um, the lower barn is, uh, you know, down where you guys were, there were offices down there. It was funky. She lived in the farm office, which used to be in the lower barn, right about where the library is now, where you're living. Uh, she lived in that, in the little office and, um, You know, she grew up in the Page Street neighborhood. You know, she knew ghetto life inside out. Nobody was pulling any wool over her eyes. She wanted to learn farming so she could work at the jail. Well, we gave her a place. And she was one of, that was very unusual because everybody had to be interested in Zen or they couldn't come here. Kathy was showing us what the real world was. So from the very first, we've had a quite strong relationship with her, you know, which is deep into true friendship. We've been through a lot together. She and I worked together for six months, and then she went on to UCSC where she got some really good training. We also did a lot of work with school groups.

[100:22]

We helped set up gardens at Laguna Honda Hospital, a garden for the handicapped. We did a number of AIDS gardens. We worked with Eson, setting up a garden at Hartford Street, those of us going over on our day off to help cultivate that garden and get it. in good shape, because that was Zen in action. That was what you do, of course, because we know how to. We've been blessed with the opportunity to sit still, to listen to the wind, to learn from this land, and then people are asking us to show them. We're not going to do that. Of course we're going to do it. We've set up a number of projects involved with the urban school, with McAteer High School, with a number of other alternative and mainstream high schools, working with high school students, teaching them organic horticulture so that they can go out and develop it. We've been for years working on the front lines doing gleaning, offering our fields as one of the many pastures for gleaning. That's what Janet Brown, our great friend from the All-Star Organics Farm, is doing now, bringing groups of wealthy kids to glean for children who aren't as fortunate.

[101:29]

That means they go through and we've picked over our chard and there's still some chard leaves. The wealthy kids, we call them the beamer gleaners because they come in beamers. So they come and they park their Beamers and work with us all day. And they harvest a thousand pounds of chard for soup kitchens. And their lives begin to open up in a different way. Yeah, they're happening all around you. They're primary. So... I want you to know this because it's really important. You know, we've always had a sense if we're going to grow for Green's Restaurant and we used to provide for Chez Panisse Restaurant, then we're also going to be delivering to Martin de Perra Soup Kitchen. We're going to be delivering to the Mission. We're going to be delivering to the Marin County Food Bank. We're going to be working in the jail. We're going to be getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plants away to the jail. Without a doubt. Yeah. We provide a lot of plants and a lot of expertise for setting up school gardens. You know, the Martin Luther King Jr. High School garden. Peter and I are both on the advisory board, helping with that garden, helping with those projects, helping, you know, just sharing what we know.

[102:37]

Welcome. You can have a chair. I think a little. Just, just, uh, put a little bit to wherever you choose. Yeah. I think so. We haven't preached birthed kitchen since we've gleaned probably six weeks ago. Just because we gleaned and everything's gone. Yeah. But you know, it's hard to keep your hand and heart going with farming and also to maintain... schedule on the life you know and it takes in order to have the place run really well you do have to have people who are dedicated to the craft of farming as their practice here comes one of them sorry honey you didn't make it though you didn't make it yeah well you didn't make it to the game oh you didn't make it to that dedication no it didn't work to try not yeah that's true it's been really hard so i can tell you

[103:44]

but it's been hard and it's also been rich. So maybe you'll tell a little bit about, you know, we've talked a whole lot about Alan and Harry. I need to tell them more about Alan. I haven't told them so much about practicing with Alan. But I promised everybody that you'd talk a little bit about the original vision of the farm and what it was like working with the horses and with the animals and maybe some of the stuff about... the Dalai Lama's comments and what it's been like to practice, to have your primary practice be farming and not formal Zen. And, you know, just anything you want to convey to this wonderful group of brand new students. So let's introduce ourselves. This is Peter Rudnick, who's been here since 1975 and worked on the farm, worked in the fields in the farm for close to 20 years, up until... about a year ago, when after, you know, long, much too long, a series of meetings, it was decided that it's best now to rotate and have some, you know, changeover.

[104:51]

So Peter's now working, doing other stuff in the county, helping set up, he was working with Catherine Snead at the jail, and two days a week, working with prisoners, and on the front lines in the city, and also helping set up a project, a great project, and one of the oldest... Catholic, the oldest high school in California, San Domenico, K through 12th grade Catholic school in San Anselmo. He's helping set up a farming and gardening project, which includes a whole composting system. And working, he's an elected member of the Muir Beach Community Services District. He got the most votes, I'm happy to say. And he's considered a moderate, which is very cool. on that in the outside world, which is nice, not so moderate attempt center. Also a member of the Marin County Food Policy Commission, the treasurer of that group, looking at organic, how organics, I don't know what the Food Policy Commission is, but something, they do some good work.

[105:56]

And, you know, a very experienced farmer has done a lot of work, particularly with potatoes and compost. You know, we studied compost really deeply. So welcome. Really happy. So what was the question you were going to introduce? Yeah. I'll let everybody say a tiny bit. You know, their name and where you've come from would be great. My name is Ann, and I'm a volunteer. I'm not an apprentice, but I live in the city. I see. She's particularly interested in the farm, so she's been coming out to volunteer in the farm. I think maybe I've seen you around. You have been around a bit. Yeah, the last couple weeks, yeah. I'm such a child. Where I've come from, I was just spending the weekend at home outside of Willett's, walking above the Douglas Bird and redwood stumps left in the ashes and feeling the spirit of those trees and

[107:04]

And the huckleberries that still grow underneath them are now taller than the trees. Sanchez lived in that watershed, was born there. You work on the farm out there? Yeah. I guess Jeff and Allison also do. I'm Todd. I'm an apprentice. Here on the phone. Great phone. I was raised in Illinois, Rochester, Illinois. I'm Matthew. I've been in Boulder, Colorado, for the past few years. I've been in Brooklyn for the past few years. Well, what's your story?

[108:08]

My story is going to remind you. Well, my next meeting. My teacher... Baby. ...ever taught me about what's going to be. That's why we... It's your ticket. David Petrie. We love David Petrie. Yeah, so that's how I heard about being not seven years ago when I started being important. Texts us after he came from UCSF here. You too. What do you also do? You too. Great, experienced person. Oh. Thanks. Sure. Nora. Here. I grew up in New Hampshire. Oh, New Hampshire, yeah.

[109:10]

Oh, Laura. I know that. Even though you're... Wait, are you from St. Louis, sir? Yeah. No. So what was the question? Well, the opportunity, you know, we had half an hour sort of just let people know a little bit about the old history of the place, you know. I told them that we used to have cows and chickens and... Of course, but I haven't told them that much about how the land was actually warped. I did talk to them a good bit about how physically based we used to be in the first years, not much physical work we actually did. Talked a little bit about communal work, but it's all for you. I don't know anything about Charlene Mack or any other thing. Well, we've been here since 1972, right? I was lucky enough to come to Zen Center in 72, just when the Zen Center was getting green gulch. And it's really true, and I've been thinking of it lately.

[110:15]

There was a few guys maybe don't work around at the time, but there was a back to the land movement that maybe some child's parents were involved in that. I really identified with. So when I... And I was interested in Zen, at least the idea of Zen. But meditation is not what kept me here. But seeing Greenville for the first time in 1972 was, you know, it was like home. It was just starting. The barn there, the upper, all those rooms were, it was a hayloft. It was a loft. It was just like storage. And for... Well, Wendy and I met Wendy at Tessa Horror, and we came back. We went to 73. So I'll just give you the advice.

[111:16]

I came here, and I lived in the city, and I was volunteering for about a year, and I was asked at that point if I wanted to move to Green Gulch, but I think I made a very good decision, and it's one piece of advice that I... everybody who's interested in the farm and more than than just doing a season you know but if you're really interested in the farm the best thing to do is get familiar with it and then go to Tassahara for a couple years and uh I think that's a good piece of advice that way you get uh see of all of Zen Center and you get some credibility and and uh you know there's a lot of trips Always in your practice, right? But in the beginning, you have things you have to sort out. So I think the identity of the farm, it should be set up that it isn't always relying on first-year people.

[112:17]

First-year apprentices should be within a system that's working. And I think that's what I was trying to do to get a working farm here. So when Wendy and I came back in 75, they had done some work on housing, but they didn't have the nice palatial rooms that are over there now. Those are palatial. In fact, what I remember is the assistant director shared a room with somebody that was, you know, 85. I mean, it was housing. We got $25 a month. We were paying $25 a month. which is more than you get. But that was after two years. That was after two years. And one thing I were able to live on it. And then as things happened, some people were getting more money. And anyway, things worked out. The standard of living, I guess you'd say, increased.

[113:22]

But the housing was the main thing. People always living here in a temporary fashion. A lot of the buildings are bullpens or horseshets that you wouldn't recognize now. The ranch house where we lived was storage, seed storage, grain storage. And then they added on about five times. Part of what they added on was a tea house from Kyoto. Some of the nice Japanese detail sites. a mixed bag. I told the gang a lot about Dikuroshi, about practicing with him, his vision. So you talked about George? Talked about George at length. They know about George and Harriet. They don't know, I didn't say much about the animals, about the original vision of the farm. I left that really for you, what it was like to do that, to work with horses. Yeah, well, yeah, just a little more general thing, and then we can... There was a lot of building going on then.

[114:27]

This building was built in 75. There was really an identity of people really learning a trade. You know, I was asked by the director when I came here if I wanted to be a carpenter or a farmer. And since I don't like straight lines, I don't believe in parallel lines since there's nothing parallel in nature, I became a farmer. Yeah, I think Baker was... So, I mean, it was back to the land movement. We were very idealistic. And culturally, we would do things like sow seeds for the lettuce out on the ground and then thin them. which I guess you call a transplant, right? Yeah.

[115:27]

I mean, that's... We went from there, incredible amount of labor. And we had communal work every day, sometimes up to two hours. And we had livestock. The horses came in 75. At least we had a couple of draft horses. We were against tractors and all that kind of thing. We had an old power wagon like the Dodge here. We basically used it as a tractor. It was like, not the green one. It's the white power wagon. We had one just like that. It was a gift from Stuart Graham. One day, I was here on a Sunday in 1972, and he drove... The international truck was an international, and the Airstream trailer, as Gipta Zone Center.

[116:29]

Where Stuart lives. If you go up the bridge on the way to... The reptiles. Well, I mean, we really had the identity of this being a farm and a working farm then. And I think some of our early failures of just, I mean, it's... You know, it takes time for a bunch of city kids with ideas. There was one, a couple people. Steve Stuckey is a landscape architect, priest, ground wrote kind of guy. He had, his father was a farmer. And so he had... And John Kunit. John Kunit was... And another guy who makes very nice woodwork, makes rocking chairs, things like that.

[117:30]

And they started the farm when I, in 72, things had been worked out by 75, but in 72, there was the Chadwick project over here, and he picked like the worst round at all, right? He told me about that up here in Spring Valley. And then there was the field project, and I got involved in it. in that uh the field project which uh we started an experimental plot in 72 which is in front of the field shed field two and it didn't go all the way up that second field uh we graded it at one point uh well we made a ledge there if you walked up there we used to farm all the way up to the reservoir and it kind of made it a turn but it was a gradual rise up until the hill by the reservoir. We had berries up there, and we had berries crops up there in the second field.

[118:31]

That was, and we deer fenced, something I did a lot of coming out, but we deer fenced the whole 15 acres, and I think we finally got a good system then, the deer fencing, but we did pretty well from the first, but the back of the second field there, that's now the leach field about the windbreak that we planted um is where the deer always got in and we got the park service a couple years ago to drop the fence because the bike trail's coming through and uh so i think that helps on the deer do we grow more of our oh well yeah we grew food there was uh it was more of the uh the norm to say if the farm grew anything, that the kitchen would use it. And that's a good idea, but when we kept bringing all the zucchini to the kitchen at the rutabagas, well, it wasn't a great quantity at rutabagas, but french fried rutabagas are very good.

[119:38]

But zucchini in the kitchen would have to use, and sometimes they're pretty big. And in communal work, I remember, to this day, I don't eat zucchini, but we had communal work. Let's see, communal work, huh? You told them about zucchini bread and communal work? Yeah, what did we have? Two periods of silence and then communal work and then breakfast, right? It's sort of like it is now. So farming-wise, we... We did a lot by hand and the whole community helped. It wasn't so departmental as it is now. And we knew we wanted to try horses. Horses was an interesting endeavor.

[120:40]

We could have picked better trained horses. since we were kind of green. They had done some pooling. It was Zip and Jerry. We have pictures, I guess you did. I didn't know where they were. They're grayed percherons. Anybody know horses? Grayed percherons, which means they weren't thoroughbreds. But we have one horse that weighed a ton, which is pretty big. So there was various teamsters who worked with horses. And... I did like this in 77, I guess. It was like the second wave. And that was an interesting experience because when you're dealing with animals, they have a whole rhythm, right, that you need to take care of. You can't say, well, it's time for zazen, you know. I mean, the horse would have to come first.

[121:42]

So we had Snip and Jerry. And we had Maude who came on. I learned how to jump off a plow the right way. It's a right way and a wrong way. We had some pretty hairy experiences with the horses. But we were getting it down, I think. And I think it was at that point, that means Zen Center's gone through so many changes. And I think basically there was more of a vision of Green Gulch not just being a practice place, but a place, a meeting place. You know, a place that actually relates with the world on its own terms rather than the place that people come. So that was actually true. That was one of our mission statements. That children were getting a little bit inspired about this building. But I never thought of making meeting, meeting together.

[122:44]

That is really true. Yeah, and there are various reasons that historical facts have happened. But we had two foals. We raised some foals. It was great. Very good experience. We took a snip out to Modesto, and she got raped by Jake, a big white stud, who was very big. She had Kate, right? Yeah. Yeah, we knew Greenbrook, would be called Greenbrook, a couple of horses, which got them like two years old, and they were, you know, not hand-shy, and could put harness on them, and we could actually put them out. Just to stay with the horses, then, I can't remember the sequence, but the Dalai Lama did come by. We also, we also delivered that show. Oh, Joe.

[123:45]

We'll get to the Dalai Lama. Joe was a Morgan horse that we got from Bellinas. And he was the one horse that we worked solo. He was a very bright horse. He'd be plowing and, you know, you have to be in a furrow. And when he got to the end of the row, you could just see him, you know, tugging with all his... to get back in the furrow and then come down. We used to cultivate the hill, the potatoes with horses, which is when I became to really like potatoes because, you know, the horses would step all over the plants, right? You know, and they grew. They were okay. So it was quite an experience. At that point, you know, Wendell Berry had written Unsettling of America, and I I did write to him, and he came out, he was part of Litton's Bar. Yeah.

[124:46]

It's not a lot of time you feel. You know, we spend some time together. And the horses were, well, it did happen back there. What was that, 1983? No, no, 80, 80. That was the first time that I... He came in 79. Mm-hmm. Well, there were issues. What were the issues about animals? I guess it's... Getting animals to do your work. Yeah, well, that was the Dalai Lomans. And that was not, you know, so directly told to me, but it was influential. A lot of people were on that bandwagon. And the Zen Center board decided to get rid of the horses. And it was the first time I stood up and fought for what I thought was right. had a long meeting in here. Midnight. Midnight with Dick. And I stood up to the Dick Bigger, the hotshot guy. Anyway, we finally did have to get rid of the horses because they let me continue having the horses, but they were getting old and I didn't get the support that I really needed.

[125:56]

And my rationale really, it wasn't like I felt like I gave up up a worthwhile thing. The point then with the farm, I think the question was, you know, just getting the farm together in a big way. You know, we had been doing, been selling a lot of produce, but it wasn't really together. You know, we had to mechanize or get more. We had to stand out. We were at, oh, look, tell people a little bit. I don't remember. I can see, but wasn't there? We had a stand out of Tam Junction. Tam Junction. We had a gypsy cart, which, in fact, if you go behind the field shed, it's had a couple transmogrifications, but if you go behind the field shed today, you'd see a cart, just a flat top of plywood and an axle. That was a gypsy wagon.

[126:56]

that somebody made very elaborate, well, did a very elaborate cart that opened up as a vegetable stand so you could display the vegetables. And you'd store the vegetables inside and then you'd sell them from outside. We're at Tam Junction and... By the rug store, right? Yeah, and there's a parking lot where the video arcade is now. That was 25 years ago. So... Peter, what did you say? You said it was getting so large that you had to mechanize? Well, the farm had to, there was issues in the farm getting together that was not just, you know, horses or not. There were bigger issues, I think. So, and the movement really was to mechanize, and for a big reason was the Dalai Lama's making that statement to people. He was here for a couple of weeks, I guess. Yeah, he actually came for an overnight visit, and he really had an incredible time here.

[127:58]

He had enough of people in the Bay Area who wanted to see him. One of those people was Long Islander. Those of you who study Long Islander work, it's a way of like, well, the Tibetan work of Buddhist. He was a German scholar who became a Tibetan Long Islander. Yeah, had never met at all in Long Islander. I'd always miss him in Tibet. And I remember him coming here to visit his holy husband. We had bodyguards. He had his own bodyguards. He had his own bodyguards because it was a very, very tight job. He was still, he was not safe or revered in the way he is now. He had a really good protector. And I remember his entourage asking for some early then-students, Wayne Godwin, who was one of our friends in Tears, rather new student. Suddenly, they produced a rock supernive, and he stood by the guard, and he was like, I took that in the guard, and he was like, big boss guy. He said, I don't know, I like this.

[129:01]

So he stood by the door, he came in, he said, may I help you? Yes, I need to see. So his holiness really liked it here, and he decided to stay. He stayed for a long time. He did all of his engagements for the ring, which was amazing. He couldn't do that now. It was different, at times, like it was particularly on one of those years. We met him about the same time. They were not... So what was the statement? Well, see, he didn't tell me, but something about not wanting, horses shouldn't be doing our work. To someone in private you said that? No, like to Yvonne, one of the leaders who sent Samson. It was a public statement, and people were working on it, although communication wasn't that open. You have to remember that the Dalai Lama is a very good mechanic and can fix anything.

[130:06]

I just thought there was an appropriate way to do it, you know. Anyway, around that time, what could I do? We stayed as long as my partner gave it up and became the director of Tassajara, I guess, and we tried. I found a good home for the horses, and we had cows and we had chickens, and chickens we had from the beginning. I think they were from Alan Chadwick when it was to have chickens. But chickens were good. I mean, it's an earlier part of the dialogue of should you eat eggs or not, I suppose. And the rationale then was, well, if we're going to eat them, we should grow them. We should take care of the birds. So that's what we did then. And I ran the chickens myself for a couple years.

[131:08]

It was a good experience. The chicken is not a natural animal. It was bread. You know, you wouldn't find a chicken in nature. Kind of like the cow, I guess. The cow is basically cousin of a deer, right? It was just bread. And they bred it for the qualities that they wanted. Chickens, you know, lay eggs served for meat, so... We had a couple hundred birds. We'd buy one-day-old chickens from Murray McMurray, and Iowa City had a great catalog, and we'd get these sexed one-day-old chicks in the mail. They were probably two or three days old. The mailman was closed. The postman would say, we've got to look back. We'll drive them right out. That's the only time we get here. So we had a little brooder house.

[132:08]

In a couple of places, one at the corner where the metal shop is, underneath the baby eucalyptus tree, next to the gas tanks. And then in the garden shed was the animal headquarters, really. We had hitching rail back there, and that was our... And we had the corral there. And we landed in the trailer right here. And the windmill was the... I remember Peter Jay ready to go cloud in the morning. Right where the basketball court is, was the milking parlor. And we had jurors. And that was tacked on, kind of Green Gold style. We had a big storm one day, and it picked it up. Jerry saw it. Jerry saw it.

[133:10]

We knew something about falling. And again, cows were the same way, but a bigger ethical question with cows is what do you do with the bull calves? So that was a real quandary. But my feeling continues to be if you are going to eat eggs and milk, then should somehow take responsibility. I think it was, you know, I remember there was Howard then, you know, I remember his last name, who was... Howard? No, a different Howard. You think of him? Nick McDonald? Yes. He, on the basis of observing how animals were raised in captivity, became vegan. This was, you know, in the early 70s, and it wasn't, it was fairly unusual when he ate eggs. But eggs were a huge part of our diet. That's another thing. We had cottage cheese and custard and yogurt.

[134:14]

We had dairy products all the time. Omelets, hard-grilled eggs, soft-boiled eggs. Did you make cheese? No, but we ate a lot of cheese. No, we experimented with making cheese. And Jersey's are very good at real high fat content, like 70%. They're the sweetest animals. You wouldn't even need a stanchion to milk them. You'd have to watch out for that back leg going in the bucket there. When the tail goes up, you've got to move that. So we had, there was maybe three of us, and we milked two cows twice a day for a couple of years. It was an interesting conversation. Cows, you get, I mean, it's not just their warm teats in the morning. You just come to love cows, I think. But there's something about that steam when the milk comes out. Calves slobber so much. Yeah, well, they suck the bulk.

[135:15]

They're amazing. We had some interesting dialogue. This was, I felt, significant when we brought this beautiful milk, which is prized in milk whorl. I'm sorry, this isn't real. The cream is so rich, and there was a contingent that sends out more kind of We had this beautiful milk that was raw from a cow that was raised and taken care of organically, and then we were burning off the milk, all the good bacteria which was really inoculating us and getting us the valley, in a way, and pretty much everybody was. Dairy was like our protein. We lived pretty strict. People were not going to have them eating like they do now. It was much more. People stayed here and they depended on this place. Everybody really did eat in the dining room. That was it. I mean, everybody was here. There was none. Families didn't have homes.

[136:17]

I mean, you never see me in those dining rooms. But families didn't have, you know, maybe Dick Baker and family would not eat in the dining room. But we all... So it was really interesting that there was this movement to pasteurize the milk. Well, it takes one or two people. It was all around the same time. It made me think of the compost toilets. We had compost toilets that in the fourth field, right? You all know the field. I know that's the first thing you learn, right? In the fourth field, past the refrigerator, I did a 50-foot trench that was six feet deep. And you could really see a beautiful soil profile. But we had compost toilets all around. We'd drive it down there, pour it, and then fill the dirt on top of it. So there's a whole bunch of compost down there in a strand, but I've never been able to see a difference in growth.

[137:19]

So it must be really low. But yeah, we had compost toilets. And then around that same time, I think... And I guess AIDS was just coming on and hepatitis and people were, you know, not quite understanding what was going on. It became illegal to have compost toilets. So we got low flush. It was a public place. So if we weren't a public place, it would have been okay. The part of Green Gulch, which is an important facet, is that this is a public place. You know, it's not just a hippie commune, a religious commune, or whatever we have. So we, people look, county health departments don't look at us differently, but, well, you're building a, you're spending $800,000 on the Zen, though you need new bathrooms, you need new set.

[138:15]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_89.45