This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'd like to begin with some quotations from other Zen teachers. From Ru Jing, Dogen's teacher. beginning of Zen study is to have the heart of the way. From Ren Getsu, an extraordinary Zen poet, artist, and both a priest and a lay practitioner, coming and going without beginning or end, like ever-changing white clouds, the heart of things. From Norman, leaving home means setting aside all we know, all that is secure, authoritative, comfortable, and binding, and shoving off for parts unknown with no roadmap, no guarantee of finding your way.

[01:21]

To go forward, you must leave everything behind. And even though the past may be persistent, Lodged as it is in our bones, it is one thing to be bound up in the past, doomed to repeat it or to be held back by it endlessly, and another to use it as a springboard for a journey that goes beyond to where one can never know. This from Joan Sutherland, the Pacific Zen School. American Zen Koan teacher. Compassion isn't a commodity we deliver, but a commitment to help liberate the intimacy already in any situation. And finally, from Maizumi Roshi, spiritual practice, not what you think it is, John, often so much better.

[02:28]

Leaving and coming home for parts unknown, no road map, no guarantees. This seems to be my Dharma journey. Learning how to help and be helped, to offer love and receive love, a commitment to compassion. This is the springboard. Continuous effort, not turning away. One mistake after another. All my ancient twisted karma. The heart as my guide star. The heart of the way. So imagine a grassy meadow in the deep green Oregon woods and you're walking towards a huge white canvas wedding tent completely enclosed by gauzy white screens. a sign meditation hall hangs over the entry flap.

[03:36]

This being your first seven-day non-Zen retreat, you do know it will certainly be different than a sesheen. The theme is already different. It's Living and Dying by Stephen and Andrea Levine, spiritual teachers, sort of Buddhist-Hindu hybrids who offer teachings and practice. about how to be with people as they're dying, rather than turning away from them or placing them in institutions where medical professionals can give them their end-of-life care. As you approach carrying your black Zafu, you can hear murmuring voices and shadowy figures moving inside the tent. A cloud of pungent, sweet incense drifts through the air It's not pine incense, though. It's just, wow, you stepped into the entryway and the scene looks like a movie.

[04:39]

It's like a battlefield hospital tent. And instead of wounded soldiers in uniforms, there are dozens of patients, females and males of all ages and sizes, flat on their backs, on gurneys, propped up in chairs, spread out on massage tables. They're wearing striped pajamas and football jerseys, knitted caps, and baggy yoga pants. Still others are sitting in beach chairs, low to the floor with arms and legs splayed, heads and feet resting on pillows. They're attending caregivers hovering nearby, mostly wearing aprons with lots of pockets over purple and red and green tie-dyed T-shirts. They have on blue jeans and shorts. Bandanas wand around their necks and heads, feathers and ribbons in their hair. Posted casually around the outer edges of the tent are maybe a few real doctors and nurses in unbuttoned white coats.

[05:48]

But I can't tell, really, because they're batting around a balloon, joking and laughing, and occasionally checking in with a caregiver or a patient in the middle of the room. a web of clotheslines strung from one side of the tent to the other, hanging from the ceiling just above our heads, laden with stethoscopes, ace bandages, water bottles, drying towels, diapers and wiping cloths, crystals and prayer beads. This was the retreat I attended in July of 1985, a year after leaving the Zen community of New York, soon to be on my way to Baltimore, where I had accepted a teaching fellowship in a nonfiction writing graduate program at Johns Hopkins University, not having any idea what I would write or do with an advanced degree in nonfiction. What I had failed to read in the description of this retreat, if it was included at all, was that many of the retreat participants would be receiving terminal care on site.

[06:58]

Of the 80 attendees, more than 30 were very, very ill and close to death. 27 others were trained caregivers and medical professionals volunteering their time. Only three of those who were imminently dying were stable enough to not need specific caregivers assigned to their seats. The seating arrangement itself was helter-skelter with no organized sitting rows. and only one other person had placed a black Zafu on the floor. Turned out it was Yvonne Rand, for those who know her. It was all just a sprawl, really. The layout resembled a psychedelic crazy quilt of human body parts and blankets, pillows and wheelchairs, metal walkers, crutches, ivy drip poles, and portable plastic commodes. A slightly raised stage covered with rose puddles, sat at the opposite end of the tent.

[08:00]

Two red zafus waited in the center, side by side, surrounded by a four-foot-high, blue-faced medicine Buddha and two large statues, one of Hanuman, the monkey god, the other of Ganesha, the elephant god. And there was also a six-foot-high cutout of two figures, the Dalai Lama holding hands with Kuan Yin. This scene inside the tent would shove me off to take the next step towards parts unknown to where I could never have known. The 20 of us at the retreat who were not imminently dying found a place to sit and settle amongst and in between the patients and the caregivers. And then suddenly, Steven and Andrea popped on stage bowed and greeted everyone, rang some bells, chanted, and were plunged into the retreat.

[09:03]

They opened and closed each morning and evening with a gratitude meditation, especially thanking those participants who were so openly and bravely sharing their last days of life with all of us, also offering love and support to their generous caregivers, reminding all of us to pitch in and give care to each other Every one of us is dying in this room, they told us. So please take refuge together here in our predicament of life and death inside the tent, inside your breath, inside your heart. Though I had a bed and a dorm room like many of the others, I mostly fell asleep in the same place where I was sitting all day. Meals and snacks were served in a nearby garden shed for those who were ambulatory. Others were hand-fed in their beds or chairs. Sometimes during the meditation time, moans of pain or a sudden gasp would pierce the silence.

[10:12]

Sometimes an oxygen machine would flick on and we would be engulfed by its whoosh sound, and then the rising and falling of inhalations. and exhalations. There might be the sound of bells letting go, a Pampers paper diaper being changed, a whispered request for a bedpan or a sip of ginger ale, then some sobbing or quiet laughter, perhaps a whoop, a whimper of excitement, sometimes fear when a curious bird or a bat flew into the tent. The frail young man I was seated next to had no caregiver. He wrapped himself in blankets and pillows sitting inside a big rubber inner tube, probably from a truck tire. Despite the summer heat, he was clothed in sweatpants and fleece jacket, puffy down mittens, ski hat, scarf, and big woolly socks.

[11:16]

His head was lowered with eyes always closed, never acknowledging, nodding, not even glancing my way the whole seven days. On the final day of the retreat, Stephen asked us to turn towards someone near us and offer something of ourselves that felt intimate and caring, something that felt like a stretch. When I asked this man if he would like a foot massage, he answered without even turning his head. You wouldn't want to massage my feet, he said. if you saw them. Try me, I answered. I'm not being selfless. Maybe you'd give me one after I do you. He didn't move for what seemed like a very long minute. And finally, he began to unroll one of his socks. Bright purple polka dots covered his very swollen foot. He pointed to his instep.

[12:20]

See that one? It was the first one I ever got. And what I saw was a perfectly shaped heart the size of a quarter. And though I didn't know the technical name of what caused it, I knew he must have AIDS, the new deadly plague circulating around the world. As I massaged his feet, I learned his name, Gilly Gilkeson, real name Harold Otis Gilkeson. He was 46 years old, born and raised by a Swedish father and an acculturated Lakota Sioux mother on a Nebraska farm. He had a career as an emergency room nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, where he had worked for two decades until a few months ago when the throbbing nerve endings in his hands and firing shooting pains in his feet made it impossible for him to work any longer. I helped nurse a lot of my dying friends in their apartments, he told me.

[13:25]

They were ashamed. They didn't want people to know what they had or see how hideous they looked. They all died terrible deaths. Most had pneumonia, couldn't get their breath, panicked, drowning in their own mucus, frantic and scared. I just wanted to help them. I thought this retreat might help me with whatever's next, probably the same. We stayed in touch by phone over the next few weeks. Gilly in San Francisco, me in Baltimore. He developed pneumonia just as he predicted, was hospitalized once, but refused to go a second time. His breath grew weaker and more labored during our brief calls every morning. until one day a friend answered instead, telling me Gilly was in an oxygen tent and could no longer talk.

[14:30]

He died a few days later, cuddling his beloved Jack Russell Terrier named Tonto. Gilly's little purple heart led me directly to the next Zen teacher. disguised as an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School. When I arrived for the fellowship, I found Dr. Frank Polk, who encouraged me to study immunology, epidemiology and infectious diseases, and then supervised my dissertation on emerging retroviruses. After the degree program was over, He asked that I write a hospital handbook on AIDS patients and their caregivers. And then he made up a job, AIDS care coordinator, and hired me with these orders. AIDS, it's an epidemic, you know. Find a way to be of more use and really help.

[15:35]

Ever since, I've met many other helpers, everyday bodhisattvas of all kinds. Like my friend Don Schmidt, extraordinary AIDS policy activist, patient care advocate, who taught me, you don't have to like everybody all the time, Jean. You just have to work with them. And it really helps if you love them. And also my friend Larry Peck, director of Gay Men's Health Crisis, also a newspaper columnist who courageously wrote, I'm living with AIDS for the Albuquerque Journal. and survived firebombing of his home as a result of being so public about his disease. Larry and I worked together for the last three years of his life co-facilitating Shanti Trainings, a San Francisco-created volunteer training for people who wanted to be helpers in the epidemic. He could light up any room talking straight about how it was to be a person dying with AIDS.

[16:40]

And at the end of every training, he would say, don't use my death for your resume or make me feel like you're superior to me because you think you're not dying. Your only job is to give and receive love, nothing else. Got it? Larry's life had been full of tragedy and violent abuse when he was a child. At the age of five, he had watched his father beat his two-year-old brother to death at the dinner table. His mother committed suicide when he was 12, and he was sent to a foster care family, Baptist, who tried to have him deprogrammed when he told them he was gay. But by the time I knew him, he'd worked his way through college by working as a dancer at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, fulfilled his dream of becoming a child protective services worker, and an organizer of gay men's health parties.

[17:41]

Affectionate and full of mischief, he would often hug his friends and call out after departing, love you, mean it. During the last week of his life, he invited all of his friends from all over the country to stay at his house, and we slept on the floors, bathed him, changed his linens, ate take-out food from favorite places he loved, and watched his favorite movies. One night, when we were all certain he was dying, including him, Larry had said his goodbyes, and we sat with him in a vigil all night long as his breath sputtered and chugged. But when he woke in the morning, he looked around at all of us, asking, Am I dead? Or am I alive? And when we laughed and said... Still here, he said, I saw my baby brother and all the helpers on the other side, and they're having a very good time.

[18:44]

A few hours later, Larry quietly died without a struggle. Are we the helpers on this side? What kind of helpers are we? I work as a helper and as a person being helped in a world of helpers. And it's critically important what motivates a helper, how they offer their help, what kind of attitudes and communications are really helpful. Remembering our Shusou, Allison, telling us in one of her Dharma talks about Lei Min Pong and his daughter, Ling Zhao, how the layman stumbled when they were out selling bamboo baskets. And when his daughter saw him, she ran to her father's side and threw herself to the ground. What are you doing? cried the layman. I saw you falling, so I'm helping, replied Leng Zhao.

[19:48]

Luckily, no one was looking, remarked the layman. In her commentary on this story in The Hidden Lamp, Joan Sutherland writes, Ling Zhao's action obliterates the idea that there is a helper and a helped. Compassion isn't a commodity we deliver, but a commitment to help liberate the intimacy already in any situation. What is most intimate? Usually the most intimate response to another's difficulty begins with the willingness not to flee. Fleeing can take the form of abandoning the situation. It can also mean escaping into helping, into a whole constellation of ideas about what ought to happen. Intimacy is being willing to stay and accompany and listen to be vulnerable and surprised and flexible.

[20:56]

It's a willingness to fall with someone else and see what becomes possible. when we do. Lehmann Pong's final line does not mean he's worried about some third person judging the event. The one who fortunately isn't looking is ourselves. That is, our inner tendency to monitor and pass judgment, distancing us from our interactions even as they're happening. How free it is when we aren't keeping score. how potentially generous a life lived with no one looking. Ling Zhao's gesture suggests we're all falling together, lifetime after lifetime, through the universe. Right now, we're falling through this world, this practice period, which holds out an invitation to us to come to see what life is like here. the sorrow and beauty, love and fear, light and dark, certainty and doubt, and everything in between.

[22:07]

And as we fall, if we pick and choose, instead of accepting all of life as it offers itself, we're refusing the invitation. Are we accepting all of life's invitation? Not picking and choosing. What are we doing? Norman asks in two of his Dharma talks. Are we falling down together? Not turning away when things are painful? Liberating the intimacy in all things? What matters is the state of your heart, Norman told me recently. And in my everyday life, doing the work I've done for the past 20 years, focusing on supporting the rights and lives of indigenous people, my heart is sometimes very troubled.

[23:12]

But it's also often buoyed by their courage and their commitment to cultivating what they call good mind into their resilient responses to pain and suffering. It's estimated that right now 25 million indigenous people are being threatened, some terrorized and killed, forced to leave their sacred homelands and waters by extractive industries, loggers, miners, hydro-dammers, foreign fishing fleets. Indigenous people may not be very visible to us in our everyday lives. but they are working very hard to save beautiful lands and waters, traditional knowledge systems and cultural lifeways, not just for themselves, but as helper bodhisattvas working to save all of us. Just to share a little about a few of them.

[24:15]

There are the Altayan people in northern Russia. who have made a sacred wilderness park that protects the world's most potent geothermal energies from becoming a nuclear reactor, as well as the habitat of the last remaining snow leopards on the planet. The Quechua people in the high altitudes of the Peruvian Andes, along with many other mountain farmers around the world, have already saved 1400 different varieties of heirloom potato seeds. 1,400. Because potatoes everywhere are struggling to survive as temperatures warm. The Haida people of British Columbia are protecting 12 varieties of salmon from being fished to death in their waters and also saving one of the last remaining temperate rainforests in the world. Old-growth cedar and spruce trees on their island archipelago of Haida Gwaii

[25:19]

are considered to be the most ancient forests on the whole planet, three to four thousand years old. There's a revival and renaissance of indigenous languages, first started by Maori people, then native Hawaiians, Lakota, saving thousands of years of precious ecological knowledge and spiritual wisdom. And the Samboro women of northern Kenya, building portable schoolhouses to carry their daughters on their shoulders as they walk the ancient migration trails to Ethiopia, a round trip that takes three years. This so the girls can be educated and not abducted, raped, and then sold to the international sex trade market by foreign workers building an oil pipeline to Nairobi. Recently, the scope of my job expanded to include the global refugee crisis.

[26:21]

80 to 100 million refugees are on the move across the globe, trying desperately to find refuge from terror and violence, oppression, starvation, racism, sexism, climate disruption, and ecological disasters, forcing them to leave home. to abandon everything and everyone they have ever known, to sit and wait in dangerous, filthy refugee camps with no clear knowledge of what is the next step. This choose-love bag I've been carrying around, people have been asking me, is from Calais, France, from the camps there, made by refugees. And this one that I carry and have at the bathhouse is from Lesbos, Greece.

[27:25]

It's made of scraps of life preservers left behind or washed up on the beach. Both are sold and distributed by a fantastic charitable organization called help refugees. I get to do my infomercial for them. All proceeds go directly to the people who are making them. They need money. They need livelihoods. They need more than just tolerance, more than boxes of freeze-dried foods in tents to keep them dry. They need socks and boots, toilet paper, tampons, diapers, shaving kits, flashlight batteries, and effective contraceptives. They need jobs and safe homes to start all over again. And more than anything else, they need compassion and love, they say. Just to be clear, this love I'm talking about is not a charitable donation by check or a sweet goodbye of love you mean it.

[28:33]

It's multidimensional, indefatigable, applied love that arises amidst and in spite of impossible odds and grave dangers in which many, many numberless beings are not being saved. The Yaqui elder Don Juan advised his student Carlos Castaneda, look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. And then ask yourself and yourself alone One question, does this path have heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use. In my case, after leaving the Zen community in 1985, I searched for another teacher for 24 years, one who was teaching a path with heart.

[29:39]

In 2008, I read Norman's book, Sailing Home, and the search ended. He wrote, the purpose of spiritual practice is not to get somewhere. The purpose is to come home, to return to ourselves. And the return takes effort, necessary, joyful, continuous effort that is its own reward. We practice not to improve our situation, but rather to recognize, celebrate, and express who we really are and have been all along. So in 2009, I took the next step. I moved to the Bay Area to practice with Norman, to renew my priest's vows, and become a member of the Everyday Zen Sanghas. What are we doing here?

[30:41]

What are we really doing here? We are helping each other, not making a list of transgressions, no one keeping score, sternums lifting, vivifying our breath, counting, deep, slow, soft. Clang, clang, come to Dokusan. We are twining vines, investigating these words. Words spoken and not yet spoken. Words never to be spoken. Bits and pieces leaping out. Teachers and disciples practicing mutually. We're gazing at the moon, waxing and waning. being eclipsed by its luminous mirror wisdom. We are giving and receiving sincere effort, giver, receiver, and gift, cycling on our three-wheeler through fields far beyond form and emptiness.

[31:58]

We are dreaming of black dogs who heal us, dreaming of the Esalen people who made their ceremonies here in this valley of magical waters. dreaming of what might be our next step. We're writing ecstatic love poems to the tree in front of the bathhouse, rebuilding the garden gate, planting new lawn and gardens, creating wabi-sabi fences, prepping for work period and guest season. We're checking all the fire alarms. We're dining without preferences at the Orioki Grill, feasting on each other's company, meeting wise old women by the side of the road, turning into mango fools, lovely loaves of olive bread, bowls of soup infused with coconut and cashews, pumpkin pudding, oh my God, for breakfast.

[33:03]

We are bowing to the bathhouse bodhisattvas, to the senior staff, to all the work leaders. Let's hear it for all the amazing work crews. We're turning, we're turning, we're turning towards the light, turning and being turned by our gomasio spoons, by our grief and our loneliness, by our secret fears and disappointments. We're arising and disappearing with our memories of longing and loss for the big job, the advanced degree, the perfect romance, the big fish, all the ones that got away. We are surprised by our resilience and strengths, our opening to tenderness, the generosity of each other's hearts. We're mourning the loss of our grandmothers, known and unknown.

[34:07]

loved, and never forgotten, and the passing away of parents, of old dear friends, of a San Quentin priest, and a lay teacher who deeply practiced with resistance and pain. We're bowing with gratitude to Mahapajapati and Ananda, Bodhidharma and Ehe Dogen, and the founder of these temples, Shinryu Suzuki. blessed by the ancestor's infinite flow of kindness in all ten directions three times, healed by a flower, a smile, a cup of fine green Japanese tea, the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, a chapter in a book that tells us enlightened beings can have flaws, the chance to support Tibetan nuns, and a zendo filled with so many spiritual friends.

[35:08]

All of us composting and collecting slime, smelling the stink of it all, swooning over the magnolia blossoms, yearning for an extra hour of sleep. We are just another monk and another monk and another monk entering and departing this monastery trying not to set up standards of our own, bearing witness, responding to the cries of the world. We are choosing love, finding ways to be of use, to help relieve all suffering. Suffering. It's an epidemic, you know. Find some way to be of use. Be helpful. When Isan Dorsey was shuso here at Tassahara in the early 1980s, he was asked at his shuso-hosan ceremony, what are we saving all beings for?

[36:15]

His answer was, we're saving them for later. So here we are. And this is later. A hundred million tapas later. And it's here. Us. sitting with all the ancestors, liberating the intimacy of all things. We're helpers. We're helpers. Suffering and helpers having a very good time. We're leading home and coming home. Coming and going like ever-changing white clouds. Just taking the next step, investigating the heart. of all things. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[37:19]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[37:25]

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