I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. There are a couple of seats in front if anybody is welcome enough to come up and take them. Perhaps it's the nature of spring that there is a sense of there being a lot to do or a

[01:17]

lot that's happening, but I'm particularly struck by that sense this morning. I'd like to talk a little bit this morning about a central theme in the teachings of the Buddha having to do with the nature of things, that is, that they are always changing, that the nature of things is impermanent. But I'd like to talk about that in the context of our beginning a study period as we are beginning today a garden study period which is being led by Wendy Johnson who is the head of our garden here and whose medium as a teacher is the garden.

[02:17]

And I am struck, particularly after our first class which we just finished a little while ago, by how much the garden is fully a place where we can study and consider all of those points of insight and understanding which come up out of the teaching from the Buddha and the tradition which follows from those teachings. One of the things that Wendy pointed out this morning was how important it is to know the place where you are working. And I'm struck by how much that is what our work is in our lives and certainly very much what is up for any of us who are doing meditation practices and in particular the kind of meditation

[03:25]

practice that we do in the Zen tradition, in particular when we sit in what we call Zazen, Zen sitting practice. How much that practice has to do with a willingness to sit down and be with ourselves to get to know our breath and our posture, our heartbeat, our stomach, to be willing to notice and be friendly with whatever arises and falls away. Isn't it interesting how hard it is for many of us to allow ourselves to do that, to just sit down quietly and get to know ourselves in this very particular, careful, direct way.

[04:30]

And yet as with a garden, with ourselves, when we have some open-minded, open-hearted willingness to be friendly and present in our lives as they actually are, things begin to unfold in a way that all of the pushing and effort and trying that characterizes much of our lives doesn't bring us to. I sometimes think that we are living in a culture which emphasizes our capacity for doing, and what we're doing here is reminding ourselves about the doing that has to do with not doing, just being quiet for a little while, hopefully every day.

[05:37]

So, if we're going to get to know a garden, a particular place that we're going to work, work in, work with, be part of for a while, as some of us are going to do for this next month in the garden here and in the wider context, the valley and watershed that contains this garden, one of the things we'll do is to begin to pay attention to the detail of this place, what is the soil like, what is the light like, what are the temperatures, where are there those cold places and warm places, to begin to pay more attention to the light as the days become longer, to begin to notice what happens with the plants at

[06:47]

this time of year as they begin to open up to this kind of surging, growing that happens in the spring. In a similar way, when we practice Dazen, when we practice Zen sitting, we want to pay attention in the same way, the same level of detail, with our breath and with what happens when we sit calmly and carefully with our attention on our back straight, to find a way of sitting quietly, back straight, attention with the breath, that allows us at the same time to be relaxed and calm. We may not begin with such calmness, we may begin with wiggling and discomfort and maybe

[07:53]

even irritation, but if we're patient, after a while we may find some stillness which is actually there, but which we sometimes don't allow. Wendy spoke this morning about the garden as a place where we have continually life and death, life and death, living and dying. And how much that is what happens with our breathing. The breath comes in and there's a kind of fullness with it, bringing oxygen and the very essence of life into our whole organism. And then the breath goes out, the exhalation. Sometimes when you sit quietly, when I sit quietly and allow my breathing to settle

[09:03]

a bit, I'll begin to notice at the end of the exhalation a small space, nothing. And I can in fact consider that space, that moment at the end of the exhalation as a kind of minor dying. What is my response to that experience? Am I willing to hang out with myself in that space? Does some fear arise, some nervousness? Do I begin to wonder, will the next breath come? Am I willing to just be quietly in that moment? And then when the inhalation arises, allow the inhalation to arise in whatever way it will. Particularly when you first begin doing this kind of meditation practice, you may feel

[10:10]

a kind of self-consciousness with observing the breath in this way, or observing your posture, but with some patience that self-consciousness goes away. And with that self-consciousness, you may feel a kind of tightening, or you may feel your breath a little quicker than usual. But are you also then able to sit with it and notice how it changes? In particular, the breath that comes in in this moment isn't exactly like the breath that preceded it, or the breath that follows it. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? And from some point of view it actually is quite simple. At this time of year, especially on a day like this with the sun clear, a little warm,

[11:21]

the kind of scent that comes off of the various plants and trees that are beginning to open up, there is a kind of fullness in our sense of being alive. Nakamura Sensei, who teaches tea ceremony and no chanting here at Green Belch, sometimes laughs and says, we're such weakies. We feel wonderful on a sunny day like this, but if it's a cloudy day, or rainy, or stormy, as it was Friday night and yesterday, especially early in the day, do we feel a little discouraged or down, or, oh, what am I going to do? Then the sun comes out and we feel wonderful, how changeable it is. There's a gathering happening in Berkeley this weekend of women in Buddhism.

[12:30]

A hundred and sixty women gathering together to celebrate the fact that women can practice wholeheartedly and fully as Buddhism comes here to the West. And in the morning, as we were beginning to open the day's events, I was asked to do a kind of blessing on the space, and people laughed at me a little bit because what came up for me as the rain was pouring down, I realized that in our planning for this event, we had planned on it being a sunny day. We had planned on a sunny weekend so that we could have various activities out of doors. And of course, that's not what we got, at least not yesterday. What we got was lots of rain and staying indoors. But what I remembered was that the Hopi people and the Tibetans and many others, I'm sure,

[13:38]

look upon the rain as auspicious. And in fact, if there's some big teaching or some ceremony or it's time to do some particular activity, these traditional people look longingly for some cloud in the sky because even if there's just a little spitting from the sky, it's considered a kind of blessing on whatever it is that's happening. A different way of thinking about the rain. Can we enjoy the rain and the blessing of it in the way that we can enjoy the sunshine and clear air and coming warmth that we feel today and understand that in a little while it will be different than it is now? The heart of the Buddha's insight seems to focus on this business of impermanence, that

[14:46]

everything changes. And that our suffering arises when we resist acknowledging, accepting, understanding that that's in fact the way things are. And that our suffering arises when we try to resist or deny that changeability, that impermanent nature of things. When we take a kind of possessive attitude or relationship to each other or to ourselves or to our things, to our very lives. But does that happen when we're in the garden? It seems to me that I'm much more willing to enjoy the cycle, to watch eagerly as the

[15:46]

roses go from being bare sticks to the tiniest pink buds beginning to form and then slowly leafing out. And I know what's coming. And feel a kind of patience and joy as I'm watching the roses in the garden getting ready to burst forth. And I hope that my feeling about the roses can encourage me to have a similar kind of feeling or attitude towards that same process in my own life and in the lives of those around me. A kind of reminder about this living and dying, breathing in and breathing out. As some of you are probably aware, we have today a full moon.

[16:55]

This is the moon which is sometimes called the sap moon. And if you spend any time outdoors in the world of plants, you understand exactly why there is that designation. The sap is up. It's rising. And you can almost hear it out there in the world. And this evening we will have a full moon ceremony. We will follow this ancient practice that we do at the time of the full moon. A ceremony where we do some kind of confession and recite together promises about how we want to live our lives. What I remember some years ago when we first began doing the full moon ceremony was how

[17:59]

suddenly I was aware of the moon, not just when it was full, but in all of its cycles. A kind of wakening to the cycles of the moon. And of course for anyone who is working in a garden, the moon cycles can be extremely important because what you begin to notice is some relationship, some activity in the plant world in relationship to the light and dark, these different phases of the moon. But is it so different for us? What some of us begin to notice is some change in the different cycles of the moon, in the way we sleep at night, in the amount of sleep that we seem to need to have, a difference in some sense of energy.

[18:59]

And it makes sense, doesn't it, that as there are these different ebbs and flows with the cycles of the moon and with the tides and with the gravitational pulls on Earth's surface that have such a profound effect in the world of plants that perhaps we also would feel some sensitivity to these cycles. Perhaps in our busy lives, in our lives full of responsibility and taking care of ourselves and our families and our work and the planet that we live on, we can also periodically be quiet enough to pay attention to the particular detail of our experience. And it's exactly this careful and attentive being with whatever arises that a meditation

[20:03]

practice can allow us to do. Wendy said this morning in class, please be mindful of the place where we're gardening, please observe as much as you can, and please keep your sense of humor. I hope we can all do that with ourselves in the detail of our experience. Of our lives, particularly whenever we sit quietly with our breath, with our posture. To be mindful, to observe, to watch, to be awake to whatever arises and falls away. And to keep our sense of humor. To not take it all too seriously.

[21:07]

One of my daughters has just finished a senior thesis. That's her last big project before she graduates from college. And she decided to write her paper on the fool in King Lear. She's always been very interested in comedy and in the fools in different pieces of literature and drama in particular. Out of a sense of what wisdom figures they are. And part of what she came to in writing this paper was some observation of what it was the fool could say that no one else in the room could say. How when the fool was in the room, he could talk about the shadowy side, the dark side. He could talk about the wisdom aspect. But always with a kind of silliness, foolishness, folly.

[22:22]

That aspect which is so important in our lives to remember. Our ability to laugh, to be foolish, but which has this dimension that runs so deep in all of us. When we were sitting together a week ago in the long sitting that we did here for a week, by the sixth day as we became gradually each day a little bit more still, one of the things that happened was a kind of lightness, but also a capacity for a kind of laughter. And in fact one afternoon as we were doing a long period of walking together, someone began to giggle. Who knows what prompts that giggling.

[23:30]

It may even be a kind of nervousness at touching some very deep place. Those things are certainly not exclusive of each other. But pretty soon that laughter went through all of us, almost like a kind of wave or ripple. And I remember quite vividly when I first heard the laughter, immediately I felt a kind of smile on my face. I could feel a kind of chuckling begin to rise up in me. Quite wonderful. And it did seem to arise out of our breathing quietly together and being quite still. Going deep in a way that you can when you do that for a long time.

[24:35]

Another thing that came up in our class with Wendy this morning was her observations about the source of everything in the garden being from that which is wild. How much do we allow that wildness which is in each of us, that uncultivated and for many of us unknown aspect of our nature and of our experience and of our capacity. I'm always surprised when I allow myself regular periods of time in which I have absolutely nothing to do except to watch the grass grow. I sometimes call that kind of space or time noodling time. To just let my mind wander around and to be quiet or not as the case may be.

[25:51]

And I'm struck by what can arise out of that kind of circumstance. Thich Nhat Hanh who is a Vietnamese Zen teacher who visits us every once in a while and who in fact will be coming to visit sometime in April, talks about how important he thinks it is for us to have a quiet day. He suggests one day a week, a day of mindfulness. A day when we can be quiet, when we can do some practices that help us cultivate our ability to be mindful, to be awake with whatever we're doing, to for a change do things a little bit slowly and quite carefully, to take a bath, to clean a particular table or section of our house,

[26:55]

to make a flower arrangement, to set the table for dinner with our family, to write a letter to a friend, to go for a walk, to just sit down and not do anything. And I think for many of us we say, oh, I'm too busy to do that. What are we so busy with that we can't allow ourselves to be quiet in that way and to find and be in touch with some deep place that each of us has some capacity for, but which we don't allow, at least not so often. That includes what the wild places represent for many of us.

[28:00]

I know that for me there's something very special that happens if I go to the mountains or if I go to the woods, some place that is not so changed by human life and activity. Particularly if I go to the high mountains, where people are not to be found so often, I feel a kind of touching in with wildness, that is, the world which is the source of everything. And I'm reminded of some place in my own life experience that resonates deeply with the wild places. In a garden we are cultivating and growing plants, in many cases plants which have been developed from the wild plants.

[29:08]

One of our teachers, a man named Harry Roberts, who lived and taught here for some years in the late 70s and early 80s, and whose memorial date is this week, used to talk frequently about how important it was to keep the plants that were our source plants, to take care of them, to not lose them. And under his guidance, two of us would for some time go up to a particular area up on a back road near Sonoma. where there was a particular outcropping of Godisha, which was a very important plant according to Harry. He said it was one of those early source plants. We would go up during the growth cycle of the Godisha

[30:16]

and tag the different plants that seemed particularly strong and then go back again in the late summer to collect seed. Because he felt that it was important for us to have source stock like that here in the garden, because it had a kind of vigor and directness that the more hybridized plants don't always have. But we need to do something like that for ourselves in our own lives also, to pay attention to what is fundamental and essential, what is source material in our lives. So in our meditation practice we keep coming back to the breath. Whatever arises, whatever we are focusing in our meditation practice,

[31:18]

there is a kind of baseline that has to do with our breath. At this time of year, in the garden outside of the house where I live, we have two rather old crabapple trees. They are alive in spite of the activity around them. The goats have chewed on them and nearly killed them, but somehow they didn't succumb. They've had various and sundry diseases. Somehow they are still continuing. And I remember a few years ago when Harry, who was living with us in this house, was dying, the bedroom that he was in opened onto the front of the house

[32:19]

into these crabapple trees. And as he was dying, the crabapple trees were beginning to bud and burst into bloom. And at the same time, the pond under the crabapple trees became the nursery for frogs. So at this time of year, we have each year, right on schedule, the frogs arriving with all of their croaking and carrying on, and the crabapple trees budding out. And it always reminds me of Harry's dying. Such a curious commingling of experience. Very sweet and tender memory. And so this year I'm watching the crabapple trees, wondering if they are a little healthier, a little stronger this year.

[33:21]

Delighted that once again the frogs have returned and do their singing as they have in years before. Remembering what it was like to sit with Harry as he slowly passed over. Rather slow process. He spent, in the weeks before he died, some days when he seemed very far away. And he probably was. But then every once in a while he would return to the room and those of us who were sitting with him. And I remember in particular one evening when the frogs were beginning to sing again, a sound he loved. He began singing a song about blackbirds. Out of this deep, kind of comatose condition,

[34:24]

suddenly this sweet, almost baby-like voice singing this silly song about the blackbird. For many of us we are afraid of dying, especially our own dying or the dying of those close to us. But if we pay attention to our breath and we become more friendly with that outflow, that exhalation, there is so much we can begin to notice about it. It has some quality of death, of dying, of letting go. There is also with it a kind of allowing. What occurs? What arises? What becomes possible with that attitude of allowing?

[35:26]

Do we in fact make the next breath come? It just comes. Until that moment when, of course, when it doesn't. And if we can allow ourselves to hang out in that space, we may in fact be able to touch whatever fear or tension or uncertainty or anxiousness that arises and be friendly with that and allow that also to have a kind of rising up and falling away. Because those feelings, emotions, thoughts have the same quality of arising and falling away. We may feel completely confident in our ability to accept the impermanence of the sunny day. We may not feel quite so confident in our ability to do that

[36:34]

with a rainy day or with negative states of mind or emotions. But perhaps we can explore the impermanence of those things as well. The other thing that Wendy talked about in the class this morning was the richness of this particular environment where we live here on the coast of California in an area which is, in geological terms, changing constantly in a very dynamic way, not at all settled, geologically speaking. And we live on the edge of the Pacific Ocean where we have great upwelling of cold water from the bottom of the ocean,

[37:40]

bringing extraordinary richness up to the surface of the ocean. And in this environment, which is so complex and so intensely changing, we have extraordinary richness of life, richness in geological terms, richness in terms of the plant life, richness in terms of the life that occurs in the ocean. This is one of the great areas for those of us who love the birds. This complex, rich environment has that nature out of the quality or characteristic of being on a kind of edge where things are continually changing, intensely so. Think for a moment, if you will,

[38:43]

about how true that is also of our own lives. We have a kind of fear or reluctance to turn into what is unfamiliar or what is about to change, a kind of uncertainty or fear arises often. But aren't those just the circumstances from which our growth occurs, from which some possibility that we hadn't imagined arises? Can we, in fact, when we sit with our breath, be welcoming to this next breath as it arises, being whatever it is, not quite the same as the breath we just breathed? And can we, in fact, have that kind of openness and respect and appreciation for change and the possibility of richness and complexity

[39:45]

in each moment? Which means, perhaps, allowing whatever fear or anxiousness may also be there to be there but to not let that dominate the landscape. Okay. If I try to possess the breath as it arises, it tends to rise up in my upper part of my body and get tighter, I have less oxygen in my system, I have a kind of constricted feeling in my physical body, and in my mind. If I'm not possessive of my breath, of my children, of my husband, of my good friends,

[40:49]

of some idea that I have that I think is just some terrific idea, if I'm not possessive of the way I think I want things to be, but have a kind of open-handed or open-hearted or allowing attitude, I can be awake to whatever arises and be surprised and go deeply with whatever it is. So I would like to invite all of you to join us in our exploration of this fragile and extraordinary and beautiful world that the garden can lead us to and remind us about, but which we can be awake to even sitting in a small, empty room

[42:00]

with our breath. To allow ourselves to be open to the widest possibility that can arise in each moment and to enjoy the spring day. Thank you.

[42:25]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ