Good morning. I'd like to start, and I will start, by reading a poem. Here's the poem. To describe almond blossoms. To describe almond blossoms, the glossary of flowers doesn't come to my aid, and neither does the dictionary. Speech will snatch me to the scam of eloquence, and eloquence wounds meaning, and then eulogizes the wound, like a man who tells a woman how she feels. How can almond blossoms radiate in my language? They are diaphanous.

[01:02]

Like water, like laughing water that sprouts from the branches out of a century dew. Lightweight, like a light musical phrase. Weak, like a flash of thought. To describe almond blossoms, I need visitations to the subconscious to guide me to the name of an emotion that hangs from trees. What is its name? This thing in the poetics of nothing. I need to penetrate gravity and speech and sense the likeness of words when they become a whispering spirit. I need to become the words and they me. Diaphanous white. Words of the whiteness yearning to describe almond blossoms. If a writer could manage in a fragment to describe almond blossoms, fog would recede from the hills.

[02:10]

And the whole nation would say, this is it. And these words would become our national anthem. to me while I was sitting upstairs musing on what to say that it's kind of a ritual I go through I have the office about there and when I look out the window I see a building via which generously blooms for a long time and I realized that

[03:13]

to give a talk I spend a lot of time staring out the window looking at the bougainvillea and something about getting in touch with an authentic state of being something about getting in touch with what I can say about what I really mean and what I really feel what would be the point of giving a talk if it didn't have that quality. And it occurred to me that in many ways, this is close to the heart of Zen practice, settling into an authentic, connected state of being.

[04:20]

Expressing life, engaging life, becoming life. From that place, from that state of being. In the language of Buddhism, this is called samadhi. And there are many ways to translate samadhi. And the translation I'd like to offer this morning is continuous communication. Continuous involvement, continuous connection to the flow of momentary existence. The finder of Soto Zen says to settle the self on the self. And when that happens, practice occurs, actualizing. fundamental point.

[05:30]

Mary Oliver, the poet, says, like giving thanks, entering into a way in which silence and another voice may speak How do we do this? This is the inquiry of practice. This is the activity of practice. This is the fruits of practice. How does this occur? How do we let the workings of our being, however they may be, authenticate themselves, settle into what they already are. This is the inquiry of Zazen, the sitting that we do in Zen.

[06:33]

To just sit and let what's already happened, happen. In some ways, it couldn't be simpler. And then in other ways, it couldn't be more challenging, subtle, elusive. As the poet says, Mahmoud Darbish, Palestinian poet. Before I read this poem, I thought, oh, Palestine. Endless conflict divided into groups, warring with each other, warring with their neighbors. Now I think, And in the middle of all that, pausing and appreciating almond blossoms.

[07:35]

Like laughing water that sprites from the branches out of the century dew. Like a white musical phrase. One way is a kind of inner ordering. I think I find my pre-dharma talk inner ordering by stirring out the window. For each of us, how do we do that? How do you come back into yourself? How do you create that presence? Is it courage? Is it diligence? Is it not knowing? Is it the product of repeated activity?

[08:45]

In the craft of Zen practice, we have many ways of creating this inner ordering. but in a way with just suggestions. It's something that each one of us needs to discover. It's not theoretical. It's completely about involvement, engagement, and discovering directly how this is. admonitions can only hint, they can only point at something that they were being asked to discover. Sometimes it seems like it can be the product of our intention, and sometimes despite our intention. As I was musing on this poem, why it attracts me,

[09:59]

start of that poem that I quoted from Neri Oliver. She starts off by saying, it doesn't have to be the blue iris. But it can be the blue iris. It can be the almond blossoms. It can be some pleasant arising of the moment. It's important to a lot of this too. It's important allow what glides our heart. The Buddhist Sutra, the Anapanasati Sutra, which describes how we engage the breath and practicing the breath as a way to come to this place of authentic connection. And in the middle of the Sutra, So the sutra starts and it says, discover the breath in its different forms.

[11:11]

Discover how the breath can help something to settle, something to open, something to connect. And then it says, gladden the heart. How do we gladden the heart? You know, amidst all the things that challenge us, disturb us, preoccupy us, threaten us, how do we gladden the heart? How will you live in Palestine to find the space, the time, the opportunity to stop and lose on the almond blossoms? how does any one of us do that? And how often do we do that? Yeah? These are the questions closest to the art of practice.

[12:14]

They're very personal. And they're both totally impractical and also very practical. Until you settle on yourself, Do you know what you're doing? Do you know why you're doing it? Do you know how to do it? Do you know what nourishes you? What gladdens your heart? What discourages you? What disconnects you from yourself? This poem appealed to me because it offers kind of like the discipline of beauty, the discipline of gladdening the heart, of realizing that outside my window, that moving via, has these reddish purplish flowers.

[13:21]

And even though it's past full bloom, in full bloom, the old plant is just planted in the flowers. And now it's about slightly more green leaf than there is flower. How easy it is in our life to miss what's being offered. And then sometimes it's about opening to the demand of life. What it's already presenting to us in its fierceness. It says,

[14:32]

I'd sort of lose for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even fiercer life because of our quiet. Sometimes it's not just or it's not even opening to appreciation. Sometimes it's opening to a harsh demand. It's opening to an urgency that life is sitting right in front of us. And it makes a different kind of request of us. It asks, again it asks something from our heart.

[15:34]

It asks courage. The word courage comes from the French word for heart. Certain strength. Maybe even tenacity. cultivate, we discover that courage, that capacity through opening in that way. It's like a muscle. We exercise it. We discover how to open by opening. We discover how to stay in the center of the fierceness of our life by staying in the center of the fierceness of our life. Discover it. Why? When life offers its beauty and its nourishment, that we allow it in.

[16:43]

We allow something to be gladdened that will stand us in good stead when those moments when it seems to be the opposite, the harsh demand. And they come from the same request. At the bottom of both those requests to authentically be settled, connected to what is. Samadhi. Continuous contact. Whatever season it is. You know, winter or summer. Whether it's delight or dismay. You know, can we stay centered in it? Not that we always know how to do that. You know? Sometimes we're in the throes of something and we don't know what it is. Or how to deal with it.

[17:49]

Sometimes it's about making contact any way you can. So here's a poem about that. When you get lost. Tell me what you do when you get lost. Tell me. Tell me what you feel. How things look to you. What happens in your head? What do you say to yourself? Tell me. Can you see anything when you're lost? Can you hear what's about you? Do you perceive life at all? Tell me. Tell me what scares you the most when you get lost. Can you draw from deep inside what you use to hold yourself up? Can you move yourself differently? Tell me. Tell me what you do to reach that special calm.

[18:59]

When do you know to wait? And when do you know to risk? Tell me. Tell me what you do when you get lost. Then tell me how you know when you're not lost. Tell me. So sometimes we look out at the world with the gesture of appreciation. And sometimes we look out at the world with a genuine inquiry about what the heck is going on. Not so much to tell the world what's going on or what should be going on, but to ask, tell me, what is happening right now as I sit here

[20:10]

listening to this. And can words hold it? Can words capture it? As this poet says, words may snatch me to the scam of eloquence. And that eloquence wounds me meaning and then eulogizes the wood. Sometimes we conjure up all sorts of interesting ideas and opinions and judgments. Getting lost is a terrible thing. Not knowing what to do next is a sign of inadequacy and failure. and turns that on its head and it says, well, that's pretty good.

[21:21]

Not knowing is like the doorway to discover it. It snatches from you all your certainty, all your preconceptions, all your fixed ideas. Yes, it leaves you naked. in the wings that are blowing around. But it's a fertile time of discovery. So discovering how to make contact. Just like this poem says, any way you can. What do you feel? What does your body feel like? What kind of emotions tend to come up for you? What does being lost teach you about not being lost? So in Zen practice, we have three processes.

[22:43]

The first one is this inner ordering. And it's not that inner ordering creates presence. It's that the inner ordering helps to create a receptivity to the presence that's already there. Stimulating authentic meaning is not to create the person we are. It's just to open to it. It's to be in contact with it. So the inner ordering of bleeps. The inner ordering of the body. What is that physicality of being that's here, that's rooted, that's upright, that's not holding back?

[23:48]

And how is that inner brush? What is it to let everything in with the inhale and everything flow with the exhale? What is that receptivity and willingness of consciousness that receives and engages what is rising in the moment? This is the inner ordering of Zazen. Both seated Zazen And every moment says it. To discover the unique almond blossoms of each moment. Whether they're diaphanous like laughing water. Or like a white musical phrase.

[24:51]

Or weak. Like a fleeting thought. Right now. In your being. That willingness to engage in experience. And then something in continually returning to this request. To this discipline. So it's not just an idea in our head, but it's something our body, our heart, our breath, our consciousness discovers and knows how to allow. The same way we can discover and know how to drive. Play a musical instrument. Type on a keyboard.

[25:53]

Repeated activity. And then, of course, the challenge is to not let the repeated activity, as we can do when we drive, be an opportunity to go on automatic and get lost in thought. But to let it be an opportunity to be a foundation for being totally open. So the inner ordering, and then the complement is the willingness to totally engage. Whatever we're doing to need it, to engage it, to be so thoroughly involved in what we're doing, that is, Dovan Sanji says, we forget the self.

[27:06]

As he says in the poem. And I need to become the words and they meet. That sense of absorption, immersion. Like a sponge soaking up water so that the sponge and the water are still themselves but they're also completely intertwined. To give our efforts, our energy, our involvement in what's happening. As we give attention. As we give involvement. To do what we're doing. You know there's a way in which

[28:15]

We can do what we're doing because we're in the hopes of a certain outcome. So we're kind of doing it and holding our breath. I don't really want to be doing this. I want the outcome. But in that way, we're not quite wholeheartedly doing it. There can be diligence. There can be A certain level of dedication. But there's a request to cross over to devotion. To just devote ourselves to what it is. And this is another of the fundamentals of Zen practice. Of Zen training. Wholeheartedly doing. this natural complement to the inner ordering that we fully engage.

[29:32]

And so the samadhi has an active dimension to it. And that active dimension can be very physical or it can just be The music with which we take in the beauty of the almond blossoms. And let them teach us what they are. Beyond all the words we have for them. And then something about... open to what life presents. Something about patience, compassion, and courage.

[30:34]

It's human life that our life together creates its own quality of strife, its own quality of conflict, its own quality of of limitation. Something about staying upright in the middle of that. In Zazran, it's the attention being pulled away. That despite the sincere effort to stay present, your mind wanders in all sorts of directions. Despite sincere intention to be authentic in this moment, the attitude that comes up, wishing for it to be different, holding back until something changes into a more favorable condition.

[31:46]

in the middle of this very human experience. And to let the inner ordering and the arising wholehearted effort illuminate the human condition. To let it teach us how to be the person that we are. beautiful poem that says in it, to reteach everything its loveliness. You know, to discover that even in the middle of a land torn apart in violence that almond blossoms bloom. To discover within yourself even though your knee's hurting or you can feel some tension in your shoulders or your back or your breath isn't flowing so freely or you can feel it rattle in the tightness of your chest that it's not about perfecting the conditions

[33:21]

That's not the consequence of inner artery. It's allowing and trusting that right now what's being presented is completely itself. It has its own authenticity, its own quality of being, its own genius. Archer said, genius is the way a person invents in the middle of desperate circumstances. This is the genius of Zazen.

[34:30]

That in the midst of all the limitations that become so evident, But we sit upright and we discover how to let this just be what it is. In the midst of all the qualifications and limitations our conditioned life wants to put upon it. That we've become reckless and irresponsible enough amuse on the beauty of the moment like a poet in the middle of a torn land writing a poem about almond blossoms to describe almond blossoms the glossary of flowers doesn't come to my aid and neither does the dictionary speech

[35:35]

will snatch me to the scam of eloquence, and eloquence wounds meaning then eulogizes the wound, like a man who tells a woman how she feels. How can almond blossoms radiate in my language? They are diaphanous, like laughing water that sprites from the branches out of the century dew. They're lightweight, like a white musical phrase, weak. like a flash of salt. To describe almond blossoms, I need visitations to the subconscious to guide me to the name of an emotion that hangs on trees. What is its name? This thing in the poetics of nothing. I need to pierce gravity and speech and sense the likeness of words when they become a whispering spirit. I need to become the words and they me.

[36:37]

Diaphanous white. Words are the whiteness yearning to describe almond blossoms. If a writer could manage in a fragment to describe almond blossoms, fog would recede from the hills and the whole nation would say, this is it. And these words would become our national anthem. Thank you.

[37:06]

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