This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. My name is Tova Green. I'm Vice President of Zen Center and a resident of this building, which I love very much. And I want first to thank Rosalie Curtis, our head of practice, for inviting me to speak this morning. And also my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, who has... I think the sound just stopped. Is it back? Yeah. Okay. Who has... encouraged me over many years, and I'm very grateful to her.

[01:02]

So some of you may have heard that there was a killing of four people in a car at our corner, at the corner of Page and Laguna last night, and I want to just acknowledge that that happened, and tell you just a little bit about it. I wasn't awake at the time. It was at 10 o'clock, and I learned about it this morning. One sangha member sent an email in the middle of the night to all of us, and I thought I would quote what that person said, just a little bit of it. After the homicide happened, I witnessed the police officers pull the four victims out of the car and perform CPR. It was a very intense scene.

[02:04]

Others from Zen Center were there on the front steps of this building of 300 Page. There were eight of us. We went in and chanted in the Buddha Hall, and I heard that this chanting was done for those who had lost their lives and for those who had killed them. I was so touched and deeply grateful to live at Beginner's Mind Temple for the love and support we share with each other and with the rest of the world. I wanted to share that because something like that happens, I think, and this week has been... I know there's violence in the world every week, but this week many of us were also deeply affected by the killings in Paris. And one wonders, how do we practice with this?

[03:08]

How do we look at, how do we experience acts of violence in our community, in our world? some of which may affect us more directly than others. How can we... offer to one another and to our community and the world a way of... meeting these... not sure what to call them. A tragedy is maybe one word. Certainly loss of life, violence in our practice, which teaches us to treat one another with respect and care.

[04:16]

What happens in a world in which it's not always like that, or it's often not like that. or at least sometimes not like that. And before these events, I had planned to talk about some of the events happening in the world. The last time I sat in the seat was at the end of June, giving the Gay Pride talk, and a lot has happened in the world since then. And I turned to a poem that I love by... a friend and poet, Naomi Shihabnai, which I'd like to share with you. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, and teaches poetry in schools, teaches teachers how to teach poetry. Her father was Palestinian and her mother American, and she grew up... Actually, she wrote an article this summer.

[05:23]

She grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, and spent part of her childhood also in Jerusalem. So she has a very strong connection with both those places, which were very troubled places this summer. So her poem, the one I'd like to share, is called Gate A4. And I'm going to read it, but I'm going to intersperse some of my own thoughts as I read it. prose poem, so it kind of reads like a story. Gate A4. Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.

[06:24]

Well, one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there. So I just wonder if you had been waiting for your plane and heard that announcement, what would you have thought? So Naomi continues. An older woman... in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. Help, said the flight agent, talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this. So the flight attendant seemed overwhelmed. You wonder, was it by discomfort? or perhaps fear of someone whose language and culture she didn't understand. Naomi says, I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.

[07:33]

Please excuse if you speak Arabic. I'm doing my best, but I don't know Arabic. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, no, we're fine. You'll get there just late. Who is picking you up? Let's call him. So what did Naomi do in that situation? First thing, she stooped down, so she was at eye level with the woman. And then she touched the woman, she held her. She tried to speak in the woman's language. She listened. And then she helped the woman make connection with someone in the woman's life who cared about her and helped...

[08:46]

this woman think about what to do in this situation. But mostly, you know, she made that connection. Body to body. We called her son. I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad. And he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, that they had ten shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This took up two hours. So Naomi is a connector. She likes to connect people. She's incredibly... friendly person, but I think in the midst of that she realized that this woman's son was worried about his mother and she was able to reassure him that she would stay with his mother and make sure that his mother safely got on the plane.

[10:01]

And then she expanded that network of people who could offer support to this woman and offer connection. So Naomi said this woman was laughing a lot by then. telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamul cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single traveler declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo. We were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling. There is no better cookie. And I just wonder, would I, would you, would you take food from a stranger in a situation like that?

[11:03]

But everyone did. Then the airline broke out free apple juice, And two little girls from our flight ran around serving it, and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition, always carry a plant, always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in, the shared world. Not a single person in that gate, once the crying of confusion stopped, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies.

[12:04]

I wanted to hug all of them, too. This can still happen. Anywhere. Not everything is lost. So this shared, the shared world. It includes moments of generosity like that one. where soon everybody was sharing and enjoying one another and what they had. So it seemed like a party rather than a group of people waiting for a plane that was four hours late. And the shared world includes events like the one that happened on our street corner this morning. How can we be present for it all? And, you know, when I read this poem, I think this is the world...

[13:06]

I want to live in, the kind of community I want to live in. And hearing about the chanting last night, I feel fortunate this is the community I live in, where we can meet something that I would say is tragic at our doorsteps and chant for the benefit of all of those involved. Not take sides, not, you know, it's... How do we extend our concern? The chant that was done is called the Enmei Juku Kanon Gyo. Kanon is the Japanese for Quan Yin. It's an embodiment of compassion. And we chant that, chant frequently. Every week we have a well-being ceremony for people who are ill, and that's... one of the chants that we do, wishing or extending compassion for the healing of those people.

[14:13]

And last night, I think, extending it for the healing of those who committed the murders as well as those who died. Because everyone suffers in a situation like that. So the world... that I want to live in is the world where people can go beyond their fear of the stranger and connect with one another, as Naomi did at Gate A4. And yet, well, I'll just ask, what would it take to live in a city, country, and world in which everyone were treated with respect and people who needed help were reached out to. And often we're more aware of some of the divisiveness in our world, some of the divisions between people,

[15:30]

some of the expressions of mistrust, even hatred of people who are different from ourselves. And I think the events of the summer were very sobering for many of us. The killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, both unarmed black men. They weren't the only ones that were killed by police in recent months in our country. And the difficulty with the decisions of the grand juries in those two cases, when the police officers were not indicted heightened awareness that brought of racial profiling and the militarization of police all over the country.

[16:44]

That was something that became much more visible with Ferguson. And at the same time, last summer, there was a war going on in Israel-Palestine I have a cousin who I'm very close to who has for years been leading delegations to the West Bank and Gaza. She's a physician, and initially they were about medical care, providing medical care for people in the West Bank and Gaza who had difficulty accessing it. But increasingly she's just been going and bringing groups of people to witness and to meet. Palestinians and also Israelis who are working to try to change things within Israel. But this summer she was there just as the escalation was happening between Israel and Gaza.

[17:48]

And she wrote a blog that's been published as a book, Stories from the Brink. And hearing about her meetings with and some of the hardships they were encountering because of settlements and the separation wall, and this was before the escalation of violence. It was painful, as my background is Jewish, and I'm a member of a synagogue, to figure out how to relate to some Jews who could only see one side and not see the suffering that was going on in Gaza. And I think, again, one thing I really value about our practice is that we are...

[18:57]

able to appreciate how interconnected we are with everyone, and to try to see things from many different perspectives. And I think one of the tendencies that we all have is to be limited by our conditioning, by where we grew up, by the beliefs of our families and friends, by our experience around our gender, our race, our cultural background, our sexual orientation. And we can't help but bring that conditioning, that experience, the lens from which we view things, to everything we encounter. And sometimes that can... contribute to not being able to see things from someone else's perspective or from doing and saying things we may be unaware of and that can cause harm.

[20:14]

And I want to acknowledge that for some time, trying to think about how best to talk about this because I think it's related. And I also want to say that this talk is not all written out. It's not going to be a neat package. I think you can probably tell from my voice that some of the events of this week and recent events have been very troubling for me, and I'm still trying to... to see how I can meet these challenging situations in my life, and not in our shared life, but what can I do or say that can make a difference?

[21:29]

Can I really learn from Naomi's act of generosity to get past some of my own tendencies to be shy or hold back in a situation where I see somebody suffering and I think sometimes all they really need is Or what would really help would be for someone to sit down and listen to them and hear their perspective and point of view. And there are plenty of opportunities for that, living in community. Can I be more available? Can I be kind? Can I be open-minded? So... Just say one other thing that happened this week was last night, a few of us in the community went to see the film Selma, which just opened.

[22:43]

You may have heard about it, but if you haven't, it's about the marches in Selma, Alabama, and some of the events leading up to them. It's fictionalized, but it's totally... in some ways totally true to what happened. This is a struggle that I am tuned into partly because in 1963 I took part in a voter registration project in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a group of people from, it was an American Friends Service Committee work camp, and it was a group of black and white college students. It was just before my senior year in college. And we went from Greensboro to the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr.

[23:44]

gave his speech, I Have a Dream. And so this film was very moving to me to see the struggle and the... bravery of so many people, black and white, who did those marches in Selma. I went with several friends from Zen Center. We've all been working in our own way on issues around white privilege and also working together. And this is an issue Zen Center has been working on for many years, but most recently we've been working with a consultant who's helping us take a look at some of the ways in which we are, because of our, I would say, unawareness, not providing as welcoming a space as we could to people of color.

[24:52]

In particular, we're looking at that area. And what kinds of changes will we need to make at Zen Center? This is a three-year process that we've embarked on. So one of the people who went last night was Blanche, I hope it's okay to mention that, Blanche, who grew up in Alabama and whose father was a civil rights activist and was beaten severely at one point for... sticking his neck out, you could say, or for taking a stand on what he believed. And so going to see this film was also both very moving, and to see what it took to get the Voting Rights Bill passed, but also I'm aware that

[25:55]

In some ways, the struggle goes on, the situation has changed somewhat around civil rights in our country, but there's still many ways, and I think the events in Ferguson and Staten Island attest to that, there's still so much bigotry and... inequality in our country, and what will it take to change this? I just started reading a book called The New Jim Crow, which talks about the prison system as the new way of creating or maintaining. And the number of people in our prisons has gone way up in... the last decade, and an overwhelming percentage of people in our prisons are people of color.

[27:04]

And there was one, just in the introduction to that book, there was something I thought I would share. It's relevant to voting rights. Jarvis Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton's family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises, the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one's life. Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation.

[28:06]

His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literary tests. Today, Jarvis Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. So people who have been accused of felony cannot vote. And as the number of people of color who have been accused of felonies increases, those people are not able to vote. So in some ways this is continuing as an issue in our country. So... I think this... I'd like to get back to thinking about practice and how our practice can help us meet some of these situations in our community and in our country and in the world.

[29:18]

And I think there are... a few things that are extremely helpful. One is being aware of... becoming more aware of our patterns of thinking and our fixed views, and how practice can help us think more inclusively, have more of a beginner's mind. I appreciate the encouragement in our practice to... look at things in a fresh way, to be aware that ideas can change just as we sit, we notice that our thoughts change, our emotions change from moment to moment, and physical sensations change.

[30:20]

Can we also... recognize that our views about things can change and to be aware that there are many ways of looking at a situation which can help us listen to people whose perspective is different from ours. And to also remember that Part of our practice is about recognizing our interconnectedness with others and working with whatever keeps us from reaching out, from being friendly, from making connection with people. And not just the people who are easy to connect with, but perhaps some of

[31:21]

people who are more difficult for us to connect with for whatever reasons. There are a few guidelines or agreements that I've been working with, I've been learning about from... from training in multiculturalism, and these are some guidelines that really help in any kind of communication. I first was introduced to these at the East Bay Meditation Center, which is a practice center in Oakland, and it's a center that opens its doors to everyone and is accessible partly because it's near BART, it's in a storefront, and programs are offered freely.

[32:28]

People can contribute what they're able to for the programs there. And it was started by a group of teachers, some of whom had trained it, most of whom had trained it, Spirit Rock, but with an understanding that this is a practice center that is especially available to people who have been traditionally marginalized. And there are affinity groups there for people of color, for the LGBTIQ community, for people with disabilities. And all the classes that are offered there that are co-led are co-led either by people of color or a person of color with a white teacher. And it's a place that really works on including everyone and being open and available.

[33:41]

So a few of the communication agreements that I think are relevant to all of us and relevant to expanding our way of looking at things, the first one is try it on. So that is, if there's a perspective that seems difficult or different, can you just be open to it, to try... doing things in a way that might not be the usual way or what you prefer or are familiar with. So like extending yourself to someone you don't know so well and being friendly, greeting them and having a conversation.

[34:47]

as a start. And then another one is practicing both and thinking. So how can we hold two different emotions at the same time or two different points of view at the same time and try to be spacious and have an ability to take in and to express both sides. So one way of doing that is saying and instead of but. Often we'll say, I feel sad, but I'm really okay. I feel sad and I'm okay. One doesn't cancel out the other. And a third is to refrain from blaming or shaming oneself or others. Often in a situation we might, especially if we're not happy with how something is going, we might tend to blame ourselves or to blame someone else.

[36:05]

But instead can we look at what our contribution is, but to acknowledge that, or what the other person's contribution is, that we're both bringing something to the situation and it's not one person's fault. And then one other one is practicing mindful listening. So being able to just listen to what someone else is saying with an open mind. So I think those are some of the practices that can help us day to day in our communication with one another. And I'd like to just come back to Naomi's poem as a way to close. But before that, I'd like to just invite you to turn towards someone sitting next to you, and if you would be open to it, to just look at that person face to face, eye to eye.

[37:19]

Just take a look. at someone sitting next to you. Thank you. I'm struck by how so often during Dharma talks we tend to look down at the floor and not at one another. or nod at the speaker, and what does it take to feel some connection with people sitting around us or sitting next to us, even in the Buddha Hall, and to realize as we each experience the talk or whatever our thoughts are in our own way, that we're also connected to one another and sharing this experience. So I'll just end with the end of Naomi's poem, and then I thought we might just take a moment of silence today.

[38:31]

So I'll do the poem first, and then we'll get to the moment of silence. I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in, the shared world. Not a single person in that gate, once the crying of confusion stopped, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those people too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. So perhaps we could take a moment of silence and extend our loving kindness to those in the world who are suffering in the streets of our city, in cities all around the U.S.

[39:48]

all around the world, and not only cities. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings know ease of well-being. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[40:52]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:01]

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