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 evening, everyone. It's really nice to be here. So many new faces. Is this really loud? I feel like I need to whisper. I won't. So welcome if this is your first time to San Francisco Zen Center, to City Center. I had a talk prepared for you. And it was a good talk. And it started like this.

[01:02]

Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take. These are words. It goes on. I was going to read you the whole thing in the talk I had prepared. And then Paris happened. And the reaction on social media, the media, the inevitable backlash of retaliation and bombings and houses searched in districts of high unemployment and overcrowded housing, all leading to further despair. and hatred, and the violence is endless.

[02:11]

So my housemate, Claire, innocently asked me, oh, so are you going to talk about Paris on Wednesday night? And I kind of froze, and I was quite overwhelmed. And I had my talk prepared. You know, it was a good talk. It was safe. And what do I have to say in the face of all of this? Unbeknowingly, she had handed me a hundred-foot pole. I'm sure some of you are familiar with the koan, the teaching of the hundred-foot pole. It's a famous Zen koan, but maybe some of you aren't familiar with it, even though you really are.

[03:15]

It goes something like this. The awakened person sits on the top of a hundred-foot pole. She has entered the way, but is not yet genuine. She must take a step from the top of of the pole. And the worlds in the 10 directions will be her complete body. When we sit at the top of the 100-foot pole, we sit in a nest of our stories. Perhaps she is sitting on a meditation cushion up there. It's familiar up there. but maybe not so comfortable. Our stories are very small, after all, and oftentimes not very kind. When we step off the 100-foot pole, we leave these stories behind.

[04:22]

I'd like to lead you on a guided meditation, if you will. so willingly agree to oblige me here. It's from work from a woman called Joanna Macy called Coming Back to Life. Closing your eyes. Focus your attention on your breathing. Don't try to breathe any special way. slow or long. Just watch the breathing as it happens, in and out. Note the accompanying sensations at the nostrils or upper lip, in the chest or abdomen.

[05:27]

Stay passive and alert. As you watch the breath, note that it happens by itself. Without your will, without your deciding each time to inhale or exhale, it's as though you're being breathed, being breathed by life. just as everyone in this room, in this city, on this planet now, is being breathed by life, sustained in a vast living, breathing web. Now visualize your breath

[06:34]

as a stream or ribbon of air. See it flow up through your nose, down through your windpipe, and into your lungs. Now from your lungs, take it through your heart. Picture it flowing through your heart and out through an opening there to reconnect with the larger web of life. Let the breath stream as it passes through you and through your heart appear as one loop within that vast web, connecting you with it. Now open your awareness to the suffering that is present in the world. Drop for now all defenses inside And open to your knowledge of that suffering.

[07:39]

Let it come as concretely as you can. Images of your fellow beings in pain and need. In fear and isolation. In prisons, hospitals, tenements, refugee camps. No need to strain for these images. They are present to you by virtue of our inter-existence. Relax and just let them surface. The vast and countless hardships of our fellow humans and of our animal brothers and sisters as well. as they swim the seas and fly in the air of this planet. Now breathe in the pain like dark granules on the stream of air up through your nose, down through your trachea, lungs, and heart, and out again into the world net.

[08:53]

You are asked to do nothing for now, but let it pass through your heart. Be sure that stream flows through and out again. Don't hang on to the pain. Surrender it for now to the healing resources of life's vast web. With Shantideva, the Buddhist saint, we can say, let all sorrows ripen in me. We help them ripen by passing them through our hearts. making good, rich compost out of all that grief so we can learn from it, enhancing our larger collective knowing. If no images or feelings arise and there is only blankness, gray and numb, breathe that through. The numbness itself is a very real part of our world.

[10:00]

And if what surfaces for you is not the pain of other beings so much as your own personal suffering, breathe that through too. Your own anguish is an integral part of the grief of our world and arises with it. Should you feel an ache in the chest, a pressure in the ribcage, as if the heart was would break. That is all right. Your heart is not an object that can break. But if it were, they say the heart that breaks open will hold the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing. When you step off the pole, you step right into the vast web of life.

[11:22]

It is the teaching of no separation. My small life becomes very big, for in my big life I am one with all beings. For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river. As our ancestor Dogen Zenji says, the Zazen of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time. So in Zazen we practice no separation. We know it then, we forget it. In the meantime the world suffers. When we get off our cushions, then what do we do? My daughter Olivia and I were talking about France on Monday morning.

[12:31]

And when I told her that homes were being searched in France, she asked, Muslim homes? Oh no. I understand they want to defend themselves, but most of those people are innocent. Olivia's 16. It's just going to continue, she said. Then a car in front of us made a bad driving move. And I said, hey, that kid's from your school, isn't he? And I was going to pull up in the parking lot and tell him, hey, that was so not cool. And just to really mortify her, but it really wasn't. And she goes, oh yeah, that's That's so-and-so. And she goes, oh, yeah, he's a really great guy. You know, Mama, he went all the way through the Boy Scouts, and then when he got to that, like, the top level, he refused the badge until the Boy Scouts accepted gay boys in the Boy Scouts.

[13:36]

So, of course, I start crying. She's like, are you crying? So, you know, in that moment... In that moment, all I could see was his bravery. Had he stepped from the 100-foot pole? I don't know, maybe not. But we had just been talking about Paris, and now we were talking about hope. So when I thought about what's something that I can say about Paris, I think that what came to me was hope. And the one thing that I can say to all of us in this room is that if we know we are part of this vast web, that that is not enough. There's so much suffering in the world.

[14:38]

Masses of immigrants desperate for a home, untold numbers of human beings living in squalor, I was listening to the radio and a woman with a French accent said, you just don't understand in America. These people live with no hope of upward mobility. And I thought, how many people right now in San Francisco live with no hope of upward mobility? My horoscope in 2015 begins. In 2015, the last encounter between Uranus and Pluto occurs in March. The culminating seventh step, so I'm very lost. I don't know, maybe this makes sense to some of you, but I'm kind of lost. With a four-year planet-wide evolutionary crisis.

[15:40]

Now it starts to get my attention. Hopefully, we will all be awake by now, I like this woman, wrote this horoscope. Taking action through projects of hope. So of course I start thinking, you know, am I taking action through a project of hope? You know, I couldn't see how, you know, so I kept turning this and then I started creating these really big, amazing projects like in my head. And, uh, and then start close in. Take the first step. How could my daily work, how could my actions be devoted to creating hope for others? So very easily. I mean, I work for San Francisco Zen Center. So with the way I collaborate with my coworkers,

[16:46]

with the way we create our budget, with the way I mother my teen, the way I pick up the newspaper on the curb in front of my house, the way I get out of bed and onto the cushion. It was all kind of feeling like, oh, my life can be a project of hope. So do I have anything to say about Paris? I do, for you and I are not separate. And I am saying this to us in this room, that we have to turn this light, we have to turn the light of our lives outward. We've got to take a stand. We've got to get off our cushions.

[17:47]

We've got to have our voices heard. voices of reason, a voice for the voiceless. We must dedicate our lives to creating, supporting, and being projects of hope. Every morning at Sun Center, we dedicate the merit of our practice to the well-being of all beings throughout all world systems. We don't hold back. throughout space and time. It's pretty big. To unborn beings. It's beautiful. And we must vote. And we must canvas. And we must register voters. This is an election year coming up.

[18:49]

and we must take the step off the 100-foot pole. Is your work now a project of hope? If you think not, can you shine the light of hope on your work? I bet it's not that hard. Start close in. The other morning I heard a report on the radio. Our governor, Jerry Brown, has convened hundreds of world-renowned researchers and scientists to issue a groundbreaking call to action called the Consensus Statement. And it translates key scientific findings from desperate fields into one unified document. In his inaugural address this year, Jerry Brown announced that within the next 15 years, California will increase from one-third to 50% the electricity derived from renewable resources, reduce today's petroleum-using cars and trucks by up to 50%, double the efficacy,

[20:19]

savings from existing buildings and make heating fuels cleaner. It goes on and on. And it's really like, this is a real stretch. And so many people were saying, that's crazy, it cannot be done. And yet, he has gone out and collectively got 57 jurisdictions, from 19 countries and five continents to sign on to this. Collectively, it represents more than $17.5 trillion in gross domestic product and 572 million people. If signatories represented a single country, it would be the largest economy in the world, and this has been the doing process. of our governor.

[21:20]

In a couple weeks, maybe it's next week, he heads to Paris, and I see this as hope. He is leading the world. California is leading the world in climate change. Pope Francis was here in the United States, and he addressed Congress. And he wasn't so forceful when he addressed Congress. But then he got the next day in front of the United Nations. And he had a very soft voice. But he had a very, very strong call to action. And he pointed the finger at the global elite for the problem that we are in. He said the system is a garden of plenty. But his concern is with the global underclass. the vast ranks of the excluded. They are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the consequences of abuse of the environment.

[22:30]

He lambasted our culture of waste. Climate chaos will lead to a world where nations are fighting over the most basic of human needs. and millions of refugees fleeing extreme weather, heat, and drought. Francis's is a project of hope. I'm stepping off the 100-foot pole, and I'm going into politics. And they say that my candidate is not electable, for he is a public servant, not a movie star. I will not name his name. But they say that he's grumpy. And people who know him say, yes, he comes off that way. Because he's thinking about vets who need surgery, guest workers who've had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists, and other people

[23:35]

God-forsaken problems that the rest of us really think about maybe for a few minutes here and there throughout the day. His, I see, as a project of hope. For he has not lost hope in this system. And I can't allow myself to either. Well, we... may not be putting ourselves through the humiliation of a presidential election or leaving the world in climate change policy or shaking the Catholic institution to its core, but I am convinced that by returning to our precepts, living by our Bodhisattva vow and letting it be our compass, and vowing to take the first step, the step you don't want to take, that we too are devoting our lives to a better world, a world of hope, and with that step, we step right into the web of being, and we will know

[25:02]

that the world in the ten directions is our own body. I wanted to end with a poem of hope. And I know some of you have heard this before, but it's so good. We're going to hear it again. It's called Gate A4 by Naomi Shehab Knight. Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed for hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumbled to the floor, wailing.

[26:12]

Help, said the flight attendant. Talk to her. What's her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. Okay, I apologize for this. Shudoa? It sounds... Anyway... The minute she heard any word 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. We'll get there just later. Who's picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son. I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons, just for the fun of it.

[27:15]

Then we called my dad, and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, 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 all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled out a sack of homemade mamul cookies, little powdered sugar, crumbled 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 woman 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 was no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered in powdered sugar too.

[28:26]

And I noticed my new best friend was Nat 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 tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I 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 other women too.

[29:28]

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. I was talking to my Dharma brother, former husband, on my way over. He happened to call. I told him I was giving the Dharma talk and he said, geez, don't put them all to sleep. So I hope I haven't. lovely spending the evening with you. 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. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:30]

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