Thank you very much. Now, by interesting coincidence, I brought you something. And guess what? It's also flowers. Would you like to go around and give each young person a flower? And maybe you could say one word to each person as you give them a flower. Did everybody get one?

[01:18]

Oh, that little boy in there. I'm sorry. [...] How many petals are on each flower?

[02:23]

Three. Three. Okay, so name three things that you really like. I like flowers, and I like shiny, and I like a couple What was the second one? Chinese? So the first one was flowers. The last one was a Buddha. And what was the one in the middle? Chinese? Very good. Thank you. So, flowers, Chinese, Buddha. And then if you see inside, three more. Anyone else? things you really like? Oh, very good Sebastian.

[03:33]

How about you? You don't know? Okay. How about you? It's okay. Anyone else think of three things they like? Okay.

[04:35]

The next question. What color is imagination? All colors. What would you say? Do you agree with him? Okay, good. Okay, what color is imagination? All colors. All colors. What do you say? All colors. What would you say?

[05:37]

Okay. Well, here's an easier question. If you had to think of yourself as a plant, what plant would it be? If you had to think of yourself as a plant, a tree, a plant, a bush, a grass, what would it be? A grass. What was the last word? A grass car? I hadn't thought of that one. Very good. What would you say? A tree. Any kind of tree? Short tree? Tall tree? Wide tree? Skinny tree?

[06:49]

a tree filled with flowers. If you got into the courtyard, you'll see where these flowers came from. And right now, that big bush is growing up the wall and covering all of Lucy's window. And right now, it's just filled with flowers and just a little bit of leaves. Don't you think that's kind of amazing? Do you think a bush is happy when it has a lot of flowers on it? Yeah? No. No. It doesn't even know it has flowers on it. It doesn't know. How come it can't talk? Does it need to talk to know? How do you know it doesn't know? Because plants don't know anything. They don't know anything.

[07:51]

How do the... Have flowers each spring. They think they... So they don't know anything. They just be. Okay. So... Thank you. And now as you leave... You can all take one or two of these and give them to somebody here. See, can you surprise somebody? Okay? You can all take some and give them to some people. And you can say something to the person if you like. Go ahead. Well, thank you.

[08:54]

. . . Oh, gee. So thank you very much for coming.

[10:12]

And please enjoy your tea and your time together. And think up some more amazing questions to ask yourself. Okay? Thank you. She can go now. Oh, you're going to go that way. Which way are your shoes? Can you remember, are your shoes that way or that way? That way. Well, then you should go that way. See you later. I'm not quite sure what that proved or what was the profound lesson from that.

[11:55]

If you've thought of one, you can tell me later. For me, it's just the enchantment of children being themselves. There's something so immediate, so unrehearsed, and unexpected in how they respond to the situation. And in a way, it ties, in my mind, it ties into what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about very well, which translates as energy. And it appears in Buddhism in a variety of lists. At this period of time, we're having something called a practice period, where a group of people commit to increasing their practice and doing it together. And Jordan, who's leading that, the tanto, the teaching he's using is the six paramitas, the six perfections, or the six ideals of practice.

[13:10]

So it appears in that list. And then it also appears in another list. that I've been studying, which are called the six faculties or dispositions or capacities. It's like the foundational capacities that we develop to be awake. And that list, so one is about disposition and then the other one is more about ideal. So an ideal, a perfection, it offers us a guideline. And then cultivating a capacity, a facility, an ability to bring a certain way of being into our life. That's what the other list is about. How do we bring energy into our life? And actually, it's not a matter of bringing energy into our life. The energy is already there.

[14:12]

It's more about getting in touch with it, And on one hand, letting it flow, being receptive to it, and then on the other hand, engaging it skillfully. The last time I talked, I talked about the first faculty, which is trust, confidence. That's cultivating an engagement in our lives that yields an appreciation for our life as it is, a willingness to engage our life as it is, in contrast to a more usual disposition that runs through us. I was talking to someone recently and they said to me, Well, when I do this, I find out I'm discontent.

[15:18]

There's a discontent there. But then when I stop doing that and do the opposite, I find out there's a discontent there too. So that discontent is asking us to discover how to be the life we have. There's a short poem by Galway Cannell where he says, whatever happens, whatever what is, is what I want. Only that. He said that was his prayer. That was his intention. In a way, this is the disposition of Zazen.

[16:28]

We sit down and we experience the energy of what is. Not to say that we completely dissipated that wanting and not wanting. Know that we open up our willingness to experience so that it includes Wanting and not wanting. That we see how the passionate energy of our life involves itself in what arises. To such a degree that what arises becomes, passes away from our awareness. It entrances us. So part of the disposition, of cultivating the disposition of engaging the energy is something about shifting from needing to change it to allowing it to be.

[17:43]

And the skill from this is this exploration. is noticing how that is not what we're doing. That we invest a lot of energy in trying to make it what we want and stopping it from being what we don't want. And the trust comes in that rather than condemn ourselves for being like that, we trust that very human disposition. Okay. It's not in contradiction of Galway Cannell's prayer. Whatever what is, is what I want. It's like that's the ideal. And the ideal, maybe we could say that the ideal

[18:51]

is born and supported by our diligence. In other words, what we're trying to do is discover the trust that allows us to cultivate devotion. The last time when I was talking, I talked about a poem by Cesaro Malosh. He followed a track from trust through hope to love. Can you trust the part of you that's discontent when it does things this way and discontent when it does things the other way? Can some part of you pause and go, okay, hmm. What's that about?

[19:52]

Can you hold back from covering it with judgment? Can you hold back from making an issue of control? I have to fix myself or the world. Whoever is responsible for that state of affairs Can you hold back from that and let this very way things are be addressed? So in the context of practice, this is sraddha. This is trust. So the ideal is that we just sit. We're just aware of what is. And it just flows. Sometimes it's receptive, just receiving the moment.

[21:01]

Sometimes it's directive, engaging intentionally, expressing a wholehearted involvement in the life we have. Or in the language of Zen, actualizing The moment. Both actualizing and expressing the self that we are, the individual being, and actualizing the interconnectedness of all life. In Cheswar Malosh's poem, when he talks about, he uses the phrase that the world is living flesh. Hope is with you when you believe the world is not a dream but living flesh. In our abstraction, we turn the world into a kind of static state, a series of objects to be desired, to be feared, to be hated.

[22:17]

An exploration of virya is to watch how those objects can be energized. You think of something, you energize that, and it becomes more significant. It becomes more emotionally charged. Or not. You don't energize it. It just becomes like a passing sign. So the study of Virya is not to say one is right and the other one is wrong. The study of Virya is to say that we're all right. To trust that this is just the energy flow of human life. How we energize, how we don't energize. You know, to sit in Zazen and to literally let the physical sensations of Zazen tune us into the flow of energy in our body.

[23:34]

To watch how the unpredictability of the kids enlivens the situation, you know. And how we can sort of impose upon the situation some expectation, you know, it needs to happen like this. And that energizes it in a certain way. They're behaving or they're not behaving. They're getting it right or they're getting it wrong. But if we just open up and say, kids are kids, you know, they do whatever the heck they do. I crawl across the floor and try to eat all the flowers. Then as Chesla Maloy says, then it's more about love.

[24:41]

It's more about trusting life and it's more about creating a trustable life. A trustable kind of relatedness. In a way, you could say the passage of our human life is a passage in search of well-being. But something arises for us, some kind of dissatisfaction, discomfort, disconnection. And it turns us towards a search. very simple search. I want to be happier and I want to suffer less. And that journey becomes an investigation of self. And that investigation of self becomes an investigation of what you might think of as the kind of

[25:58]

the fundamental elements of a self, consciousness, emotions, a psychology, a personality, attitudes. And as we explore them, and we're less caught in a habituated response, we start to trust something larger than our own creation. And of course, we do this all the time. But usually, we retreat into a self-constructed world for comfort, for safety, for a whole variety of reasons. how to trust something larger.

[26:59]

And as Maglos says, as we do this, what arises in us is a kind of hopefulness. That the world can be engaged in a way that brings happiness, that brings freedom, that brings love, that brings creativity. And we discover that fundamentally this is about relatedness. This is an interpersonal activity. We're not doing this alone. We're doing it with all the other people on the planet. And we're doing it with the flowers and the bushes and the trees and the animals. And that something about our human capacity starts to be stirred up.

[28:16]

Our ability to step outside self-concern. Our ability to give and our ability to create. As we settle into what's called in Zen, shikantaza, just sitting. And we start to trust the experience of the moment and experience the interconnectedness of being, something starts to flower. As Katagiri Roshi, a teacher who used to teach here, said, saddle the self on the self and let the flower of your life bloom. And it's not something you figure out.

[29:28]

It's something you facilitate. You know, that's what these five faculties, you know, trust, energy, awareness, concentration. Concentration as a continuity of connection and awareness to what's going on. And as that's cultivated, The nature of what is becomes apparent. Not as something you read in a book, but as something you're living. Something you're experiencing. And that's shaping your thoughts and going beyond your thoughts. I'd like to read another poem. The great thing about poems is that we don't have to take them seriously. We don't have to think, oh, well that's a dogma.

[30:37]

We can get away with a lot in a poem. In a poem you can say, you must take time to imagine yourself as a bush. Nobody sort of writes that down and thinks it's a commandment, you know? It's more like a whimsical way to kind of delight in your own life. You need to know that no one has ever been here before, not even though. As though You are ever kneeling on an oblong Indian rug. Its faded tree, its dry bluebirds. To pray, open yourself, your whole self, to the sky, the earth, the sun, the moon.

[31:51]

to one whole voice, that is you. And know there is more that you can't see, can't hear, can't know, except in moments, steadily growing, that aren't always sound, but circles of motion. Breathe in, knowing we are made of all this. and breathe knowing that we are truly blessed because we were born and will die soon within the circle of motion like eagle rinding out the morning flying inside of us we pray that it will be done in beauty.

[32:53]

That poem was by a person named Joy Harjo. So I looked up, there's a little biography on each person in the back of this book. She's a Native American poet. But I love this last sentence, it says, She's also a multi-talented performer and saxophonist, combining poetry and chanting with tribal music with jazz, funk, and rock. With ego flying around inside of us. How do we create a sense of inner spaciousness? How do we create a sense of possibility that says, yes, when I put myself in these circumstance, there's still some discontent.

[34:10]

And yes, when I totally change my circumstance, there's still some discontent. How do we not let ourselves succumb to some subtle or blatant feeling of despair? How do we sustain a willingness to engage that engenders possibility? As Suzuki Roshi says, you know, In the beginner's mind, there's endless possibility. You know, how do we tune into ourselves and attend to what's going on?

[35:14]

So when this person said that to me, felt like the unspoken part was and I'm desperately stuck and I don't see a way out the rigor of practice The discipline of practice is that the world is not going to bend to your will, to your want and dislike. The world is going to be the world. That's the discipline.

[36:25]

Let's go away. Nell says, my prayer is to want it the way it is. I would say beautiful ideal, but at least if we're willing, maybe begrudgingly or tentatively or tenderly to explore it the way it is. Zazen is to sit down and settle ourselves enough to begin to explore what is the way it is. This zazen is like a 30-minute, a 40-minute free-verse poem about your life. It has its own beauty.

[37:31]

I think it's less about figuring it out as it is about witnessing it like a poem. This is today's expression of what it is to be you, of what it is to be a light. in the circumstances you're living in. And it's already filled with energy. Even when we become quiet and settled. You know, in the Buddhist sutras it says, when we become quiet and settled, the energy becomes more pronounced. So much so, it's like the hair on the back of your neck standing up.

[38:40]

It's like those moments of exhilaration. It's like those moments of enthusiasm when we forget And we forget that we were tired and we're just charged by being tantalized by the moment. Not to say that we should live in that state, but that we should know that this is the nature of energy. That it can flow. And that it's something about how we block it is what we're trying to work with. How we work against it and make ourselves tired. How we channel it in ways that cause us confusion and suffering.

[39:54]

And that when we're exploring that through the practice of awareness, It's not an expression of our own shortcomings or our own failures. It's just trusting the life we have and letting it flow. This is trust and energy. This is Zaza. And of course, attention to posture, attention to breath, a willingness to experience the moment are the foundational attributes. But there's also something foundational that we might call saddling and opening the heart. Trusting the life you're already living.

[40:57]

that the passionate play of the emotions and concerns and fears and delights that are flowing through you can teach you something. Here's a little poem by David White. Enough. These words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, Just sitting here. Opening to life. We have refused again and again. Until now. Personally, I've read that poem a hundred times. So something about knowing the language that works for us. What is it that reminds us?

[42:08]

Oh, yes. Reminds us to open, reminds us to allow, reminds us to trust. What is that? And each time you come to sit, each time you come to meditate, to do Zazan, can you bring forth that reminder? That is a vow. You know, devotion is a vow. And it's like a muscle. The more we exercise it, the more we engage it, the more that capacity, that facility comes into being. And I would say it's more like A deep sensibility than a well-crafted idea in your head.

[43:21]

It's more like looking out the window and seeing the bougainvillea just ablaze with iridescent, purpley-red flowers. Almost psychedelic. Realizing, you know, in that moment, in this moment, there's something extraordinary happening. For each of us to discover for ourselves, what are those gates where I can walk through and go into a world bigger than the world of self-concern? These are the questions of practice. And they're offered to us not for a clever response.

[44:26]

Not to trick us. But they're offered to us like a flower. You know, something to stimulate our appreciation. Our trust in our human life. Thank you.

[44:53]

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