Well, I was born in Concord, Massachusetts, across the street from Walden Pond. And I feel like that's a part of my identity because that's where Henry David Thoreau did his hermitage. And my parents were a big influence on my interest in spirituality. My mom, some of you met this summer. She was here for Paul and Brother David's retreat. I consider her a contemplative Christian. She was raised Catholic and regularly does silent retreats, three-day silent retreats at Benedictine monasteries from time to time. We can really connect about what's in practice. She likes Thomas Merton, and we get along great. I can tell her about Sasheen, and she can turn it with me, and we can have these really rich conversations. And my dad was even maybe a bigger influence in my path of interest in spirituality. He was a priest, a Catholic priest, before having me.

[01:09]

My mom, let me just go back to my mom for a second. They knew each other as kids in New York City and Long Island, and my mom married a classmate of my dad's named Bob, and they had four kids together. This was my mom's first marriage. They had four kids together, my older brothers and sisters. And later, about 12 or 13 years into that marriage, my mom divorced Bob. He was an abusive, alcoholic person, and that marriage was ending. And then meanwhile, my dad, I want to say, he grew up and suffered some really tragic losses as a young person. He was 12 when his older sister, who was 17, died in a car accident. And his family didn't deal well with death and loss. They shut the doors and windows and shut out the world and didn't talk about death and didn't talk about grief, and his dad then proceeded to drink himself to death. So within a few years, my dad lost his sister and his dad, and really at the age of 12 or

[02:17]

15. So I think this propelled him to become a priest and start looking for answers to these life questions about suffering. The type of priest he became is called a Maryknoll priest, or Maryknoll Father. It's an order that does a lot of social justice activism in the world. He went to Bolivia in the 1960s, 1964, and was there throughout the 60s. And for those of you who know Latin American history, Bolivia was a, well, I don't know if it still is, but it was a fascist government, a military government at that time, and there was a movement in South America called Liberation Theology. And the idea here was, there's a huge class distinction down there, and the poorest nation in the, it was one of the poorest nations in the world, still is, and so the military government is in support of that and in the control of the uppermost class, and then you have a vast amount of extremely poor individuals. And then the church, the high church, is kind of a corrupt institution as well.

[03:17]

So my dad's role down there as a missionary, I think less of the sort of convert and conversion kind of missionary. He did a lot of activism and community development work, and I want to tell you about a couple of those things. I'll just say right up front, he's really a giant in my life. So in South America, he was the regional director of adult education and trained curriculum for volunteer teachers in 23 local communities. So he administered and budgeted a literacy program to train, to teach 1,300 non-readers. He coordinated volunteers, government agencies, and resource personnel to bring water to 2,000 isolated families in Cochabamba, Bolivia, administered two child nutrition prenatal care clinics, and supervised personnel in the distribution of emergency relief supplies for Catholic relief services, about a quarter million dollars of relief. He's really highly educated, had three master's degrees, one in education, one in divinity and one in counseling. And then he, in this activism role in South America, when you do things like teach the

[04:22]

poor how to read to empower them, you're not favored by this fascist government. So he was put in the prison a number of times in Cochabamba, in Bolivia. He saw immense suffering. I know he did funeral services for countless babies dying of dysentery, counseled or served to leper communities and things like this, and just bared witness to the suffering and poverty of a third world nation like that at that time. Eventually, this imprisonment of activists like this became more serious, and they were actually executing activists like this, and he left Bolivia for his life in 1969, came to America. Post-World War II, America, meanwhile, had built supermarkets and highways, and he came back and saw the opulence of our world, of our nation, and just wept, saw a supermarket and just cried. And so he had to sort of put the broken pieces of his life back together. And Zen, he left the church, by the way. He thought the church was a totally corrupt institution by this point. But the spirituality of Jesus's life and model, I think, was still important to him.

[05:23]

So Zen and Buddhism helped make sense of that suffering that was in him, and so I saw evidence of this as a really young child. And so I can remember at the age of nine seeing a painting of Shite, this Zen eccentric companion of Hanshan, and my dad would say, see, Maddy, that's a Zen master. He's holding a broom, and he's just loving and joyful in the simplest of activities. He's sweeping. Look at him. He has this ear-to-ear smile. And I was like, yeah, cool. And then my dad was really influenced by Alan Watts and others at that time, and Martin Buber and Carl Young and Joseph Campbell. And we would go fishing in Maine every summer in the wilderness up there, and he would convey to me, we would have these conversations about dreams and the mind, and it was like a tutelage sort of in a way. And he was a real pacifist. And then I had this stepdad who was really violent. So I grew up bouncing back and forth between my mom and dad's house, so I'd see a lot of

[06:23]

violence around my brothers. There's broken glass, and I'd see them arrested and bloody one another. And they never really took it out on me, because all my life they outweighed me by 200 pounds. They're massive. But I still was around all the time. I was always hiding under tables and stuff like that. And so that contrast, I know, that set in me a real vow at a young age to try to find a peaceful way to be in the world, and my dad's example was important. Wilderness definitely became his next church, and that's where we both dove into spirituality kind of exploration together. And he would teach me the Dharma, but I didn't know what was that at the time. He would teach me things like if I had a headache, he'd say, and this he probably learned as a somatic therapist too, he'd say, like, what color is it? How big is it? How much water would it hold? And he would invite me into suffering physically. Sound familiar? And then the headache would either go away or change, or he'd say, can you let go of it? And I would let go of it. And he would convey these Alan Watts stories to me about life is like doing dishes.

[07:24]

You can either look over at the stack of dirty dishes and just be like, oh shit, or you can totally get off on each action, the bubbles and the warm water and just like, yeah, okay. And he encouraged me to live life this way, and we both were really interested in the sense of flow, where like kind of a search for samadhi, where performance athletes experienced sort of a dropping off of self, gymnasts and whatnot. So from a pretty young age, I got into things like rock climbing and sailing and skiing and stuff like that. I can remember at the age of nine, picking a Buddha, dropping ashes on the Buddha by Master Sung Song, Korean Zen master off my dad's bookshelf. And it's a book of koans. I didn't really get anything about it other than the cover dropping ashes on the Buddha meant if you worship the icon of the Buddha, you're missing the point that it's an interior direct experience in your life. And I understood that much anyway at that time. And so life went on, and my dad's other quality that was really palpable and influential is his loving presence. He continued, he was worldly.

[08:25]

He took his skills from South America, and he became a bilingual guidance counselor in our public junior high school, where for the next 10 years, he did, among other things, developed chairperson coordinator of 766 special education programs. And so I went to visit him at school, and people just loved him. But mostly I'd see him going through toll booths or going to convenience stores, the kind of presence he attended to giving and exchanging change with the merchant or genuine care of how are they doing. And loving presence, that's all I can say, it's just it was very palpable. And so growing up to teenage years now, I started sitting, when I was 17 in high school, I just started sitting zazen three times a day, 20 minutes at a time in my dorm room in high school. And I started, I read the Zen of Seeing, and I just noticed, and I started getting Gary

[09:26]

Snyder and Annie Dillard and nature writers, Gretel Ehrlich. And I just noticed how much more extroverted, oddly enough, I was when I sat zazen on days when I didn't, because actually I think I felt more ease and more presence with my peers, and maybe a little less self-conscious. So I went on to college, I went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a really radicalizing institution, because my first year I was there, I was just hit with like, here's what's going on in the world, from a really liberal perspective. The environment, just got loaded with facts on the state of the environment, social justice, and became very depressed in the face of all that information, and felt despair, really. I felt really clear about how people saw themselves, human beings see ourselves, see themselves as the center of the universe, and I actually felt like, through wilderness time and otherwise, that we weren't, that we're just common citizens in the world among species.

[10:27]

And that this was such a powerful paradigm for humanity, that this could never be overcome, actually. And as long as it wasn't, this anthropocentrism would ruin the world, basically. Deep depression. And so I was really depressed, I was in college, and my professor crossed the room, like there were three professors, somebody else was teaching, there was 300 people in a lecture hall, and this professor just walked up to me in the middle of a crowd, maybe I was crying in class, I don't know, and he said, have you ever read Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior? And I was like, no, maybe I should. So I did. And I read other things, and the notion of taking refuge really hit me, the three refuges, and also the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings was the first time I really heard a religion that addressed this notion of sort of an antidote to what I perceive as sort of this anthropocentrism. So college went along, the next year I felt like, because of what my dad and I had been doing and my notion of the need for rites of passage, and Campbell and Jung still turning

[11:32]

in my head. I went to Alaska alone when I was 18, and I did a lot of solo wilderness travel, sea kayaking and travel, and Denali National Park on my own, and taught natural history and stuff up there. It was a very spiritual experience to be in this, Alaska is a lot more wilder than the lower 48, I'll just say that, rich. I mean, one moment there was whales, salmon, eagles, otters, glaciers, and I just felt like the world really is really abundant, and maybe that renewed my faith somewhat. I came back to school, and I did a traveling semester on a bus called the Audubon Expedition Institute. It's an intentional community with 20 students living on a school bus studying a region. We drove all around the northern Rockies, and I got to study on a number of Native American reservations at that time, and I'm not emphasizing that in this talk, but that's been a big part of my spiritual path, this Native American studies. So then this bus experience had a really open curriculum.

[12:33]

You could study whatever you wanted, and given a lot of room, I guess what I wanted to do was study meditation, Tao physics was really important to me that year, and I built a Cesar bench once on my break, and I just started sitting outdoors. We lived outdoors, slept outside every night. The winter in South Dakota was really rough. And then this leads me up to my senior year in college. I became depressed again, and I think I was depressed for two reasons. One is my girlfriend at the time and I went through an abortion, and just the experience of that death of a life really struck me, and I went with her to the clinic and really was there. Yeah, it's really sad as I think about it. And also anxiety about what to do after college was hitting me hard. So I went home that winter in December, I told my parents about the abortion, and I told my dad about it, and he was like, get into your breath, get into your body, and we did some breathing exercises. And then two months later, I went out to Olympia, Washington.

[13:35]

My parents were in Boston, mind you, and I'm in school, and it's a February, sunny day in February, and I'm biking home from school to my house, and my girlfriend intercepts me in her car and says, put your bike in the car. Okay, we get back to the house. We don't even go to the house. We go to a local city park, and my mom is there. She's crossed the coast. She's standing in a sunny meadow, and she's in a black, like, cape kind of thing. And she says, your dad's sick, you know, and I knew he was gone already. I said it to her, is he gone already? She said, mm-hmm, he had died. And we started making our way to the East Coast, and so I was 21, senior year in college, just overnight, he's gone. So I don't have an experience of dying. When someone dies to me, they're just gone overnight. So I made my way home, and as we made each step of the way, my mom started breaking more

[14:38]

news to me. He had committed suicide, and then I got home, and they're like, and the reason he committed suicide was that in a role as a school counselor, some accusations had been brought against him for sexual misconduct with a student, inappropriate, and a lawsuit had surfaced. And he started to, well, he was despairing, obviously, and he wrote a note and planned his suicide. My mom found it the day before he tried, and said, Richard, you know, what are you doing? She is going through some of the trauma of the accusations, and the media was hounding our house. I didn't know about any of this. And she said, you know, I'm not suicidal because I feel guilty. I'm suicidal because I can't, the shame and the, I can't stand to be tried by the media. Basically, we had newspapers, and you know, his career was ruined. If you work with children, and you have even an accusation, even if you're innocent, your

[15:40]

career is gone. He was 60-something, 60 years old. But he succeeded the very next day. He asphyxiated himself in a car in a public garage. And so, fortunately, in the state of depression, I had begun sitting with a Vipassana group every week before, in the fall. So I continued with that, and I continued with counseling I was already doing, and I was really committed to sort of healing through diet and exercise and meditation. And I graduated school. I don't know how the hell I got through that spring semester, but I did. And then I really gave myself to my body. I just said, I just started climbing and sailing a lot more, and skiing. I became a ski bum in Colorado, and a climbing bum lived out of my truck for months and climbed all over the country. And then went off-shore sailing from Rhode Island to South America. And at the meantime, I had applied to a Green Gulch practice period.

[16:42]

And I was in Venezuela, or Trinidad, and I got my mail forwarded or something. My mom read me a letter, said Green Gulch practice period starts in like a week or something. And like 48 hours later, I flew from Venezuela to Boston to Green Gulch and sat my ass down for my first practice period. And unfortunately, I'm out of time, but I'd like to tell you more about the next two steps. Okay, so my first practice period was with Reb in 97, and at Sashin, I really heard from Reb the echo of my dad's voice, and it really affirmed to me how my dad had been teaching me exactly what I needed to know to come to terms with his death. And that through sitting, with the physical pains that we sit in Zazen and Sashin, I learned to trust and relax that. And then the emotional pain that had been shelved for two years surfaced, and I grieved really hard, and really a lot of compassion came up for my dad for the level of suffering that he went through. But then the grief and the suffering also came up connected to the pains of my childhood

[17:47]

and the violence I had lived among, as well as that pain of the world that I was speaking of ecologically, socially, justice, none of it was differentiated, it just was all there and all of it with compassion, and all of it just meeting it. So I pretty much started practicing that day, I knew I'd never leave, you know, kind of saved my life, I think. And then the next fall, I met Mimi, and we lived together at Green Gulch, you know, as co-practitioners for like nine months, and then we started dating, and then we moved away from Green Gulch, and eventually moved up to, went to Upaia for a year, and then moved up to Seattle for the next four years so I could go to graduate school in ecology. We got married at the Green Gulch Zen Do in 2002 with Linda Ruth, and in 2003 I did Jukai with Linda Ruth there, too. And then Mimi and I spent a year in reflection about, with a Rinzai Zen abbot psychotherapist in Seattle, exploring our fears, concerns, and draw to starting a family.

[18:50]

And we concluded that we did want to start a family, but that we wanted to go to Tassajara for a year first. And that's what brings us here. While living in Seattle, we lived with a group of practitioners, five practitioners, and had a Zen Do in our house, and kept that going for four years, and many of, basically all of us had San Francisco Zen Center monastic practice as a shared experience, and that was a great experiment. So, thanks. Thank you.

[19:20]

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