Good evening. I'll say just a couple things about myself, just as a way of introduction. My name is Mark Lesser. I took a one-year leave of absence from Rutgers in 1973 and then spent the next ten years at Zen Center. I was at Tassajara. I lived at Tassajara for ten practice periods and six summers and I was here in between. I lived here from 1978 to 1980 and I was working as part of the draft horse farming project here and managed to survive, to tell about it, barely. In 1983, I was director of Tassajara and decided to go.

[01:15]

It just seemed obvious at that point to leave and go to business school on Wall Street, which is what I did. And more recently... I have two children who are 20 and 15. My son Jason was born when I was at Tassajara. I started a business called Brush Dance 15 years ago that makes cards and calendars and journals with spiritual themes. um i was um i was recently shusso in the city last the fall practice period and uh i've been um kind of co-leading company time on retreats for business people out here with norman fisher for the last um i don't know five seven years it's been a while um and i'm um

[02:17]

planning to be ordained as a priest with Norman at the city center this September. That's kind of a brief sketch about me. I've been studying these past several months with Norman. koans in the Muman Khan, and I feel like it's taken me many, many... I feel like for the first time, the koans have come alive in some way for me, and I wanted to talk about Case 38, which says... Wutsu said, it is like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window. Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through. Why can't its tail pass through as well? And I really love this story.

[03:20]

And when I was thinking about this story, the first image that came up for me was thinking about being with the birth of my children and being there as my children each pass through the opening of their mother. First the head and then the arms and body and feet. And there they were, but still there's some part of them that still felt connected to something else, something before they were born. And in a way, that something that was before they were born felt even more tangible and more connected to that in a way than this creature that just appeared. And I also think of the time I spent with my mother as she was dying. in breathing with her and that she was so present.

[04:24]

I was really trying to be present with her with each breath. And then there was that last breath as I was sitting with her and kind of chanting with her, breathing with her, holding her hand. And there was that last exhale and no more inhale. And and just being with her as she passed through, and yet there she was, still there. So this sense of this koan, this tale. In Wu Man's commentary he says, if you can get upside down with this one, discern it clearly and give a turning word to it, then you can meet the four obligations above and give comfort to the three existences below. But if it is not yet clear, pay close attention to the tail, and you will resolve it at last. I also, actually, when I was trying to think about what to talk about tonight, I was also thinking about, partly, it came up for me to talk about this case when I was thinking about Green Gulch and my relationship to Green Gulch.

[05:44]

And it's, in some way, I kind of feel like I never left here, that there's still some part of me that... I was just walking down in the fields sort of looking for that part. I was kind of combing through what used to be the old horse bins, looking for some horse equipment. Of course there is, there's little pieces of plows and things all around. And in some way, there's some part of me that still feels like a... You may not know this, but there's a part of me that still feels like a resident here. And sometimes when I come into Green Gulch, I just drive and park in the resident's parking lot, and I call it ex-resident's privilege. One of the... One of the stories I was thinking about, which I think relates to this feeling of this con and the turning upside down is that A cousin of mine, my cousin Gary, who lives in Florida, he's a pretty kind of straight business guy.

[06:55]

We were talking about Green Gulch and my experience at Zen Center, and he told me that he had blood pressure problems and was really concerned about kind of his life and death issues and asked if I thought it would be a good thing for him to come to Green Gulch and learn to meditate and spend some time here. And I said, yeah, I thought it would be a wonderful thing. And it was this huge thing for him to rearrange his life to fly out from Florida and come spend a weekend at Green Gulch. This was several years ago, I think four or five years ago, at the time when Norman was here and was abbot. And I mentioned to Norman, that my cousin Gary was going to come and ask Norman if he saw him to, you know, please make him feel welcome. So Gary told me after he was kind of, he wrote me this long letter about his experience at Green Gulch. And one of the first things he said is that when he arrived here, he pulled up in the parking lot and there was Norman.

[07:57]

Norman. And Norman came over and was very friendly, and they talked for a few minutes. And Norman said, you know, if you think that being here for a weekend is going to change your life, you're wasting your time. And Gary thought that was kind of a strange welcoming committee from Norman. Again, I think to me it's that sense of that tail. What does it mean to pass all the way through? What do we need to do to pass through? And then I think it was also that same weekend Norman lectured, and Norman started his lecture that Sunday morning by saying, you know, I've been practicing Zaza now every day for the past 25 years, and I'm not sure that it's made any difference. And again, my cousin Gary is sitting there. His letter was very funny. But in thinking about this koan, what it's saying to me is that to practice means to be fully alive beyond ideas and labels of success and failure, beyond our own fear, greed, grasping, even beyond ideas of coming and going, arriving.

[09:27]

And every moment, there's also no avoiding success and failure and coming and going. In Wu Man's comment, he says, if you can get upside down with this one, that is really turning your world upside down and seeing things from a different perspective, a perspective beyond failure and success, beyond right and wrong. Only when we get upside down and see clearly can we give a turning word. Only by turning our world upside down can speech come from a place that's clear enough, unfettered enough to actually help others. And yet, no matter where we are in our practice, We have to do something. We have to say something. We're constantly, we're constantly missing the mark, constantly causing pain, constantly causing confusion, despite our best intentions.

[10:30]

If it only weren't for that darn tail. Sometimes we cherish that tale. Sometimes we think if that buffalo could only go all the way through, if we could only get to that end point of practice where there was no more confusion, we had arrived. Sometimes we have such a foolish idea. This koan also made me think of a repeating dream that I have. It's a dream that I had a lot as a child and still every once in a while have this dream where I'm standing on the moon and suddenly I leap off the moon backwards and I'm spinning in the air with my head going over my feet and I'm just both terrified and elated at the same time, but more, well, I'm not sure which, a little bit of both. And then suddenly I land on my back

[11:36]

And I wake up, and I'm not quite sure whether I'm dreaming or whether I'm awake, whether I'm alive or whether I'm dead. And I'm lying there. I start to wake up, and I'm lying there in a sweat. I'm actually sweating from all that work of having flown through the air head over heels. And again, I think it's that feeling that Utsu's talking about of being upside down. He says, if you get upside down with this one, discern it clearly and give a turning word, then you can meet the four obligations. Again, he's in this koan, he's spelling out the path. Get upside down, see clearly, say something or act in some way that is authentic. Meet our obligations by giving comfort. If you can get upside down with this one, discern it clearly, and give a turning word, you can meet the four obligations, which these are our parents, the place that we live, all beings, and the three treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

[12:52]

I think in terms of this koan, these obligations as being kind of using the metaphor, these obligations are the window in this koan that we have to pass through And that we can really only pass through and meet these obligations when we turn our lives upside down. You know, in some way it's really difficult. It's amazing to me to see at my age how difficult it is to really meet our parents. And I continue to be amazed how much my parents are in me and that And really fully embracing how much my own way of seeing things is both fettered and clarified by what I inherited from my parents and my parents' parents. And that those seeds of my parents, how powerful that conditioning is and how...

[13:57]

Again, the only way I feel like I can see that clearly and begin to work with that is in a way to turn upside down. And I was thinking about that sometimes I think it's, for many of us and for me, we're first drawn to practice when we find for some reason that our worlds have been turned upside down. we get a glimpse of how much we're not really ourselves. And we get a glimpse of the possibility of actually being ourselves and finding a kind of real freedom, finding our true spirit that we're not even aware how much we're not ourselves until something happens that turns us upside down. And to me, this turning upside down helps me to see things with a fresh, open heart.

[15:01]

It means seeing everything as a gift and staying in touch with a part of us that is somehow still connected to this mystery, this mystery that I was talking about when children are born, when we're with birth, this mystery of the connection of before birth. And trusting somehow that the only way to really turn upside down, the only way to see things as fresh, is to have our worlds turned upside down, which often can be unexpected, unpredictable, and quite painful. Usually we spend so much of our energy wanting things to be straight. We want things to be clear and straight and avoid just how difficult and upside down our own worlds can be. It's so easy to avoid pain and difficulty. I was thinking of, again, in preparing for this talk, I was thinking of Harry Roberts, who, again, it's funny, I don't, I sometimes assume that, well, everyone in this, how many people in this room know who Harry Roberts was?

[16:23]

So most, but not everyone. Harry was a Yurok Indian scholar. trained shaman who was mostly Irish, but taught here for many years. He designed the gardens at UC Berkeley, and he was quite a brilliant, difficult, and crotchety man. But one of the things that he taught me, he taught me how to weld when I lived here. Well, it's funny, I should just mention that Things worked a little bit differently back during the time that I lived at Zen Center. There was much less choice about what you did and where you went. I had just been living at Tassajara for a year and a half when one day I was tapped on the shoulder and was told I was going to Green Gulch to go work with the draft horses.

[17:32]

And I thought for sure someone had made a mistake, that they must have misread my resume, that I had, you know, I was a pretty good gymnast. I did a lot of work with the horses, and they must have somehow saw that and thought that therefore I would be good with draft horses. And I had never been by a horse in my entire life. And I was suddenly in charge of this draft horse farming program here at Green Gulch. And my training was basically I was introduced to these two horses, Snip and Jerry, and was told that my task was to learn how to farm. Maybe I... Let's see. I'll tell... I wanted to tell at least one sort of Green Gulch story, or tell lots of Green Gulch stories, but the story that comes up as most prominent, in a way, in my days is what I think of as my... And it's also very appropriate for this koan, I realize.

[18:46]

Maybe a little bit of a stretch, but not too much. This was what I think of my most dramatic day at Green Gulch was... Not only was I taking care of horses, but we also had cows. Every day, I was milking Daisy, the cow. And... We were also breeding horses and cows. It was pretty incredible what we took on. But Daisy had just given birth to a calf. And I knew Daisy was this very sweet Jersey cow. And typically, there's often, there's real danger during this 24-hour period after cows give birth, particularly jerseys. I had, you know, I had read about it. And in fact, within a few hours of her giving birth, she suddenly went down on her stomach, which I had read meant that she was going to die within 24 hours unless we got a vet out here, and that it was essential that...

[20:01]

that we keep her propped up, that we not let her. Cows will die if they lie down. You don't see cows lying on their side. So this was, I don't know, probably like 1979, and this was right in the first shed, right before the first field. That was a milking shed. The garden shed. The garden shed, yes. And as soon as Daisy went down, we called the vet who said, you have to prop her up. And I was sitting in that shed with my back against the wall and my feet toward Daisy, sort of keeping her propped up, and of course right next to her tail. So that's how it's related to the book. LAUGHTER I told you it was a stretch. And a few hours later, the vet came and gave her this shot and she just kind of propped right up and popped on her feet and she was fine. And I wasn't so fine.

[21:05]

I was exhausted and I kind of dusted myself off. And I was walking back to the guy town, and someone came running up to me and said, there's a horse stuck in the pond. They didn't say this, but the story would be perfect if they said, and you can only see her tail. LAUGHTER And I said, what do you mean there's a horse stuck in the pond? Horses don't get stuck in the pond. So I ran back to the back pond, and Snip had been grazing in there and apparently went to get a drink and walked in too far and kept getting kind of sucked more and more into the pond. And she was up, right up to her chest. Were any of you here for that? We tried various methods of getting her out, all of which failed until we called the fire department and who somehow got

[22:24]

I don't know, 20 or 30 people from your beach and every, and everyone at all of the, you know, 40 or 50 residents here, we wrapped fire hoses around snip and, and everyone pulled, everyone pulled together on these fire hoses and pulled her out. Yeah. Of course around, you know, tail first. So that was, um, that was my most, um, exciting dramatic day at Green, at Green Gulch. Well, I was starting to tell this story about Harry Roberts, who taught me how to weld. One of the things about coming to Green Gulch from Tassajara is that I had never done anything with my hands. I had never done anything physical. And I realized that, again, looking back at my parents, my father was an electrician and a builder and could fix anything.

[23:26]

He was constantly tinkering with things. And I think he consciously... he didn't think that was a kind of worthy livelihood. And he wanted me to be a professional. So I think he showed me how to do absolutely nothing. So that's what I knew in terms of physical things, was absolutely nothing. And I came here, and being in charge of the horses, part of that was learning how to handle horses, learning to fix horse equipment, learning to... sew harness, and part of that was learning to weld. And Harry was my welding teacher. And one of the things he said about welding was that, he said that the secret of welding is to realize that the world is, that everything is actually liquid. And it just appears frozen. and that by applying heat to things, you return metal to its natural state, which is liquid, and then you can shape it and do whatever you want with it.

[24:35]

And then in his own way he would let out this huge laugh and he said, our lives are a lot like this also. That actually our lives are liquid and that we just see them as frozen. We just see ourselves, we just have this feeling of a self and this feeling of this being kind of stuck in this time and place and we think that that time is linear, and Harry would say that, you know, from when you see that the world is liquid, in some way, we haven't as yet been born, and we've already died, and that's the secret that we learn about our lives from welding. You know, after... Again, I feel like in some way one of the main things about this koan is this turning upside down, getting upside down as a way of seeing clearly. For me, after being at Zen Center for 10 years, I chose to enter the business world.

[25:44]

And in some way, this was, again, looking back, I'm not even quite sure how consciously or unconsciously I was making these decisions in my life. But in some way, I think I chose to enter the business world as a way to be turned upside down. In some way, it was the... It was the most difficult, most contrary thing I could ever imagine doing. It was contrary to every idea I had about myself, about what I thought I'd be good at, about what I thought I wanted to do. At the same time, it also seemed really natural because when I woke up one day having been director of Tassajara and realized that my activity was I was engaged in business. Though I was a Zen monastic, a lot of my activity was involved in

[26:47]

what would normally be sort of business activity. I was managing people, I was responsible for a budget, I was planning, and I just loved it. I felt so engaged in this process of both practicing, being in this monastic practice, and and an activity that gave me a lot of energy. So there was also... It both seemed like the most incredibly foreign thing to do and also had some real appeal. And, of course, I've had many what I think of as I should have stayed at Zen Center days or I should have gone to medical school days because in many ways it's been really... I feel like each day in business my world feels turned upside down and I feel turned upside down. There's a famous quote by Dogen where he says, when the Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient.

[28:01]

When the Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. Again, this quote, I feel like this is a quote that comes up for me, this koan, this sense about something's missing. Why doesn't the buffalo go all the way through? Why is there that tail? What is it that's missing? There's no limit to our understanding, and at the same time, I feel like there's no limit to our confusion. If we think differently, We've gotten to a place where we have complete understanding, this is Dogen's, the Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind. What's missing? The whole buffalo passes through the window, head, horns and four legs. Why can't the tail pass through? Our job in practice I think, is to remain open. Usually, when we hear something, we're comparing it to our own ideas.

[29:05]

We hear something and it either agrees with our worldview and we accept it, or it doesn't agree and we reject it. The buffalo passing through the window, except for the tail... to me means to be open, to be open to what we don't expect. We expect it would make sense that the buffalo would pass through the window, that it would go through completely. How could it? How could it go through completely except for the tail? What's there to learn here? What's there to learn about our lives? One of the questions that I've been turning is, And I don't know where this question comes from, but it's this question that says, what is the impossible request that this life asks of me? And I believe that we all have some unique gift, some unique mission, that it's no accident that we're here, that we're alive, that we're in this place at this time.

[30:15]

amazingly in the form of a human being. At the recent mountain seat ceremony, I asked Paul Haller this question during the ceremony, and I thought his answer really touched me. Paul's answer to this question was, to keep an open heart, to be open to our own and others' pain and suffering, and also to be open to joy. How could it be that this tale doesn't pass through? Why is it so difficult to really love ourselves and to accept ourselves and to accept ourselves and others as Buddha? Why is it that we're so easily fooled by our own stories? Why are we fooled by this story about the tale not passing through? Being open also means being open to the truth of our own pain and difficulty.

[31:24]

So often we want to hide from our pain, from our shame, embarrassment and suffering. Yet the more we look away, the more we become entangled in our own stories. Pain, failure, and disappointment tend to turn us upside down. And that turning upside down changes the way we look at the world and can open us, help us see things, be fresh. Yet it's hard to turn towards that pain, towards that tail not passing all the way through. I was thinking about a, I was telling Fu last week, the story on the path after last week's lecture, about a conversation I had with my son. That'd be great. Thank you. My son Jason, who's 20 years old,

[32:30]

We were standing in the kitchen, and one day he said, he said, look at you, Dad. You're old. You're short. You're balding. You're starting to limp. Your teeth are crooked. You're not very smart, and you're not wealthy. And I felt so proud of him. Thank you. Thank you. He also said, just to complete his thought process, he said he didn't want to be anything like me. And I... No, because he looked at me and he said, you know, you have a job and you have a house and you have children.

[33:37]

You have, like, all this responsibility. It's like, why would anyone want to do that? And... I could only stand there and kind of nod, you know. But I felt so... I felt so loving and connected and so glad that, and we've had, in fact, we had a, he and I had a wonderful, we had, he's working in my warehouse this summer. And I sat down for lunch with him in a Chinese restaurant and he looked up at me and he said, do you think of yourself as confident, as having confidence? Yes. And I thought that was a great question. I also think it's a lot like this koan. I answered his question with a question. I said, what do you mean by confidence?

[34:41]

What is confidence? And he said, well, you know, I don't really... He said, you know, you're giving this lecture tomorrow night at Green Gold. She said, you know, he says, I usually think of confident people as giving. And he's like, I'm confused. Is it because you're my dad that I don't see you as confident? It's like, you're trying to teach all these people something, but what have you ever taught me? Brutal, I know. Again, it's that, you know, it's that darn tale. I said, you know, I feel like... I've really tried my best with you, you know, to teach you that I hope that I've taught you, you know, through what I do and who I am and that I don't really believe so much in, like, I mean, do you want me, do you want us to set up lecture time, you know?

[35:53]

I somehow never thought that would be all that useful, but is there, you know, is there something that you want from me? And he said he would think about it. Yeah, so I... In some way, when he asked me that question, when my son asked me this question about why did I do these things that I do, I thought, well, what's the alternative? There's no avoiding responsibility. You can avoid the responsibility. You can... you cannot have children or you cannot have a house, and that's fine, but you cannot avoid being responsible.

[36:55]

And in a way this koan is talking about, our responsibility as practitioners is the responsibility of seeing clearly and the responsibility of helping give comfort to other people. And there's so many ways that we can choose to there's that that can take many many forms and there's no this idea i think that he has as a 20 year old that he can somehow it's a wonderful idea that you can somehow avoid all responsibility right be the eternal child and it's wonderful because i also and when he asked me that i realized i you know i don't i said i don't feel responsible for you and so it's like you you think that you know, I, I've never, I've never done any, I've never, I don't feel like I've ever sacrificed, you know, I, I don't do, I'm not working to make money to support him because, it's like, I, I don't think, he thinks that I think that way. He thinks that I'm working some job because I feel responsible.

[37:55]

I said, I've always just done what I want. And, um, I like what I do. I like, you know, I like my life. And I'm, at the same time, I'm still trying to figure out, you know, what I'm going to do when I grow up. But I said, you know, you should not count on me to be responsible for you because I don't, because I don't, if you, you know, it's time for you to be responsible for you. But I felt as he was, I loved his questions and I loved the spirit and I felt like in a way his questions were a lot like my questions, which is what is responsibility? What is freedom? How is it that our own ideas get in the way? And what does it mean to act freely, to act effectively and to act beyond these ideas of success and failure? In some way, this koan is about failure.

[38:56]

It's about failure in terms of something turning us upside down, something not meeting our expectations. The buffalo doesn't go all the way through the window. I'm part of a group called Social Venture Network, which is a group of business leaders from around the country. And this is a group of mostly very, very successful business people. So of course, I didn't feel like I fit into this group. And there was a meeting. This was a couple of years ago. This was in a room of about 300 people who are running companies but are trying to combine running companies with social responsibility. And this was a meeting that was being hosted by Ram Dass. who was really speaking from his heart and really kind of got people to a very, very kind of open place.

[40:01]

And people in this room, each person started talking. He would go around and give the person a microphone. And the first person started saying how... how much they felt that they didn't belong in this group, that they felt like an outsider. And the microphone went around and every person started expressing how much they felt that they didn't fit, that everyone had this image that everybody else was a successful business person and that they all didn't fit. And in a way, it was this wonderful, almost this kind of group crying and acknowledgement of that all of us felt like misfits and all of us felt like failures. And that that was this kind of wonder, it provided this wonderful opening to really get down and to turn upside down. And it provided, it set the whole tone for the weekend so that there was real, real human meeting.

[41:02]

And we were able to, you know, the conversation and the dialogue was not, you know, about business stuff. It was about human beings and about real meeting and real suffering. I thought that since... In fact, I intended to... I was going to come here for dinner tonight, but I was involved in this project at work of trying to find quotes about spiritual humor. And I kind of got into it, so I ended up staying a little bit too long to make it here for dinner. But I was thinking of how much I think... I think that laughter and comedy is such an important part of spiritual practice that often we miss or that I think we could all use more of.

[42:04]

I think there could be more of it here at Zen Center and everywhere for spiritual practitioners. I was thinking of, one of the things I was thinking of as I was sitting and writing, I was thinking about you know, shikantaza, just sitting. And I was thinking about somehow some connection between just sitting and stand-up comedy. And I thought, well, maybe there should be a school of Zen called sit-down comedy. You know, something about, something that combines humor and wisdom together. And a lot of the kind of quotes that Brush Dance does tries, and we try and do that, but it's so hard for any of us to really be funny. I don't know quite what it is. But one of my favorite quotes that we've published on a card is a quote from Teresa of Avila, who is an 11th century Christian mystic.

[43:15]

And she said, I know the universe won't give me more than I can handle. I only wish it didn't trust me so much. LAUGHTER I think I'm going to end with a poem by Hafiz. Have you guys been studying Hafiz at all out here? You probably mostly know, right, Hafiz, I think, Teresa of Avila's 11th century, I think Hafiz is 12th, 13th, 13th century, right, 100 years before Rumi. 14th century. a long time ago and I thought this as I was looking through Hafiz's poetry I thought this one was went really well with this koan and it's called Someone Should Start Laughing I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question how are you I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question what is God

[44:27]

If you think that the truth can be known from words, if you think that the sun and the ocean can pass through this opening called the mouth, oh, someone should start laughing. Someone should start wildly laughing now. Well, it's really just a phenomenal pleasure for me to... It's such a gift for me to be here with all of you, and I was... Fu has been inviting me to come and spend more time here, and I was checking out the schedule in the Gaitan, and I'd love to start coming and sitting with you all in the mornings when I can. There's a few minutes. I know that it's kind of close to bedtime here, but... It's getting dark. But if there's anything that anyone wants to say or ask or do, there's a couple minutes.

[45:41]

It was really steep. Well, I was admiring the rows of potatoes And one of the most fun and exhilarating things we did with the horses was harvest potatoes with horses, with two horses. And the machine was, it was like a blade. It was a real simple machine. It was holding two handles at about chest high, which went down to a big rounded blade. And then there was a wheel that turned behind the blade. So you go up and you line the horses so they're straddling the row. And the idea was to walk slowly and straight. So that the blade, when you are doing, for the moments when that's happening, the blade is going... It was, we learned a tremendous amount.

[46:54]

We had a man named Harold Hart who was this, he grew up, he was driving teams of horses since he was seven years old in Kansas. And he ran the stables up by, what's the name of that town? Just south of Point Reyes. Yeah, some of them are. Olima? Olima, right. There's a ranch in Olima that Harold Hart was our mentor, and like when we couldn't get a horse to load on one of the trucks, Harold would come down, and he used the two-by-four method of telling people. And it was not the Zen center. I mean, he would say, you guys are too gentle with these creatures, and he'd... So... It was a lot of things were wonderful about it, but it was hard to be a horse farmer and be practicing here. Because the schedule, I mean, we were usually up as early or earlier than...

[47:55]

and down getting the horses and preparing the horses for the day. So it was really hard to follow the schedule. And so there was some real questioning about being farmers, actually being farmers and following the schedule. And there was also this real, I think, though the learning curve was very, very steep, there was this realization that this was a three-generation commitment, that to farm, that I felt like I needed to spend the rest of my life being committed to doing this, horse farming, and that Zen Center needed to be committed to that for over generations, and that... And it just wasn't that, you know, when we really faced that, we faced the truth of that. And, I mean, my commitment wasn't there. I mean, it was like, I wanted to go back to Tassajara. And, I mean, I loved it, but, and, you know, and I felt totally devoted to it, but...

[48:59]

I think a combination of seeing the level of that commitment and there was, it caused some, you know, real conflict within the community. And, you know, I got tapped on the shoulder one day and went down to Tassajara and spent the next several years working in the Tassajara kitchens. And the horses soon, you know, were sold after that. I heard the story that the Dalai Lama's visit had something to do with that. Is there any truth to that? I never heard that story. I mean, there were lots of sub-stories. I mean, one of them was that, I mean, again, this was during the Richard Baker days, the Baker-Roshey days, and in part, there was also, there was a little bit of this feeling that Green Gulch was supposed to be a model, you know, and that in a way, the horses and what we were doing was, part of it was to raise funds, and part of it was, so there were multiple agendas going on.

[50:04]

I thought it was a very sincere and wonderful attempt, but again, it just was, I think, the infrastructure and commitment just weren't there to really pull it off. I mean, again, there were horses, and we were breeding horses. There were cows, and we were breeding cows. And there were chickens. At one point, someone calculated we were growing the most expensive eggs in the world. But if you were to actually cost, if you were to include labor costs with a dollar an egg, those potatoes were probably a dollar a potato. It was just so inefficient. We were so over our heads in many ways. Yes? Mark, when you were here, did you also work with Steve Stuckey? He also talked about the horses and how it might take until noon to actually get them harnessed up because you never knew where they were at on a regular day.

[51:12]

Steve Stuckey, yes, was my close mentor. Was Nick your mentor? Nick handed the baton to me and left. Yes, for them. Yeah. It was me and Peter Rudnick were partners in crime. We were both... That was our job for that three-year period. Mm-hmm. Mick often reminds me that I forget that we're in the same bread lineage. Mark taught me how to bake a tassamara. He gave me the book and said, go ahead.

[52:16]

But it was a magic book. It was very crusty. And then what's great is that Mick now, you know, Mick is much, much better, more sophisticated baker than I ever was or will be. So it's wonderful to, the way traditions are passed on. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

[52:37]

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