This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'm a little bit new at using technology for these occasions, and it's a little bit freaky. Just saying. I gave it a talk at Upaya. It was the first time I used my iPad for a talk. It was a public talk, a big Wednesday night public talk. And I had copied the talk from my computer to the iPad, and I got to the talk, and it turned out that four lines from the top and bottom of every page didn't get to my iPad. And so I would, you know, give the talk and then there would be this void.

[01:00]

That's not really what you want. Anyway, how are we doing? You know, I'm a recovering school teacher, so what we do is we do this, you know, in between. So how are we doing? Okay, there's a range. That's good. I'd like to start talks with any nature updates that I know of. And so here's your nature update for the week. The day after tomorrow, January 20th, there is a total lunar eclipse. And at the moment, the forecast is... partly cloudy, possibly. So we may or may not get to see the eclipse, but we have a good chance. Now, which way is east?

[02:04]

That's like due east, due west? Okay. So the moon rises at 5 o'clock and the eclipse starts at about 6.40. So let's see. It should be about there. So it might not be over the mountain yet. But the full eclipse is at 841, which is a couple of hours later. It should be about there, about 45 degrees. So we ought to be able to see it if the clouds aren't in the way. So that means what, right after Zazen? Is that right? I think... I think that's scheduled for the next day. I think that there was a situation. So, anyway. We'll have a pre-full moon, full moon ceremony.

[03:08]

Full eclipse ceremony. So, as we know... When we practice Zen, we learn a lot of rules. How to walk, what to do with our hands and eyes. And we learn a lot of forms. Orioki, service, getting in and out of the zendo, getting up and sitting down in our seat. We sit down and arrange our bodies and our clothing in a very specific way. And then, not so many rules. Settle yourself on the cushion. Breathe in and out.

[04:14]

Stay present. You can count your breaths if you want. Sometimes we might do metta or other things. But really our meditation, compared to a lot of different kinds of meditation that you may have looked into, is pretty formless. So why is this? Why is it that we are so formal when we stand up and walk around? and so formless when we sit down. Well, I have a theory about this. My theory is that it's because we are the wild ones. We are wild. We are the wild people. People who are drawn to Zen are wild people.

[05:23]

and it's kind of our secret. You wouldn't necessarily know this from looking at us. And we don't really mind learning how to walk, learning how to bow, learning how to tie a special knot with cloth. We like it. Once we learn the forms, we like the feeling of being one body, It's like a dance. Us together and us with the ancestors. We like it. But when we sit down, we don't really like to be told what to do so much. We don't really like our meditation, our creativity, messed with. Really, we're like an artist's colony. in our meditation practice.

[06:27]

Each of us differs in how we approach meditation. We each have our own work, unique, personal, intense, and wild. Our meditation practice is a process of discovery And it calls on our creativity, our passion, our energy, each in our own way. Even so, we do share ideas. And today I would like to lead you in a brief guided meditation that may or may not help you. in the spirit of artist to artist sharing ideas.

[07:30]

So let's see. First, settle your body weight on your cushion or your chair so that you can sit upright with stability now take three deep breaths lifting your head on the exhale and blowing out like you're blowing bubbles excuse me lifting up on the inhale blowing bubbles on the exhale emptying the body of air from top to bottom. Three times.

[08:35]

Feel the Earth's gravity fall into the earth with the force of gravity on each exhale. Feel the life force of breath as you inhale, gathering air from the room into your body. Feel the air lift up your body And now feel the Earth's gravity allowing your shoulders to fall, your neck muscles to relax and fall, the chest and belly to release and fall, emptying the body of air. Then again, air

[10:01]

our life force lifting up with the inhale, falling into earth with the exhale. Life force up, lifts up, gravity falls down. Now place your attention in your belly. Keep your attention in your belly as you inhale and exhale. As thoughts arise, as emotions arise as they do, bring them to the belly

[11:07]

and breathe in and out. Don't worry too much about thoughts and feelings. Just stay located in the belly. For me, children are a strong presence and theme in my life. So the image comes up of grandmother's lap where all the grandchildren and their friends are welcome and loved. The restless ones, the whiny ones, the grumpy ones, the miserable ones, the hyperactive ones, and the little angels. Grandma isn't fooled by their shenanigans.

[12:15]

In fact, she's a little hard of hearing, so she doesn't get too involved with their issues. Grandma sees them clearly, accepts and honors and loves each child, and just keeps knitting. Open, gentle, accepting, not too judgmental, unshakable, a wide open field where an overwhelming thought or feeling has plenty of room to be itself. Suzuki Roshi famously said, If you want to control your cows put them in a really, really, really big field.

[13:22]

When you feel overwhelmed or overburdened by thoughts and feelings you can bring to mind the image of snow falling softly. thoughts and feelings as falling snow landing on you falling away it's not your snow and it will fall away of its own weight in its own time we can't control snow and we can't control thoughts and feelings. They have their season, they have their dignity. We have wild thoughts and twisty feelings because we are human.

[14:30]

In meditation we receive whatever comes up. Ugly thought falls away. judgment of ugly thought falls away. Comparison of this ugly thought with that other ugly thought from last week falls away. Excuse me, falls away. Special Satori experience falls away. Just like snow. All the children, all the snow are welcome. All are seen. We don't have to do anything except stay located, breathing in our belly, alive and seated on earth.

[15:36]

When you practice this way over time, you will find deep, This deep pleasure in breathing can be a touchstone that you can find most any time. This will become, over time, your meditation body. So I've just offered you several images because I'm an image person. I tend to think in images and because I thought they might be helpful to you. Different people are really different. Some people think in sound. Some people recall bodily sensation.

[16:43]

People are really different in that way. It tends to be images. But I thought it might be helpful to you in your meditation, in finding your meditation body, in moving in, in fully inhabiting your body, your life, and your life's work. If my images are not helpful, toss them out. Put them on a shelf. Forget about them. Just do what you have to do to fully inhabit your life in whatever shape you find it. Twist it up mess or sublime samadhi. It doesn't matter. Just move in. Fully inhabited.

[17:45]

So we've been here just over a week. Norman and I got here just over a week ago. And we're all getting, many of you got here more like two weeks ago. Some of you got here years ago. And we're all just getting used to this place and to each other, to the schedule, all of us together. Even if you've been here before, you know that each practice period is unique because each person that comes to the practice period is unique. I look forward to getting to know us all together and also individually over the next few months. But since you probably don't know me, I thought I would tell you a little bit about me for a few minutes, if that's okay. So I started sitting in 1971 when I was 19 in Berkeley with Sojen Mel Weitzman.

[19:00]

I knocked on the Berkeley zendo for zazen instruction and Mel opened the door and I was the only one who showed up that day so I had zazen instruction with Mel in the attic zendo of the Berkeley Zen Center, where it used to be on Dwight Way. You would walk up these stairs to the attic. The stairs, I don't know the word, but this way was tall and this way was short. So it was really, like, risky. It felt exciting to walk up the stairs. It felt even more exciting to walk down the stairs. So I was a student at UC Berkeley, and after five years of living in Berkeley, I finished my undergraduate degree in Buddhist studies, mostly Chinese. I met Norman, we got married, pregnant, and went off to Tassajara for our first practice period in the fall of 1976.

[20:12]

So I sat Tangaryo pregnant. in September of the year when it was hot I sat next to Tia Strozer and I remember since I was pregnant I was 24 I was weeping a lot and Tia we'd sit there like this and Tia would hand me a Kleenex and then we would laugh I remember once mouse this was in the old zendo with stone old funky stone walls the stone walls were a little old the a mouse ran across right in front of us and we just lost it for the rest of the day we were just laughing like the whole day it's not that it's not that pleasant to be laughing all day during tangario but anyway so that practice period

[21:18]

I was pregnant, and it seemed like a person who was pregnant ought to go to the doctor. So we took me to the doctor early on in the practice period. And the doctor said, oh, you're just fine. But the trip out and back was so horrendous that we decided not to go to the doctor anymore. That was a sensible idea, we thought. So we just stayed put for the rest of the practice period, sat sashim. and moved back to the city center, 340 page, actually, and to have our little baby girl, Faye, she was going to be really sweet. Her farts were not going to smell bad. She wasn't going to cry. You know, it occurs to me that this is what parents think, for the survival of our species. If parents thought otherwise, we would have gone extinct long ago.

[22:23]

Anyway, we got through the practice period. We moved to 340 Page and had twin sons. And they were really loud. We came back to Tassajara the following fall with our seven-month-old baby twins. And this was right after the Marble Cone, I think it was called the Marble Cone forest fire. I think this was the first of three serious forest fires. I don't know. over the last, you know, some number of years. So this was a serious one. Tassajara was almost lost. Lots was burned. I remember coming in and it was like my, it was how I would imagine it would be to drive on the moon because there was this kind of barren, you know, barren hills and burned out forest.

[23:33]

And I remember that practice period, there was a lot of kind of charge and excitement. Jerry Brown came as a guest of Richard Baker, and he brought his girlfriend Linda Ronstadt. And Linda Ronstadt was very excited to be at Toscahara, so she walked around and she saw these babies. And so she went up to play with them, and one of them, our son Aaron, drooled on her newly polished toenail. We sandbagged all fall. We had the emergency crew here helping us conducting, you know, all kinds of projects to prepare for what looked like it was going to be a heavy winter, which, as you know, after a fire is a very serious matter. So we sandbagged all fall, and on October 31st, Norman and I realized it was Halloween, and it was our 10-month-old baby's first Halloween, so we dressed them up as sandbags and took them trick-or-treating.

[24:49]

I think we probably just wanted some candy, Norman. There was extreme rain, and landslides all winter. The road was closed for what seemed like a really long time. I remember miner's lettuce and sprouted lentil salad a lot. And I remember being evacuated in the middle of the night. All the creek side cabins were evacuated because the creek was so high that there was a fear that it would jump the bank. and flood the cabins. So Norman and I and our two one-year-olds were put in a cabin with about six other people and we all spent, I don't think we got much sleep. I don't think anyone was all that happy to see the fishers come into their cabin that night.

[25:57]

Anyway, it was a long winter. There was a lot of sickness. But we got through it. And the spring was beautiful. It turns out that wildflowers and lots of rain, rather, forest fire and lots of rain make beautiful wildflowers. There were flowers everywhere. Our babies were walking. It was looking good. We went into the zendo at the end of practice period for Shosan ceremony, and the zendo burned down. I remember someone, I can see his face, shouted from the back of the zendo, Hey, there's a fire out here. I don't remember his name, but I think he saved lives that day. Ted Marshall, who is the head of the fire crew, and the whole fire crew, I remember Clay Calhoun, sort of took charge and got us all out.

[27:13]

Walk fast, don't run, do not take your shoes. There was no time. And everyone got out. The last ones out had their hair singed by the fire. The next practice periods more families came to Tassajara and with the conviction and the encouragement of Richard Baker we created and we developed and we refined childcare at Tassajara and parent care too. The whole community Richard Baker decided after a practice period or two in which parents had to take turns staying in their cabin with the kids, he came up with child watch so that every person in the practice period took a turn and it was on a little plaque like fire watch.

[28:23]

You'd get the child watch plaque and it meant during morning zazen you would just walk around and around and around during the whole period and listen for children waking up and crying. And if somebody woke up, you would come and get the parent out of the zendo. So, you know, at four o'clock in the morning, most babies are crying. I mean, most babies are asleep because they've been crying between one and two. So... So... We left Tassajara for Green Gulch after nine practice periods, having had priest ordination during that time. So this is my tenth practice period, with a 38-year window in between nine and ten. I'd like to read a list of the people that I could think of who were

[29:32]

here during those practice periods. See if I can read it. Paul Haller, Clay Calhoun, Tia Strozer, Keith Meyerhoff, Leslie James, Frank Kilmer, Ted Howell, David Schneider, Jay Simino, Annie Somerville, Alan Block, Where's Alan? Steve Weintraub, Linda Ruth Cutts, Jane Hirschfield, Ed Sattison. And I'd like to read another list of people who were also here during that first or second, those early practice periods. Miriam Bobcoff, Catherine Thanis, Pam Chernoff, Alan Liu, Susie Clymer, Ted Marshall, Jerry Fuller, Wendy Matlow, Michael Jambold, Philip Whelan, and Ihsan Dorsey.

[30:48]

So that second list is of people who are here and who have died. They pretty much all died young, at least younger than I am. not so young. So, at Green Gulch Farm, I did lots of jobs. We lived at Green Gulch until 1996, so from 1981 to 1996. That means we went there with four-and-a-half-year-old boys, and they left Green Gulch for college. So they were raised there. I was Sheikah. I was Eno. I was director in Eno at the same time during the big shakeup in 1983, which landed Norman and I and our boys in the Bronx for a year.

[31:52]

We went to live with the Zen community of New York. and practiced with Tetsugen Bernie Glassman for a year. I remember talking to Katagiri Roshi before we left. He came and helped at Green Gulch and when I was Eno especially. And I said to him, we're going to go to New York. And he said, good, go to New York for some fresh air. When we came back after that, I was shusou at Green Gulch with Mel for a practice period. And I was the attendant of Nakamura sensei, who was taught tea ceremony and also utai chanting. So for many years, I studied tea ceremony with her.

[32:54]

And during that time, I met three... extraordinary women during basically the eighties, that decade. One was Nakamura sensei, my tea teacher. She studied, she did urusenke tea. One was Charlotte Salver, sensory awareness teacher, who I came to know through taking care of her programs when I was Sheikah. And the third Maureen Stewart Roshi, wonderful Zen teacher from the Cambridge Buddhist Society. Ami and I studied with Maureen and will always have a special bond through knowing her. I learned what strength and independence looked like

[34:00]

from these three women. I learned what strength and independence looks like. It reminds me of the women's chant. I don't know if any of you went to the women's march a couple of years ago. I had the good fortune of going with my daughter-in-law and my two-year-old granddaughter to Washington, D.C., and there was this chant This is what democracy looks like. And my little granddaughter, who could hardly talk, she was going... She got the rhythm, you know. But that's how I feel about these three women. I learned what strength and independence looks like from them. By the end of the 80s, I decided to teach school. which I then did for 28 years.

[35:01]

I retired about two and a half years ago. I mostly taught seventh grade science, mostly biology, and I especially enjoyed teaching marine biology, so I took up scuba diving in 1995, which was the same time that our sons left for college. And I'm sure these things, teaching school and scuba diving, will come up in... my talks, subsequent talks and conversations, because I've spent so many hours doing this. When I retired, I calculated it. 25,000 hours in the classroom with kids. And the majority is with seventh graders. And underwater, about 1,500 hours. So, I'm going to leave. It means I'm an odd duck. But it looks like it's time to wrap it up.

[36:10]

But I would like to tell you a story about one of the people from the Tassajara practice period, one of the first ones that I did. And this is a person from the list of the people who have died, Isan Dorsey Dayosho. You probably know a little about Isan. He was just a remarkable person. He founded the Hartford Street Hospice and then Zendo. He had been... You know what? I need to update my... terminology and I apologize. He had been a transvestite and dancer, performer in San Francisco in the 60s. He'd also been, he'd also done some drug dealing and taken a lot of drugs and some prostitution. I think he'd gone to, he'd signed up for the military and went to the Korean War and was dishonorably discharged.

[37:20]

for having a relationship with a man, another man. So he was kind of a high-profile character in San Francisco in the probably 50s and into the 60s. And in that context, he met Suzuki Roshi and turned his life around. So he, by the time we met him, he had been ordained. He was an ordained priest. And he was at Tassajara and he was the Eno when Norman and I were on the Doan Rio. So I believe Anne Overton was the head Doan at that time. Isan was very, he was like the kindest, most non-judgmental person you could hope to meet.

[38:20]

But he was very fastidious. So he had kind of an artist sense about how things should be. And he had a really keen sense about forms in the zendo. And it was like he had this sense out of love. He just, you know, it was out of love. But he was very fastidious. So we would, you know, he would teach us how to, you know, like how to do all kinds of things. So one day we were having a doanryo meeting. I think it was in his cabin. And the topic that day, the important topic that day was, wait for it, which way the gamachio spoons should face on the tray when serving and when returning. So this was our topic for the day. And there were more opinions than there were people in the room.

[39:24]

And, you know, there was kind of a flow of opinion and a kind of interesting... Anyway, the whole discussion got louder and people were talking faster and faster and people were turning red in the face. And it was intense. And in the middle of all that... All this intense, no, it's this way because if you serve the spoon facing the person, it's like a dagger in the heart. But if you turn the spoon away from them, then the other person could bump it accidentally. But if you turn it to the right, then it discriminates against left-handed people. So this was the kind of discussion. So in the middle of all that, more and more intense, Isan threw up his hands and said... let's just get naked and go driving in a big black car. Let's just get naked and go driving in a big black car.

[40:28]

I think of that as Issan Dorsey's commentary to Ru Jing's poem, Let me read it. Piling up bones in an empty field, gouging out a cave in the empty sky, break through the barrier of dualism, splash in the bucket of pitch black lacquer, and get naked and go driving in a big black car. I just got this robe. It's big and it's black. I also have brown. So as we get back to splashing in a bucket of black lacquer and driving naked in a big black car, I found one passage that I'd like to read to you.

[41:35]

This was translated by Dan Layton and Shohaku Okamura. about practice period. And, you know, I tried to find, I'm not actually sure where it's from. We have some opinions, but I couldn't track it down. But I thought it was just a good passage. It goes like this. All Buddhas and all ancestors are within the way and engage it. Without the way, they would not engage it. The Dharma exists and they appear. Without the Dharma, they do not appear. Therefore, when the assembly is sitting, sit together with them. As the assembly gradually lies down, lie down also in activity and stillness, at one with the community.

[42:37]

throughout deaths and rebirths, do not separate from the monastery. Standing out has no benefit. Being different from others is not our conduct. This is the Buddha's and ancestors' skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, and also one's own body and mind dropped off. So please take care of your practice in consideration of each other, our ancestors, near and far. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge.

[43:40]

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.

[43:53]

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