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. Good evening, and thank you for coming. It's my great pleasure and honor to introduce... The person who doesn't need any introduction, Naomi, she has not, who has been coming here for over a decade, each summer, and we do a delightful poetry workshop. Naomi's accolades and awards are bundles to as many as the grains of sand in the Great River Gatches. I think many of us come each year to be part of Natalie's workshop and watch her weave a certain kind of simple magic.

[01:20]

Convince us all we not only know something about poetry, We're even more audacious that we know how to write it. And then we go away utterly convinced it's true. Thank you, Paul. It's such an honor to be here. Wonderful to meet new friends this evening and to be with our extraordinary circle. this evening and come back to a place like Tassahara. It is the greatest pleasure and privilege to come here. And thanks to all of you who keep it moving so smoothly around us every day and who honor us with such exquisite meals and kindness and the feeling of being well taken care of, which is something we have been particularly in need of this year as human beings.

[02:32]

And I think Tassahara reminds us of what we'd all like to do better. So thank you for the gift of well-being, which we feel so strongly by a Wednesday that this becomes the reality again. So thank you. I'm very honored to have Some old friends here, as well as my mother, who has come for the fourth year, Miriam, in the front row, who had a yoga class this afternoon. Thank you, Pam. And turns 90 this summer. And Tassahara, she said today, is the most wonderful place on earth. She speaks with conviction. To do any kind of gathering in the company of Paul Haller is the greatest honor. So thank you, Paul, for your belief. And your poetry, your own poetry. It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words.

[03:35]

Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you, and suddenly there will be a story to live in. And here, a silence to live in. Dusk. Where is the name no one answered to? Gone off to live by itself, beneath the pine trees, separating houses, without a friend or a bed, without a father to tell its stories. How hard was the path it walked on all those years, belonging to none of our struggles, drifting under the calendar page? elusive as residue. When someone said, how have you been? It was strangely that name that tried to answer.

[04:36]

I am astonished at how quickly poems are written in this room. And here's a very tiny one from yesterday, Slim Minute. moon nestled in treetop as humans soaked in hot heart of the bath. And since it did say Dharma talk on the signs, and I know some people may be feeling really disappointed this moment, I thought I would read the, as close as I could come to a Dharma talk, it is the introduction to my next book, which really quotes a lot of other people and tries to give a sense of steering and guidance in the times we're living in. So my editor asked me to cut this down by half.

[05:46]

It was twice as long. And I cut it down to half size. And then before I came here, She sent me a message, I really think you should plump it up a bit. I thought that was confusing. So I just cut it back by half. So I thought maybe if I read it out loud, I've never read this anywhere, maybe I can hear what it means. Or maybe any of you could tell me tomorrow. Or maybe just by feeling it in the air, since the title of the book is Voices in the Air, maybe I'll hear what it means. But it is a collection of poems, and many of them speak to or of other writers or people from personal life history whose voices remain with you always. Galway Canal. To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying.

[06:53]

with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment. Someone, Abraham Lincoln, once said that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around out there in the far ethers, somehow, somewhere. And if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now. Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms. Sometimes a single word, the furniture on which to sit. Each day we could open the door and be found. Was life always strange, just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can't solve or change it? Where's my back? Where are we, please?

[07:55]

Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we're in? William Stafford, great 20th century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding, or not surprised at all? When I see a highway sign, no right turn onto whirlwind drive, Stafford comes to mind. I think not, right? He carried a decisive calm.

[08:57]

Peter Matheson, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, whom we had a memorial for here two years ago, is still standing out on his long island beach, staring at the sky, asking, did you see that? flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head? Might we pause on our way to everywhere we were rushing off to and hear something old or new that would help us? Not so long ago, we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood, did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on Earth. In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt to find our messages.

[10:17]

When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on. No one speaking to us in our absence. Juna Hewitt, a student at Yokohama International School in Japan, taught me an important word, yutori, life space. She listed various interpretations for its meaning. Arriving early so you don't have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord attaching your phone to the wall socket is not taut. When it has a little extra room in it. Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori. A place to stand back, to contemplate what we are living and experiencing.

[11:21]

More spaciousness in being. More room in which to listen. I love this. It was the best word I learned all year. Not that sense of being nibbled up as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping at our edges. Perhaps we have more voices in the air now. but are we able to hear them as well? Is our listening life space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day or a full day or a few days, ease into a realm of something slower but more tangible? Can we go outside and plant some seeds? In 1927, Frius Stark, an English writer born in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus.

[12:32]

She wrote, We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things. Near Baghdad, she wrote, In the morning, all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield. They are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days. The sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day. Freya Stark's light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in, yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope,

[13:45]

heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear and the people claiming power or demanding recognition seem alien as they try to make others feel they don't belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time. The melancholy, brilliant singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt died suddenly on New Year's Day, 1997. his many fans were stunned and saddened. That was the first day our son ever showed me I could enter the World Wide Web to read obituaries and stories about towns rising suddenly from all over the world, Nashville, London, Berlin. Incredible. How had this happened? Everything was now available? The searching process felt exotic, haunting, comforting.

[14:47]

Fans around the world grieving for towns together. His song lines kept rising in mind for months afterwards. If I needed you, would you come to me? I think they all would. All the voices we ever loved or respected in our lives would come, and they would try to help us. That's the introduction to just a gathering. How many of you are familiar with Stark's writings? Her writings. They're really incredible books. The fact that she dressed herself as a man through many of her travels and was alone for days in the desert and did all kinds of things that she really hadn't been raised up

[15:49]

with any kind of background for this sort of outward bound to Baghdad, they're amazing books to read right now. They help. They help navigate. So, does anyone know how to plump it up? I can't even remember what's going, actually. But I don't think it needs to be now that I heard it. Is that okay? I think if it was Plumper, it would be too plump. I think it was probably in the end. So, Plumper, would you like to read a few poems first? Okay. I think this is the first thing I say to open up the workshop. We start with a period of meditation in the morning, Zazen. And I think this is what I say.

[16:53]

Zazen is simple. Sign to the rushing water, chirping bird sounds, beating heart, breath, breathing body. Of course, thoughts arise. The poetry of life. And then we did an exercise where we put words in the middle and you plucked two out and then wrote a poem about them. So the two words I plucked out were impeccable. And on the same piece of paper it said impeccable, honest. So I put them together. Impeccable is a mile wide Mississippi. Every drop flows to the ocean. Honest is blue sky, completely open. Impeccable as the warmth of the first sun that morning, arriving exactly as the shadows shrink. Honest as darkness, never claims to know.

[17:58]

When someone dies and you have a funeral, the family members wait outside the church after the funeral ceremony and each person turns shakes hands with them and says, sorry for your troubles. With every handshake, sorry for your troubles, time and time until over a hundred times, scoundered by the decency of good people. So I threw in a Northern Ireland word, no two. It means I'm done. One more short one? Okay. Arguing over what should be written on our parents' gravestone. Like our childhood games, we took sides in battle for victory. Sibling rivalry, the original blood sport. Grief arrives in its own time.

[19:13]

Hummingbird. This has a quote from John Muir at the top. The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark. Lyna Rose asked, are you a grown-up? The most flattering question of my adult life. She darted around me like a hummingbird, knotted in gauzy pink scarves, braiding, tying into my hair. There... On the brink of summer, all summers blurred. No, I said. I don't think so. I don't want to be. What are you then? Her dog snored by the couch. Little sister dozed on a pillow. When her mom came home, we'd drink hot tea, talk about our dead fathers, and cry. I think I'm a turtle, I said, hibernating. and a horse, a mouse in the moss, and sometimes a hummingbird like you.

[20:23]

She jumped on my stomach then, asked if I'd ever worn a tutu like the frayed pink one she favored the whole spring. No, not that. I have a shovel though, I said, for digging in the garden every night before dark, and a small piano like yours that pretends to be a harpsichord. And I really love my broom. Two artists in San Antonio, where I live, started a billboard project the week of inauguration this year, and they asked two poets, actually Lyda Rose's mother and myself, to come up with some poems they could put on these lit billboards. They're old-fashioned, and they have arrows that are kind of lit with neon pointing at the words.

[21:26]

And the poems had to be short. And we each, unbeknownst to the other, turned in one folder of poems that were not political, and then another folder of poems that were. So they started with the non-political ones. But then people kept stopping and coming to the billboards, taking pictures. It became like a field trip site. And now there are all kinds of other people wanting to buy billboards, put them on public buildings, and about 19 poets writing for the billboards. So I'll read you a few that went up in those first weeks of mine, and then I'll tell you two that didn't. LAUGHTER Be brave. Little things still matter most. We have never paid enough attention yet. Some days we are the fallen flower.

[22:35]

Talking truth is hard. Staying silent should be harder. Two that didn't go up are, my voting preference? Every person in this city. You be my president, I'll be yours. We are very happy that it's been so popular. These artists are quite gratifying. I mean, they said, why not? Why not have art billboards with people's voices? So this is about remembering a child from a poetry workshop and then running into him years later. Mountains. Jesse had never felt smarter than at age six, the only first grader in a fifth grade poetry workshop, when they wrote about their neighborhood.

[23:40]

His poem, by far the best in the room, and he the first to volunteer to stand and read it. The big kids clapped for him and cheered. He remembered this at 21 when we crossed paths on Commerce Street. Hey, could I ever feel like that again? It was my best day. Now working two jobs, two kids to support. Yes, I think so. Do you read to your kids? Do you have a library card? Do you use it? No, no, no. Start there, Jesse. You knew the truth when you were six, that your street was magical and full of mountains, though it was utterly flat. You wrote about the rooster's songs, the dog's barking full wonder. You wrote, who do you think I am, am, am?

[24:43]

and knew instinctively it was more powerful to say three times than one. You are still that person. A month ago, I worked at the Maine State Prison with 50 men who are in an English program. And they were beautiful, meh, very touching men. And they gave me assignment. For some reason, every time I work in a prison, I walk out with an assignment. They always give me an assignment. And you have to do it. Their warden's name hauntingly was Liberty, his actual name.

[25:46]

And on the way walking me out, very, very high security, he whispered to me, I just want to say that I was once a child here visiting my father. And the only place I knew my father in my whole childhood was in this prison. So it's very touching to me to be here now. And I am sponsoring the organic garden, and I'm a big fan of the English program, and the library, and the books. Anyway, their assignment was, write about what liberty is to you. The tent. When did hordes of sentences start beginning with so? As if everything were always pending, leaning on what came before.

[26:51]

What can you expect? Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage. So you felt anxious to be alone, easier to hear, Explore a city, room, mound of hours, no one walking beside you. Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening. This would not be strange. It would be the tent you slept in. Waking calmly inside whatever you had to do would be freedom. It would be your country. The men in front of me had whole acres in their eyes. I could feel them cross recross each day. Memory stitched, history soothed. What we do or might prefer to do, have done. How we got here. Telling ourselves a story till it's compact enough to bear.

[27:52]

Passing the walls, wearing the sky, the slight bow and rising of trees. everything ceaselessly holding us close. So we are accompanied, never cast out without a line of language to reel us back. That is what happened, how I got here. So maybe, one way anyway. A story was sown, seed sown. This was what patriotism meant to me. To be at home inside my own head long enough to accept its infinite freedom and move forward anywhere to mysteries coming. Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet. Billowing tent flaps murmur to one another. Bamboo mind.

[28:58]

Popping. profusely, small shoots of glimmering interest. Can you feel the inner nudge? Something wants to grow, needs sun. Pressing up between blades of grass, you thought were your real thoughts. That one's specially for you. This is a poem for which I received hate mail. Big Bend National Park says no to all walls. That's on the border of Texas and Mexico, a most beautiful national park. If you've never seen it, I hope you get to go there someday. Big Bend has been here, been here. Shouldn't it have a say? Call the mountains a wall if you must. The river has never been a wall.

[30:00]

Leavened air soaking equally into all. Could this be the home we ache for? Silent light bathing cliff faces. Dunes altering in darkness. Stones speaking low to one another. Border secrets. Notes so rooted you may never be lonely the same ways again. Big Ben in thinking. Why did you dream you needed so much? Water. One small pack. Once I lay on my back on a concrete table the whole day and read a book. A whole book. And it was long. The day I continued to feast on. Stones sifting a gospel of patience and dust. No one exalted beyond a perfect parched cliff. No one waiting for anything you do or don't do. Santa Elena, South Rim. Once a woman here knew what everything was named for.

[31:02]

Hallie Stillwell, brimming with stories, her hat snaps in the wind. You will not find a prime minister in Big Bend, a president, or even a candidate, beyond the lion, the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest. Maybe just one more, is that okay? So this poem came from a two-hour Skyping session with children in a reading and writing club in Gaza recently. And they were all about 13 or 14. And an amazing thing happened in the middle of our time together was a mom showed up shouting at her daughter for not having washed the dishes before she came to the club.

[32:08]

And the daughter was so mortified, you know, because she knew I was seeing this whole scene via Skype. And so the daughter said to me, talk to her. So that was pretty great. You could talk to the mom... who entered the class and wasn't even supposed to be there. Anyway, she ended up sitting down at the table, forgiving the daughter and becoming part of the conversation. And it was beautiful. Everyone was laughing. And it was just an amazing time. I continue to live in the hope of the day that Jewish people and the Arab people, Palestinian people in particular, can figure out a way to share that small land. with mutual respect and affection, share their oranges, share their roads, share their talents, share their medical skills, share everything. Why not?

[33:10]

And it was so touching to me to be with these kids for two hours and realize afterwards there was not one complaint about like anything, no blame. No negativity, no wine. And these were 13 and 14-year-old kids. So at the end, they asked me, instead of talking just about the texts that they'd been reading and we were talking about, if they could just ask me random questions. And I said, sure. So this poem was born from those. Cross the Sea. A girl in Gaza speaks into a table microphone. Do you believe in infinity? If so, what does it look like to you? Not like a wall. Not like a soldier with a gun. Not like a ruined house bombed out of being.

[34:12]

Not like concrete wreckage of the school's good hope, the clinic's best dream. In fact, not like anything imposed upon you and your family thus far in your precious 13 years. My infinity would be the never-ending light you deserve. Every road opening up in front of you. Soberly, she nods her head. In our time, voices cross the sea easily. But since, it's still difficult to come by. Next girl's question. Were you ever shy? Now, in the case of this book, I mean, in the case of this poem, my editor, who I rarely defy, strongly wanted me to drop that last, the second question. And I said, no way.

[35:14]

There's just no way. There's no fault there for me without the second question. That you could have two people side by side. Do you believe in infinity? What does it look like to you? And then... Were you ever shy? And this was just completely normal to them. I'm still in shock that Skype even exists and that it works. Or actually, this was Google Chat, which works better in many under-electrified countries for some reason. It works much better. So is there anything anyone would like to recite or talk about? Or questions. Questions, answers. Yes, thank you. So I have a comment, a question, a quick comment. I remember hearing you in an interview with Chris DePippet on Omni. I was walking in an airport in Chicago and I had a bunch of bags and I was kind of late for something.

[36:16]

And you said, I think, something about how you really think that we, We experience our lives through poetry. And it literally stopped me in my tracks. And I had all this stuff when people were walking around me. And I was just so moved with how insightful that was. So I just want to say thank you for that. That's been really helpful to just kind of turn to. And then the question is, if we do think in poetry, Do you have any advice or suggestions for how to find, maybe not our true voice, but a voice that is calling to us? Because it often feels like there is a calling. And like there is a voice to discern from the kind of the they, you know, the chaos, what is coming in now.

[37:23]

And I was just curious about maybe... Paul can respond to that also. Just how to cultivate the ability to discern which voices to follow and which voices to just sort of post. Thank you. Those are beautiful comment and question both. And thank you for listening to that interview. And I hope you made the plane, though. I hope you made it there. But I really think that a practice of very simple writing, even as little as one to three lines a day, can cause that thinking in poetry to become amplified or more distilled for you. I think you start hearing it differently because you have a place you're putting a tiny bit of it. And what we often see in our group is how it's just astonishing how much people can write and how well it's almost like

[38:25]

continually, like the creek that's continually running, just running around the room, and you hear a voice and someone else's voice is abundant, giving more energy. I think the small practice of writing a little bit in a daily way, not carrying the expectation that it will be good or that it will grow into something bigger, but it might be, and it might. So just having that practice. One friend here this week told me that keeping a notebook since last year in which she just wrote one line a day has been very helpful to hear all the lines of poetry that she's living within at all times. So that's what I would say. You know, you can sneak it in. You talked about people sneaking out. You can sneak it in to a day. and all the rest that you have to do very easily.

[39:27]

So I hope you can do that. And then just having a particular place, like keeping different notebooks where you can go to that notebook and know that there's a space for your next line. Thank you. I would say, listen. Listen deeply to the question that arises. speaking from some part of us that wants to experience the full gravity and majesty of life. And to hear that part of ourselves and to become familiar with it, to stay connected to it. And then we live out And then it calls us into living out what the question is trying to bring forth.

[40:31]

And how that's going to look, I would say it's always, it doesn't actually matter. It's going to look all sorts of wonderful. Because it's how each moment is being met in addition to the moment that creates the majesty of that moment. Even if you do three lines a day and you do a month, 90 lines or a lot of lines, and some of them might want to grow or give you more to listen to. Thank you. Finding your own utori space. I think writing those lines down is a welcoming moment of utori right now to look at what you've lived today. what you've heard today, what you've carried with you today. That is space for your life.

[41:34]

And without placing a judgment on it or a criticism. I think I grew up thinking of poetry as something that belongs to a kind of solitude. And what I enjoy about your poems is how friendly they are, how social they are. Thanks. When you're writing, you're always sort of bringing up other voices in and wanting to be in places where you can hear those words. And I guess I'm curious about that. Is that a kind of history of poetry? Well, I think poetry is always had a kind of double impulse, like the solitary voice speaking out of quiet contemplation and then the voice that interacts with the world and hears a lot of voices of the world.

[42:42]

I think we've lived in an interesting time of what some people call the slam poetry or the stand-up poetry or the spoken word poetry, they're all different names for it, because that is so social in a way, and it's not only it's often it's text, but it's presentation. I mean, where people are cheering and going and doing all kinds of things. That seems a little wild sometimes, but it's definitely brought a lot of young people to appreciating the sound of voice, one another's voices, and one another's advocacy for language. So I love it. I think it's amazing to listen to. I won't judge it, though, but I love it. You know, people are always looking for old poets to judge stand-up poets. I said, no, get some young bitches. They're all good. So I think it comes out of both histories, both traditions, the interior.

[43:45]

the together. I mean, it's kind of the Dickinson-Whitman tradition's collingwood. And, you know, I think a lot of us grew up reading Walt Whitman and thinking of Walt Whitman as just such a brave and confident guy, but when you learn more about how he revised the same book his entire life, and very few poets I've known would do that. I mean, that took a kind of bravado and belief that very few poets would just keep revising. And also he wrote reviews of it under pseudonyms. I mean, if you read a few biographies of Whitman, you have a whole new view of... It was as if he had to be so social with himself that he became, or with the world, he became other people reading his poems, which in themselves sounded very gregarious. I mean, it's really astonishing, his story.

[44:48]

There's a great new biography of Whitman for like 12-year-olds that tells more about all that stuff than I ever read before, so if you couldn't find it. But it should give everybody confidence, but I think both, and we need both. And then that new book, The Envelope Poems of Emily Dickinson, where the flaps are actually where she wrote on the flaps of envelopes. What do you think the future of form in poetry is? The future of form? Could you say a little more about that? Yeah, just, I haven't put it too extensively, but you know, it seems pretty recent in the last hundred years or so that we've really begun to take liberty with form and began to play with structure.

[45:57]

So I was wondering how it really... Well, I think the question is about form and poetry in the past hundred years, taking liberty with form. I think poetry was always a place where liberty was taken. And then I think maybe, you know, In the 18th, 19th centuries, there were, in 20th, early 20th centuries, there were certain forms that developed that were very popular, that were assigned, that were suggested as the true form of poetry and all kinds of curriculum people worked with that suggested there was a proper way to write poems and a less proper way. But I think the open form has always been there. back in the oral tradition, in all histories of poetry in different countries. And I think that open form is form. Not a Stimsic or word count, but those are still popular.

[46:58]

I mean, we've been looking at a Tonka diary that comes from a contemporary poet in Los Angeles, Harriet Mullen. And I never knew her to write Tonka before. She always wrote narrative poems, language poetry, all kinds of other poetry. She became fascinated with that form because it was so concise, precise, and involved a lot of outdoor observation. And she wanted to take walks and write poems, one every day for a year and a day. So she did. And it's called Urban Tumbleweed. But I look at that book and I think, here's a... And she sort of reinvented the tonka form, too. She talks about that in the intro. She's not going to do it the traditional tonka way, but she made her own tonka way. So I think I think there's an appetite for form, and people continue using it and trying it, but I think there's always been an openness of experimentation, too. How would you describe the form and the performance? Is there still some kind of form in the unshaped culture?

[48:01]

Well, there definitely is, because there's still line breaks and stanzas and punctuation in many people's poems, not always. a visual aspect to the poem, which is a form. So I think there's plenty of form. But hopefully it takes us to a formless place also. Or we can imagine readjusting that poem, changing it around. I think often this helps us when we're writing. We've been working with a certain shape, the way it looked on the page, to change it or to open it up. Put fewer words, bigger spaces between words. You know, all of that is form. Do you know Merwin's poems, W.S. Merwin? Yeah. I love the forms of his poems, and he hasn't used punctuation since his 20s, I think. He's turning 90 this year, too. But they're very foreign, very deliberate.

[49:05]

Thank you. Fascinating. This question is for both of you. So, how does Zen influence your, or relate to your poetry? Paul, which person? How does poetry relate to Paul's Zen? Mary Burst? I don't quite know, but at one point I discovered that I just find poetry enticing. And then I was studying a book called Living Your Child in one of the schools of Buddhism. And it started one of the chapters. It was written by a Japanese psychotherapist. It started one of the chapters. He talked about in the 14th to 15th century, there was a Zen teacher

[50:07]

and he was being chided by one of his students for being so interested in poetry. And the teacher responded, well, you might be reading poetry when I'm reading the Dharma. I think that poetry, words under the words, words inside the words, words beyond the words, words around the words. The genius of poetry that's in every one of us captures that blend between that which can be said and that which can't be said. It holds them both up where we can say, well, look at that.

[51:12]

Well, Zen just helps with everything. Everything. And I remember having the feeling at six, before six, when my mother read poems to me, before I could write or read for myself, feeling in that kind of language, I'm home. That's my language. I want words like that. And feeling as an 18-year-old reading... Zen as a religion major in college, feeling very drawn to Zen and reading different Zen texts on the home. This is also home. And the fact that there could be a place like Kasavaro where we all are home in this room with both is a great pleasure. But in everyday life also, that feeling of how often we need to return to a quiet, rooted, stable sense of where home is. What home could be. Otherwise, things feel pretty willy-nilly.

[52:13]

Right now. Yes. One last one. Yes, please. One last one. So this is for all of you for your kind listening. And since the daughter of my father's best friend that he made in the United States is here with us. I read this for you too, Marsha, and for Aziz and for Palestine. It's just called Every Day. He loved the world and what might happen in it. Some people labored to get up, but he was so ready to rise, refreshed and glistening, still alive, after the dark hours, glistening with hope and cologne. Must we love the world doubly much now in his absence? He is not absent, still living in the fig tree, the carefully placed stone, the draping mimosa, in his empty notebooks, the lonely wooden chair.

[53:27]

We will keep it pulled up to the desk just in case. Just in case, Justice suddenly walks into the room and says, yes, I'm finally here. Sorry for the delay. Tell me where sign. He tried to think the best of people. His drawer was not stacked with disappointments. Only folded white handkerchiefs, still waiting. After the storm, frogs and toads chorus along the pavement. We believed. We believed. Thank you. Can we help once a few helping hands to help?

[54:30]

Yes, please. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, 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 SSCC.org and click giving.

[54:58]

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