Good morning. I'd like to thank Hojo-san, Abbot David, for kindly inviting me to give this talk, and particularly for inviting me to speak on the theme of the practice period, the Mountains and Waters Sutra. So, the mountains and waters are the expressions of the old Buddhas. Mountains and waters of the present moment actualize the expression of the old Buddhas.

[01:10]

Each abiding in its condition unfolds its full potential. So a few days ago, smoke from the Kincaid fire up north blew into the valley, reminding us that Mountains and waters of this present moment are burning. So what is this like, that the mountains of the present moment are burning? The experience of the smoke, quality of the air, quality of the light. I notice a contraction around my heart. It's only partly caused by the smoke. Memories of all the fires that have come close to me are close to me now.

[02:13]

The Oakland Hills Fire, when I had to evacuate. The Camp Fire last year, where my nephew, who lived in paradise, lost his home to the fire. The Basin Complex Fire, came so close here, came through here when David was director and the Soberanis fire when I was Tassajara director. In fact, it was three years ago today that the Soberanis fire was officially declared over, 100% contained after three months, $260 million dollars and 132,000 acres burned. And now the Kincaid fire, many friends in Sonoma, they've all been evacuated.

[03:17]

Some of them are staying at the city center in Green Gulch. It's up to 55,000 acres, 10% contained. Mandatory evacuations of 180,000 people. More than 2 million people without power. The weather conditions are better today, but extreme fire weather may return tomorrow. I've lived all my life in California, and wildfires are just a part of California. Growing up in Southern California, when it got to be mid-late summer, early autumn, there would always be fires in the hills. And in fact, fire is a natural part of the Ventana Wilderness in which Tassajara is right in the middle.

[04:20]

It's a fire ecology and there's some seeds that only germinate in fires. Native peoples have often used fire as a means of interacting with the landscape to encourage certain plants to grow and inhibit others, to clear ground for agriculture. And this has always had an impact. But it's been more limited in scope. But what's been happening in more recent years are not just wildfires, but firestorms. They can create their own weather just from the fires themselves. So this increasing number and intensity of fires is increasingly one of the things that's being referred to as the new normal. So how do we meet this?

[05:21]

How do we meet this mountain that is in all of our lives in one way or another? When we meet an emergency, like a major fire, it's actually relatively straightforward. What you need to do is pretty clear. And I was thinking it's kind of like when we have big health crises. It really focuses our attention. If we or someone close to us gets a diagnosis of, say, cancer, has a heart attack, We put all of our attention toward that and a lot of other things fall away. They're obviously less important. And an emergency like a fire is the same thing. Being here during the Soberanas fire, it was such a great opportunity to practice because at a certain point, very early on, it became clear that I could either be completely here and just focus on taking care of Tassajara during this time

[06:35]

or I could dissipate my energy into all the other ways that it was pulled with concerns relative to Zen Center, but outside of the present moment. And I realized that I was completely called. What I most needed to do was just to focus on taking care of what was right in front of me. And it was so tremendously grounding and transformative to just meet the moment. with a whole group of other people who were equally meeting the moment. The students who stayed, the fire crews who kept rotating through, all working together for a larger purpose. It was very, very powerful. But when it's a little more business as usual, it can be very hard to focus that way.

[07:42]

Very, very hard. When the suffering is not intense, we can easily get distracted. About six weeks ago, I went to the Branching Streams conference. which is a meeting of the affiliate sanghas of San Francisco Zen Center. It was a wonderful gathering, about 40 people from 20 different sanghas. We were in Racine, Wisconsin. Beautiful environment. And the overall theme of the conference was justice. But the particular presentation that touched me most deeply was one by Stephanie Caza, on climate justice. And she talked about specific ways that Buddhism in particular can contribute to climate work. I've been certainly aware of climate issues, concerned, but my energy has been particularly in taking care of San Francisco Zen Center for many years.

[08:58]

So I wasn't deeply engaged other than what we were doing here and supporting things like solar power and related issues. Not having kerosene anymore, absolutely minimizing our use of fossil fuels here. These were all things that I was involved in, but on a larger level, I was not so involved. So I'd like to share something about my experience of entering into the issues around climate justice in a profoundly different way through the lens of Buddhist practice and seeing the possibilities for practice in this realm and the unique ways that Buddhism can contribute to this larger conversation. been deeply enlivening for me.

[10:01]

And I was reminded of something that my teacher, Sojin Roshi, has said to me. He said, I study to verify my practice. Not just study for the sake of study, but to verify his practice, to verify his experience. And what I've found is that in studying things related to climate change and climate justice, I found my own practice deeply verified, and that's been very encouraging to me. So one of the exercises that Stephanie Caza started us out with was getting with a partner, and each person said, you know, would share answers to three questions. The first was, When I observe climate change, what I see is... So my partner lives in Eastern Oregon, and what she talked about was seeing the fires that were burning all around her.

[11:15]

And she spent several years at Tassajara, so I knew that I could share with her my experience of fires at Tassajara, and particularly the Soberanos fire. And this deep sharing of our experience of fire in places that we love and care for, and particularly around Tassajara, really opened my heart, opened our hearts. And the next question that Stephanie had asked was, when I feel what arises, in response to climate change, what I feel is. And what I felt, what I could see then was often a kind of a numbness, a shutdown, a denial, a difficulty in feeling the depth of what was there. But in that moment it opened my heart and I could feel this deep grief and sadness.

[12:23]

I could actually connect with my feelings, get out of my head, and deeply connect with another person in our grief together. It did not divide us, but brought us together. And the third question is when I consider climate justice, climate change, what do I think? And as I reflected, what I would think is more about taking a wider perspective, a longer view of time, remembering after the Basin Complex fire in 2008, which came right through Tassahara, coming back here just a few weeks after the fire, and the ground and everything was black. It's just absolutely black.

[13:25]

The areas where it burned, there was not a single living thing. And yet at the base of stumps of trees, there were already bright, bright green shoots sprouting up. And I just felt the power of life coming forth. cut down most of the tree, it's burned to the ground, and the roots are still there, putting forth life. And I could remember and hold that as well. So for me, the exercise she was doing brought me back to the basic Buddhist instruction. Clearly observe. Be fully present with what is arising. and then to go further in inquiry, reflection, and finding the spaciousness to hold it in a larger context, to be able to relate with it skillfully.

[14:31]

I have some notes from Stephanie's presentation. And this was about denial. She said, many people in the first world are willing to live in denial to keep their ways of life intact and unchallenged. Consumer choices keep justice issues hidden and consumers' attention on personal preference. The privilege of climate change denial is an environmental justice issue. People occupying privileged social positions encounter invisible paradoxes Awkward, troubling moments that they seek to avoid, pretend not to have experiences, and they forget them as quickly as possible. Environmentally privileged people reproduce existing power relations as they enact denial in everyday life.

[15:41]

And I saw this in my own experience of the Soberanis fire. seeing up close, interacting with fire crews and heads of, because in my role, I was the incident commander for Tassajara, Tassajara's fire brigade. And, well, I was designated incident commander, but that's not the incident commander of the whole fire. But I did have interactions with them. And I came to realize more and more that decisions about resources and tactics were political and economic. and had history over about the past 15 years in terms of some laws that had been passed. And I was able to sit more deeply with my own experience of awkwardness and ambivalence and guilt about the massive use of resources and use to protect Tassajara during the Soberanis fire.

[16:50]

It included helicopters and planes dumping water and fuel retardant to keep the flames two miles away from Tassajara because there was no other way to address it in the middle of a wilderness with enormously steep mountains. That was a lot of why the fire was so expensive to fight, 260 million. That's not the losses, that's the cost of fighting the fire. So much of it had to do with the air power. And in the middle of it, and it wasn't my decision, none of this was my decision. So I could accept to stay here. That was my decision, our decision, was to stay here. I didn't choose how they responded. but staying here also impacted the things that were done.

[17:54]

It's very complicated. So how do we live with this? How do we live with this mountain? There's so many examples other than fire that we could consider where our food or our clothes come from, for example. In meal chant we say we reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us. One of the other exercises that Stephanie had us do was a very interesting example of considering using interdependence to look at an issue. She had given us some background on mining of certain rare minerals in Africa and the impact that that had there.

[19:00]

And she told us what the minerals were used for. They were used in electronic devices. So she gave us this list of words. I think there were a couple dozen words, and they included things like rule of terror, consumer lifestyle, iPhones, laptop computers, debt bondage slavery, armed militias. And she asked us to be in groups of four and on large sheets of paper to write the words out and to draw arrows between them, to find connections between them. And it wasn't hard to draw. People drew them all different ways. That was what was fascinating. People drew them all different ways, multiply intersecting and interacting. When I looked at it, to me, it went back to consumer lifestyle, demand for electronic devices like iPhones, and everything else fell out from there.

[20:08]

And when I reflected on it later, it's like, no, all of these things were there before that. You know, all the different pieces of this were all there and began to come together in this way, in this particular way. But I started seeing the greed, hate, and delusion that drives so much of everything that drives all of these issues. So the next line in the meal chant, is we reflect on our virtue and practice and whether we are worthy of this offering. And I've always been a little uncomfortable with that phrase, whether we are worthy of this offering. But in thinking about this talk, what came up for me was, what resonated more was maybe entitled to have so much when others have so little.

[21:17]

Not whether I am worthy, period, but how did I get to be in this position? And how do we deal with it? Because we do have this privilege. And we're becoming increasingly aware of just how things come to us. It's not so hidden anymore. So how do we live with this awareness? And how do we meet it with our virtue in practice? On the way home from the conference in the airport, I noticed an issue of Time magazine. It was the climate issue. That was leading up to, I guess, the UN summit. And there was a tremendous amount of coverage in all the media on climate. And I picked it up and started flipping through it.

[22:22]

ended up buying it and reading it on the way home from the flight. And the lead article was by Bill McKibben. And I found it tremendously encouraging. The article was titled, Hello from the Year 2050. We avoided the worst of climate change, but everything is different. So he lays out what's actually a very hopeful, imagined path, looking back from 2050, about how things turned around in a profound way. And where we are now. So he lays out this imagined path, starting with the election in 2020. And imagined... The Halloween hurricane of 2020 kind of set the stage for a lot of other things which have been cascading in a positive direction to come together.

[23:28]

And you can find it online when you go out. The whole thing's available. But the end of the article was what really, really moved me. He says, so that's where we are today in 2050. We clearly did not escape climate change or solve global warming. The temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It's turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one. We ended up with the most profound and dangerous physical changes in human history, our civilization surely teetered and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price. But it did not fall. What's changed most of all is the mood.

[24:35]

The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind. Increasingly, we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we've come to respect. We know much better now. We know that we've knocked the planet off its foundations and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We're dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far, we haven't crashed. I was reminded that when the Buddha, before the Buddha was Buddha, and he was still a prince, he ventured out from the palace. He'd been very, very protected because his father did not want him to become a spiritual teacher.

[25:48]

He wanted him to be the king after him. So he had a tremendous amount of privilege. He was very protected. He did not see much of the reality of the world. And he was absolutely overwhelmed by seeing old age, sickness, and death. And he was in despair. And then he went out again, and he saw an ascetic, a spiritual person, a monk, walking through a charnel ground. And it was clear that the monk was peaceful. And he saw some possibility. So he went forth from privilege and protection and encountered the truth of suffering.

[26:49]

in his own life and body and awakened. And a few months after his awakening, the Buddha gave the fire sermon to a thousand newly converted ascetics who had formerly practiced a sacred fire ritual. The Buddha said, monks, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning? The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind are burning. Forms are burning. Consciousness is burning. Whatever is felt as pleasant or painful, or neither pleasant nor painful, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of greed, with the fire of hate. and with the fire of delusion.

[27:53]

So in the present moment, our world is literally burning as a result of the fires of greed, hate, and delusion. And I think in a certain way, for me, the heart of what the Buddha's teachings have to offer is summarized in a short story. I can't find the source for it. But a lay person came to him and he said, so I've heard you're a wise sage and you have many powers. So I want to ask you, can you help me with my life? Specifically, I'd like you to help me with my wife. I'm having trouble with my wife. And the Buddha said, no, I'm sorry, I can't help you with your wife. He said, well, what about my work and my job? I'm having a lot of difficulty.

[28:57]

Can you help me with that? The Buddha said, no, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that either. And the man got fed up and he said, well, you're no good at all. What can you help me with? And the Buddha said, there are 80 kinds of suffering in the world. 79 of them I cannot help you with. And the man said, okay, what's the 80th one? He said, how to meet the other 79. So the Buddha's teaching is all about how to meet our suffering. I teach suffering and the end of suffering. I want to share just briefly some of the things that Stephanie Caza had mentioned as particular aspects that Buddhism could offer to the conversation about climate change and climate justice.

[30:09]

A focus on psychological, ethical, and social aspects of climate change. examining the nature of denial and privilege, taking a systems view of interdependence, doing grief work, and white culture awareness. And I thought of, when we do confession and repentance in the morning, we chant, all my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech and mind, I now fully avow. So not just my own individual greed, hate and delusion, but all the greed, hate and delusion throughout space and time that is manifesting now.

[31:16]

that I carry from the past, and in this moment I am responsible for my own karmic actions, and I sit with it, I avow it. I am not in denial. And that is the first step in finding freedom, is to simply avow it, to acknowledge it, to be with it, to not bury it. And this tied in for me with several other issues, particularly trauma and racial justice. Because climate change is an utterly intersectional issue. These unintended consequences of greed, hate and delusion. the way that our wisdom, compassion, and understanding of cause and effect has not kept pace with all the increasingly rapid advances in science and technology and by the increasing consolidation of power and privilege over centuries into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals who are overwhelmingly white.

[32:43]

and new learnings over the past few years for me about the history of whiteness as a constructed identity and how trauma relates to all this have been very freeing in my own experience. Resmaa Menakem, in my grandmother's hands, talks about black body trauma and white body trauma and looks at history through a somatic or body-centered timeline from the Middle Ages where there was an incredible amount of interpersonal violence, state-sanctioned interpersonal violence, but it was white on white. And how that carried through, that traumatic experience carried through to the whole era of enslavement, to Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow. Rasmah Menakem asked the question, what do you have to do to others or to yourself in order to perpetuate power and privilege?

[34:04]

And particularly for white people, or for those with privilege, I should say, most of whom are white in this world, what do you have to do to yourself? when compartmentalizing of emotional connection with our experience and with others' experience becomes transmitted as part of the culture, when there's a fear or even a phobia of certain aspects of one's own experience, and that can show up as a fear of being seen as weak, supposed to be powerful, supposed to know what's going on. And these are also gender issues. It's long been known that the ability to master one's emotions is part of power. But power can be used for good or ill.

[35:15]

So how do we use the power of regulating our emotions with kindness and compassion for good. I was already familiar with parts of the history that I was reading, but seeing it through the lens of trauma, not just individual trauma, but transgenerational trauma, really opened my eyes in many ways. I could see how my parents' trauma impacted me. And it was very much intergenerational trauma. I had a safe and comfortable and privileged childhood. But the impact of my parents' trauma was deeply felt. And it showed up mostly in the deep fear and aversion and inability to be present with suffering.

[36:20]

with difficult feelings of themselves or others, and particularly of me. So I learned to disconnect from my feelings. It helped my family stay together. And I learned to do that before I could speak. So it was all in my body. And as I've connected more and more with my body and been able to tolerate the experience of suffering in my body, that has had a tremendous impact on my capacity to be with others. My parents were very good people and very kind people. And they always tried to be there for other people. But there were limits to that. And I experienced those limits in myself as well. Things are a little messier now.

[37:21]

And I still have a lot of feelings about being a little messy. But a friend recently told me, but you're so much more alive now. I'm like, right. There aren't the dead zones. There's a term in ecological studies called sacrifice zones. Areas that are just considered sacrificed. You know, we're giving up on them. Clear-cut forests that don't come back. Toxic waste dumps. And some are reclaimed or restored, and some are just let go of because there's too much. And I thought about the sacrifice zones of our own experience, of our own bodies and minds, where whatever trauma we've had in our lives, whatever wasn't allowed to complete the healing process, just gets left aside.

[38:34]

So this whole issue has become something not separate from myself. not separate from my practice, not separate from my own suffering. It means that I'm far less afraid of any of it, less afraid of the scary diagnosis, less afraid of the fire, especially when I can just be with what's actually happening. this experience right now and the people around me who are sharing that experience with me. So just a few of the other ways the Buddhist teachings can support us.

[39:40]

The practice of restraint, reducing our desires, simplifying our lives, the principle of nonharmon, of caring for other as self, having a view of deep time, building our capacity for resilience and grounded presence with equanimity and stability. Investing in community and governance. Developing our capacity to work with troubling emotions. Joanna Macy talks about getting used to uncertainty. Not knowing is most intimate. To break the habit of helplessness. To look at guilt, our own guilt for global inequities.

[40:46]

and not be overwhelmed by it. To develop the self-knowledge that builds the capacity for helping others to break through their denial and conditioned thinking, regardless of what realm it's in. These are not separate. Greg's been reading this wonderful book called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which is subtitled Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. And I haven't read it. I just opened to a page and wanted to include this.

[41:48]

She's talking about the woods where she lives that are so beautiful and varied and the medicines. She's a native person. The harvesting the plants and the honorable harvest of interacting with the natural world in a mutually honoring way. no separation of giver, receiver, and gift. She's talking about different types of woods, and she says, these woods are second or third growth and sadly lost their leeks and trillium long ago. It turns out that when forests around here grow back after agricultural clearing, The trees come back readily, but the understory plants do not.

[42:56]

From a distance, the new post-agricultural woods look healthy. The trees come back thick and strong, but inside, something is missing. The April showers do not bring May flowers. No trillium, no May apple, no bloodroot. Even after a century of regrowth, The post-farming forests are impoverished, while the untilled forests just across the wall are an explosion of blossoms. The medicines are missing for reasons ecologists do not yet understand. It might be micro-habitat, it might be dispersal, but it is clear that the original habitat for these old medicines was obliterated in a cascade of unintended consequences as the land was turned to corn. The land is no longer hospitable for the medicines, and we don't know why.

[44:00]

But the Sky Woman woods across the valley have never been plowed, so they still have their full glory, but most other woods are missing their forest floor. Left to time and chance alone, my cutover woods would probably never recover their leeks or their trillium. The way I see it, it's up to me to carry them over the wall. Over the years, this replanting on my hillside has yielded small patches of vibrant green in April and nurtures the hope that the leeks can return to their homelands and that when I'm an old lady... I'll have a celebratory spring supper of leeks close at hand. They give to me, I give to them. Reciprocity is an investment in abundance for both the eater and the eaten. The mountains and waters of the present moment are the expression of the old Buddhas.

[45:13]

The mountains and waters of the present moment are burning with the fires of greed, hate, and delusion. The mountains and waters of the present burning as they are with the fires of greed, hate, and delusion are the actualized experience of old Buddhists. The mountains belong to those who love them, and we belong to the mountains. Carrying the healing medicine of wholeness, of the heart of the Buddha's teaching, not just words that we've heard, but the ones we know in our own hearts, by our own experience, this is what we carry over the wall, to plant it carefully. We have to do this over and over again.

[46:20]

I'm so grateful to be doing this with all of you. Does anyone have any questions or comments? Yes.

[48:05]

Yes. Well, I think revising our own internal structure and also participating in the wider culture. We've done a number of things over many years. Our efforts towards sustainability and greater ecological awareness have continued in many, many forms. And it's in my role as president that this has really come up for me, particularly since this conference. So that was six weeks ago. And since then, I've really been exploring what more we might do. It's a huge field, a huge area. It's big. So how can we best serve? How can we best meet this from our unique point of view, from our unique position, from this Dharma position?

[49:30]

What do we do? So this is just beginning to unfold further and to see what the best opportunities are. We're doing a lot of things, and they're not all coming to my mind at the moment, but one of the things that we do want to do is to articulate them more clearly so that they're ready to hand because people who've been much more involved in this within Zen Center for many years are very aware of all the things. particularly groups at Green Gulch called the Eco-sattvas. They've really been bringing awareness for a long time. And I agree, it's time for action. And in my role, I'm most concerned with trying to find the most skillful and beneficial action. So that's where I am right now, is looking at this. And I hope to continue the conversation moving toward action. There's something that I learned through studying trauma that's been very helpful to me, this notion of a window of tolerance between overwhelm and hyperarousal and shutting down or deadening or cutting off, which is kind of like flipping the switch.

[52:43]

When it gets too much, it's just shut down. And this happens in our nervous system in the midst of trauma, but it becomes ingrained in there as... habits and more subtle ways of doing that. And the whole idea of the window of tolerance is that within the window of tolerance, we have the capacity. So whatever your window is, within that window, we have the capacity to be present, to show up. to be wise, to be skillful, to be engaged. It's usually thought of as being socially engaged, but I think it's also to be engaged inside of ourselves with our own experience and to start expanding the window of tolerance. When we crash out of it, we often have a reaction. We can't help going outside of it.

[53:45]

We will continually fall outside of it due to causes and conditions. This is just too much. This is overwhelming. I can't deal. Whatever it is. But sometimes even reflecting on something that happens afterwards, we have the space to be in it but not consumed by it and to start expanding that window of tolerance so that when we encounter something like that, the next time we can show up more for it. And we're really good at things around, say, zazen. I mean, teachers are usually pretty good at saying, you know, just sit with whatever arises and just take it back to the zendo. So you think your leg is going to fall off and you'll never walk again. See if that's actually true and find what the limit is for you. But the emotional stuff and the stuff that touches on privilege,

[54:49]

and power, whether that's in our own community or out in the world or in our role, this is where it gets really sticky because it's unexamined. So we will run into ourselves and we will run into others. So I would say just honor the limits that we encounter in ourselves and in others and the fear And keep coming back over and over. Keep carrying the medicine over the wall. Keep replanting it. Keep planting the seeds of wholeness, compassion, kindness, patience, generosity. Just keep planting them. And don't give up. This is, this won't

[55:50]

no change happens overnight. Change that looks like it happens overnight is usually a tipping point, whether positive or negative. It happened as a result of many, many causes and conditions over time. So, yeah. I don't know if that answered any of that. That was what's here. And I think maybe one more and then Thank you. It is my question.

[57:09]

And then there's part of me that wants to go back to the island because I can see how. Like, I personally, so I mean, if I look at my own part of it, okay, I'm going to be here, but good, right? Then again, a lot of positive parents just get me here. I guess what you just .

[58:13]

Yes, two things. I mean, there's so many, but maintaining a sense of humor because it's impossible. We can't not cause harm. And if you get so focused on not causing harm as an individual, that causes harm too. It's like we have an impact in the world. And if we don't have some sense of acceptance and lightness and capacity to smile, to find joy, to even find humor, sometimes it's gallows humor. but to not be submerged, then we fall back into learned helplessness, which ties very much to the other, which is connection.

[59:24]

Anything that you or I could do as individuals is not enough. It's just not enough. But all of us together is enough. So how can we make connections and webs Greta Thunberg just sat by herself. And mysteriously, and she might have done that 20 years ago and nothing would have happened. But now, according to place and time and the causes and conditions, this has exploded. And there's this turning. Joanne Macy talks about this great turning and then the, oh, forgetting the word, the great regeneration or something like that. Do you remember? No, anyway. This is a time of tremendous possibility as well. So I think staying connected, seeing a larger view, doing what we can and not being so obsessed by it that we forget the life force

[60:42]

that is still happening and how to skillfully see ways to meet that. Yeah, you know, I also flew to the conference, and I'm like, and I've never felt like, oh, my own carbon footprint before. It's like, how do I, I'm aware of it, but it's like, oh, me. You know, like, how do I meet this? Any aspect of our life that we try to look at all at once gets overwhelming. It's like trying to think about all the food you're going to eat in your lifetime and having it all piled up in one thing and told that you have to eat it all now. It's like, no, we keep taking what's right in front of us. Suzuki Roshi said, this is all so overwhelming, we just have to sit down first. Just come back to the present moment, what's actually happening to some sense of spaciousness, calmness, presence, in order to see how to take skillful action.

[62:00]

That's the value of sitting down, is to not react, but to see how to act skillfully and to practice it moment by moment. Every moment, that every person in this practice period meets the moment as skillfully, as kindly, as compassionately as you can, that is a moment of practice. That is a moment of awakening, and it will carry forward in unimaginable ways into the future. The capacities that you build here will continue to build when you leave, whenever that may be. also I don't know maybe it could go both ways maybe as you're heading into what might be more difficult in the practice period on a personal level maybe this kind of puts it in perspective a totally different way but yeah it's like okay painful knees yeah okay and here I am here I am able to be present

[63:16]

in this amazing place with painful knees. So, thank you all for suffering your painful knees. May our intention Zip.

[63:49]

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