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. How's this sound? Great. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be here. speaking with you face to face in this sendo that I love so much. I am living at City Center and we have not yet had a Dharma talk in our Buddha hall, person to person. So this feels like an incredible treat and delight to be here in this sendo with you tonight. I want to thank you all not only for coming to the talk, but for being here and working so hard to prepare Tassahara for the practice period.

[01:06]

Many of you will be staying, and some of you are here for a shorter time to help out, and it's just wonderful to see the fruit of your work everywhere. So I want to thank the Tanto, Linda Gallion, who's also a dear friend, for inviting me to give the talk tonight. And I want to thank my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, in the many ways she has supported me for quite a long time now, I think 25 years. And my topic tonight is work as practice, the connection, the relationship between practice and work. And I'm... I'm planning to, you know, it's interesting to prepare a talk without a computer or access to the internet, which I have in the city.

[02:07]

So I'm drawing on my experience for the most part, and also on some words from Suzuki Roshi, not always so, and a poem. I love poetry and I try to include poetry at every possible opportunity. So what I'll be talking about is first what shaped my own ideas about work as I was growing up and in the earlier part of my life, and how coming to Tassajara and experiencing work practice totally changed my ideas about work. And I may... from time to time ask you to reflect on your own experience, because each of us has very different and unique conditioning, depending on so many things. Where we were born and grew up, our families, our education, where we've lived since, many things shape us.

[03:16]

And just to say a little bit more about myself, I identify as white, racialized, cisgendered woman. I am comfortable with queer or lesbian as gender identity. And I'm also, I would say, an elder. I turned 80 last year, and I'm very grateful to be able to continue to work and live at Sun Center. So I've been a resident of city centers primarily since 1999, and I lived at Tassajara for four years, coming here for the fall practice period in 2000. Greg and I were Tongario students together that year.

[04:20]

And after a little over four years, I moved to Green Gulch for two years to train as a priest with Linda Ruth. And after my training, part of my training was here, and then Green Gulch, and then I moved back to city center where I've lived ever since, I think it was 2007. I've held many different work practice positions over the years. So in terms of what shaped me, I want to start with my parents. My father, well, both my parents were in high school during the Depression, and they had to work. They had to go to work right after high school. They both would have liked to have gone to college, but they had to earn a living.

[05:21]

And they met, actually, when they were both working for my uncle Sammy, who had a fabric factory. And my mother was in the office. I don't know what my father was doing. But my father, for most of my childhood, I think starting when I was two, began working at the post office. And he worked at night. And then he had a second job. a part-time job at Macy's as a stock clerk. And what I was told was my parents and my mother started working when I went to kindergarten, that they were working in order to enable me and my sisters to go to college, have what they couldn't have, and a good education. And my father never missed a day of work in all 40 years. So one thing I learned from him was to show up and, you know, to be dependable.

[06:25]

And I don't think he enjoyed his work so much, but he never complained about it. He just did it. And my mother did enjoy being a secretary. I think for her it was... stimulating to go downtown and work in an office. And she really enjoyed the opportunity to be with other adults, I think, at that time, having two young children. So I started working in the summers when I was in high school. My first job was at a Girl Scout camp I had attended. And after two years as a camper, I was able to go back and work as a pot girl, cleaning pots in the kitchen. It seemed like a great honor to be able to work at that camp, which I loved.

[07:28]

And then the next summer, I worked at Girl Scout House in Manhattan in the office, just doing whatever was needed. And that helped me save some money for college. My first college, I transferred partly through, but my first college was Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. And at that time, Antioch's slogan was more than books. And there was a work-study program. You would go to campus, study for three months, and then get what they called a co-op job. The jobs were in different cities in the United States. And one reason I went to Antioch was because I had never been outside New York City where I grew up, except for camp, which was not very far from New York City. And these jobs were, you know, my first job was in Chicago. I had jobs in Boston, St.

[08:30]

Louis, and then they had an education abroad program. So my first co-op job was very... meaningful to me. I was working in the Field Museum in Chicago in the herbarium. I thought I might be a science major, so I think that's why I chose that job. And one of the outstanding things about it was that there was a colleague working who had been there many years, who was blind, and he was able to create these herbarium sheets where you mount leaves and flowers of dried plants on the sheets that are then filed according to the genus and species, and he made the most beautiful herbarium sheets without being able to see.

[09:31]

I was impressed, and the skill that he had Part of my Antioch years was studying in Vienna and then working in Israel on two different kibbutzim. And I spent over a year in Israel. And what impressed me about the kibbutz was some of the people The first one was populated mainly by Jews from German-speaking parts of Europe, Austria, Czechoslovakia. The Czech Jews also spoke German. Germany. And some of them were very well-educated and

[10:36]

They all seemed really happy to be farming and working in the kitchen and taking care of the children who lived communally as well in children's houses. And the second kibbutz was mostly populated by Dutch Jews, and they had a small plastics factory, and I remember olive trees and various... crops that they harvested. And there too, the work was, what was really important was just the spirit of it, doing whatever work was available. And that made an impression on me too. And I think it predisposed me to an appreciation for community living. And I think to work practice as well. didn't know about work practice at that time. So I transferred from Antioch to UC Berkeley and I became a German major and was thinking I had actually applied to graduate schools and was accepted to a graduate school in the Boston area.

[11:58]

And at the last minute, I decided not to go, and I think that was partly because I didn't know anyone. No one in my family had been to college, let alone graduate school. And I couldn't imagine myself teaching in a college, which seemed to be what most people who went to graduate school in German literature did. So I got a job at a place called Mass Mental Health Center. It was a mental hospital with an outpatient clinic. And my job was as a research assistant. And I interviewed clinic patients and had a questionnaire. And I got very curious about why these people were coming to the clinic. And some of them had multiple addresses in their lifetimes and multiple jobs and others not. And what was that connected to? Anyway, I decided on the basis of meeting psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers at that job to go to social work school.

[13:00]

And I did go to social work school and worked as a social worker in Boston for about seven years and then started a private practice and worked in a feminist therapy collective. But I did social work for maybe 20 years until I left Boston. and moved to San Francisco. And one of the other things that influenced me, not just work, but also turned me, I think, towards Zen practice, I started meditating while I was fairly new to social work in the 70s. And I mostly went to insight meditation retreats at the Insight Meditation Center in Barrie, Massachusetts. But in 1982, I did a weekend workshop with Joanna Macy, who some of you may have heard of.

[14:08]

She's a Buddhist scholar and activist. And I learned how to lead workshops like the ones she did, which were focused on helping people experience our feelings about some of the things happening in the world. At that time, she was mainly focused on the threat of nuclear war. And her first book was called Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age. And so people would come feeling a lot of despair, hopelessness, numbness, anxiety, anger about what was happening in the world and emerge from this workshop. with energy to do something that might make a difference. And I was so impressed by that that I learned how to lead those workshops, and that began a long period of doing work that I would call social change work. And I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 to be with a colleague of Joanna Macy's.

[15:15]

Her name was Fran Peavy. And she had a small nonprofit called Crabgrass, working for social change. And she was doing a lot of international work, including work in India to clean the Ganges River, which is a possible task like the Bodhisattva vow. But she did what she could with a group of Indian hydrologists, and one of whom was a Mahant of a temple. So the work that Fran and I took us to many places, including the former Yugoslavia, Australia, and parts of the U.S. and Canada. And the other thing that happened when I moved to the Bay Area was that I got involved in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. The office was in Berkeley. And... It was there that I met Alan Sanaki and other people who practiced at Berkeley Zen Center.

[16:19]

And I started practicing at Berkeley Zen Center during the week. And I would go to Green Gulch on the weekend. And eventually I was on the board of BPF. And then just a year before I moved into City Center, I was the associate director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. moved to city center, and then after about a year, everyone was talking about Tassajara. I wanted to experience Tassajara. And Linda Ruth suggested I go for a year, which meant giving up my job at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And my job included, I was the associate director, so I worked closely with Alan Sinaki. I coordinated chapters around the country And I did some fundraising. And it was a very engaging job. I really loved that job. And then when I arrived at Tassahara as a Tangario student, Greg reminded me of this.

[17:27]

Today there were only 40 students. 20 were returning students, and 20 of us were new students. So rather than be assigned to general labor, some of us were assigned other positions. bathhouse attendant and initially I found that so hard for a few reasons one is I didn't really like cleaning very much and as the bathhouse attendant my job was to clean the bathhouse every day and do it every day the same thing every day and I you know I was suffering I think from thinking that my job at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship was more important than cleaning the bathhouse. I was really suffering until, you know, partway through that practice period, I realized how important the bathhouse was as it got colder and people were really cold and looked forward to that bath exercise time and immersing in the hot tub and it was important to get it at just 108 degrees.

[18:35]

You know, I started realizing that it made a difference to the community if I did my job carefully and if I could create a welcoming atmosphere, make a nice flower arrangement, and it totally changed my feeling about working in the bathhouse. I'll just tell you about one other job I held while I was at Tassajara. I think it was the first summer I worked in the kitchen. The second summer, I was the Fukuten, and that was an incredibly challenging job, partly because of the complexity of it. The people, not only the kitchen crew, the guest cooks, creating meals for students as well as prepping things for the guest cooks, and then finding assignments for all the guests. people who came for short periods of time who were assigned to the kitchen, and trying to practice, you know, to create an environment in which we were taking care of each other as well as the guests.

[19:54]

And I really learned from the Tenzo that kitchen work isn't really about... It is about food, but it's not only about food. Food means so much to all of us. But it was also learning how to be part of a team and how to create a team feeling among people, some of whom were experienced in the kitchen and some were very new. So also learning about taking care of people the things we worked with, making sure the pots were clean and put away where they belonged, and the sense of everything having a place, and the attentiveness to detail about how things are chopped. It was a wonderful learning experience for me, just checking the time.

[20:56]

I think I did want to tell about one other position I had, which was being the Anja, the assistant to Linda Ruth, who is my teacher. And one incident, the job included caring for the cabin, cleaning her cabin, and making sure there was wood for the wood stove, but was also doing things that Linda Ruth needed help with, whatever that might be. And one day, she asked me to iron a juban And she told me that the sleeves needed to be ironed at a lower temperature than the body of the jubon. The body was cotton, and the sleeves were some kind of sheer synthetic material. So I took the jubon to the back of the dining room, and there were two irons and ironing boards, and one of my friends was ironing something at the other ironing board. And I started with the sleeves at the lower temperature, and then I turned it up.

[21:57]

and I wasn't paying attention, and I burned a hole in the sleeve of her juban. So I had to, of course, tell her that I had done that, and I was extremely apologetic, but nevertheless, I offered to replace it, but I didn't know how I could do that, re-sew it. Anyway, we talked about it soon afterwards in Dokusan, and she said, my job was to be more attentive, pay more attention, and her job was to let go of having a perfect juban, which was amazing. Now, it turned out it was a ceremonial juban that she had been given for, I think, possibly even her mountain seat ceremony. It was really, it was bad. What can I say? But her attitude was so healing in a way, you know.

[23:00]

But I did, and we did talk about what can happen with a momentary lapse of attention. Some cases that can be fatal. So that was an important lesson to learn about paying attention. So I wanted to share some A few words from Suzuki Roshi's not always so in the chapter, respect for things, because I think one thing I learned from work practice was not only respect for objects, but also respect for people. And Suzuki Roshi talks about both of those things. This is the chapter some of you who live at City Center have heard the story about not dragging the dining room chairs across the floor because the zendo is underneath. And Blanche Hartman used to talk about that frequently.

[24:02]

And Suzuki Roshi wrote about that as an illustration of respecting things by lifting the chairs, not dragging the chairs. And we do that. We move zafus with our hands. We don't kick them. Things that you might not think about, but this idea that Everything has Buddha nature and the gratitude we express when we bow to our seat in the zendo and to one another. So near the end of this short chapter, these are Suzuki Roshi's words, Because the respect for people, I mean, I see that here in so many different ways, which I'll talk about in a minute. But he says, in this Zendo, everyone can come and practice our way, experienced students and also those who don't know anything about Zen.

[25:12]

Both will have difficulties. New students will have difficulties that they could never have imagined. Old students have a double duty to do their own practice and to encourage those who have just come. Without telling them you should do this or you shouldn't do that, the old students should lead the new students so that they can practice our way more easily. And I think we see that every day here, people coming, arriving. Some of us have been here before, but some have not. And there's some of the ways that we treat each other with respect include like I saw this morning someone pointing out where a sutra was in the sutra book. Somebody can't find it. Explaining how to find a cup or where you can get an extra towel

[26:19]

where the bathhouse is. Those are small acts of kindness, I think, and also an indication of respect for each person, no matter how long they have been here. So I wanted to share a poem on this matter of kindness. Small kindnesses is the title, and it's It's by a poet in Santa Cruz named Danusha Lamares. I've been thinking about the way when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by, or how strangers still say bless you when someone sneezes, a leftover from the bubonic plague. Don't die, we are saying. And sometimes when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up.

[27:21]

Mostly, we don't want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot and to say thank you to the person handing it, to smile at them and for them to smile back, for the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other now, so far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, here, have my seat. Go ahead. You first. I like your hat. So I've seen so many examples of this since I arrived two days ago, like someone taking someone else's dishes to the dish shack, opening a door for someone whose hands are full, listening to someone, giving them your full attention.

[28:33]

And I think for myself, I fell in my room on Tuesday morning, the day after I got here, and people have been so kind. me, helping me in innumerable ways. And I just appreciate it so much. So I want to thank everyone who has taken a dish for me, found me a walking stick, taped my leg, brought ice. I think that kind of kindness is something that I just really appreciate about not only Tassajara, I think it's wonderful to encounter it anywhere, but I think there are many practices we do that help us be more aware of the people that we're in community with from the work circle in the morning.

[29:37]

Acknowledging who's arrived and who's leaving and a chance for people to say, I forgot to ring the wake-up bell, I'm sorry. You know, bowing in and bowing out, having a sense of connection with the people that we work with, all the many ways in which we, in the kitchen, will say, I don't know if you still do this because I haven't been in the kitchen since I've been here, but... hot when you're carrying or opening the oven or carrying something really hot or a knife. Those are ways of sharing a small space together mindfully. So I'm just gonna end with a few more words from Suzuki Roshi and we'll have a few minutes for comments or questions. So Suzuki Roshi says, I think we have a very good spirit here in this sendo. I am rather amazed at the spirit, but the next question is how to extend this spirit to your everyday life.

[30:43]

You do it by respecting things and respecting each other. Because when we respect things, we will find their true life. So... Yeah, I'm wondering if anyone has any comments or questions. And if you would, if you do, please raise your hand. And I may not know all of your names, so I might ask you what your name is if I don't. I have a couple of prompts. Can you share a moment? when you've experienced work as practice? That's one. And or have you found any obstacles to thinking about work as practice? Linda. One of my favorite instances of work as practice at Zen Center, in particular, is in the summer.

[31:51]

In our usual summers, the town trip comes in at 6 pia. It's right when dinner is served. And usually the railroad bell rings just as about 20 people are sitting down and about to take their very first bite. And everybody puts down their fork and goes out to help unload the township truck, putting all the supplies in. And then we all go back to eating. And just that community spirit and everyone doing it together. And we have smaller versions of that here. But just everyone letting go of their hot dinner. to go help everyone else to take care of the community. Thanks for asking that. That brings back a wonderful and repeated name. Thank you for sharing it. Yes, Rose, right? Yeah, right. I keep saying every time we value the work circle in the morning and when we get to our different jobs, we always value it.

[32:53]

I can't help but think how different work out in the world would be if we did that rather than rushing in and grabbing a cup of coffee and slamming down at the desk and hardly even reading the code workers. It would be a different world. Yeah, certainly would. Thank you. Thank you. And maybe some of us can bring that into our work environments outside. Yes. Lauren. I just wanted to add on to what Rose was saying is that there's been a couple of times where either only Rose and I are bowing in, just the two of us, or only Jim and I are bowing in, just the two of us, or sometimes there's six people. And, you know, even though we started originally dying for people, when it went down to only two of us, we didn't do it with any less... integrity or respect. We weren't like, oh, just forget it.

[33:55]

There's only two of us bow and leave. We still went through the whole process and said the words with just as much meaning. And it was actually almost sweeter to just the two of us look each other in the eye at the end and bow and like, it's just you and me today. That's really nice. Thank you. Yes. My name is Rio. have your thoughts on this one. It's been coming up for me a lot in conversation with people, the notion of volunteering when there is an open position for work. So sometimes I can volunteer for things very wholeheartedly. I love picking up sender jobs and such. And other things sometimes I feel very obligated to do. And I wonder, should I volunteer for things that I you're begrudgingly volunteering for. Sometimes I picture Bodhi Dharma saying to me, like, nothing, no merit.

[34:56]

And I love your thoughts. Is this work practice or not? Well, some people would always say yes. I think that may not really fully attend to what all the variables are. So if you're exhausted and you need rest, it's probably not the best thing to volunteer for something at that moment, even if it's something you might like to do, like a do-honored nap job. But to pay attention to not only whether it's something you like or not, but what your physical state and is, and also perhaps to the context, maybe someone really urgently is needed to do something that you know how to do and other people may not know how to do. In that case, you might want to volunteer, even if you're tired, even if maybe you'd rather not.

[36:03]

And it could even be, you know, somebody's upset and you're the person they ask, can you spare a few minutes to hear about this? You might say yes even if it maybe isn't what you would really like to be doing in that moment. So I don't think you can make a blanket statement about that, but to really notice when it is you say yes and when you say no and how it feels to say no. Sometimes saying no to a request is also saying yes to yourself. So it's... I think it's a really important question to keep asking yourself and for all of us to not automatically say yes and not automatically say no. Yes, Jim. to be discernment in the way in which we give kindness.

[37:18]

You have to also try to figure out to know that the impulse to be generous and to be kind sometimes has to have a little bit of perception about the situation. That it could be construed as interference or hurtful for others. I think like a good global example of that is that... Would you be willing to tell what happened between us? I think that might be more relevant than a global example. after Zazen, I saw you going down the steps, and it was dark, and you met your thing, and as you got down, you were walking your steps, and then I fell in beside you, wordlessly, and just walked beside you.

[38:36]

And I was thinking that, you know, it's dark, and I've tripped myself going down, and so I just wanted to sort of accompany you to your room. And you came up to me today and said, no, you know, that I kind of hurt your feelings. And that sometimes when you're gonna be kind, know when you need to ask. That's important, don't just go lightly, blindly into a situation thinking that I'm going to make things better. I'm here. And you really, that was so helpful for me. And you thought that you were going to hurt my feelings. I thought that I hurt your feelings. And we got all, oh my God. But I thought I'd stop thinking about it. And thank you so much.

[39:38]

We can't be presumptive all the time that our kindness is going to be received the way we wish it would be. That's true. Thank you for sharing that. I think that was a good mutual learning experience. I think especially when people have disabilities, whether it's temporary or ongoing, to ask if they need help is really important rather than assuming they can't do something themselves. So I'm learning a lot by walking with a cane. So I think it's past time, so I'm going to suggest we close with a closing chant. 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.

[40:39]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

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