Hello. Testing. So I've been, I signed up to do my way seeking mind talk because I'm tired of rehearsing it in Zazen. Wanted to get it over with. So, and then I've also been thinking about what brought me to practice. And, um, you know, the funny thing is that, uh, I thought that what brought me to practice was I wanted to calm down. Um, but actually I think that, um, There's a lot of things that brought me to practice and there's kind of no way to ultimately know what brings us to practice. So I was born in 67 in Mackinac Island, Michigan. It's a little island that's in between, you know, Michigan kind of has two parts. It's kind of like a mitten and then there's a northern part and then there's this little island. And it's kind of an unusual little island.

[01:13]

It's There's no cars there, it's horses and bikes. And it's just primarily like a tourist destination in the summer, it's closed in the winter. You might know a place like that. And we were there because my father had a personal connection from his childhood growing up there. He didn't grow up there, but he used to come on summers. And his family had been part of this group called Moral Rearmament, which sounds really like a horrible name. But it was actually a response to, I think it was World War II. One or World War II, I'm not sure. Maybe World War II, where as the world started arming itself, it was this movement of this group to morally rearm society. So it was not religious. It was religious, but it wasn't any particular religion.

[02:16]

And they were trying to be multiracial and very inclusive. And the practice was just to... My mom was telling me, wake up in the morning, you write down your first thoughts. And they didn't really do meditation, but that was kind of their practice. And... um they did a lot of meetings and things like that and um so anyway my my grandparents actually my father's parents had been involved in that and so he and his brother had gone uh with their family in the summers and they built all these buildings all these lodges and things there and um later that um group kind of disbanded the only thing that's left of it is um up with people if you've ever heard of up with people that came out of that group So, anyway, so it was a college, and he was teaching English at this college, Mackinac College, and so my family was there. And so a couple years later, the college failed and closed, and... I think it wasn't a very convenient place for a college. And so we went to Ann Arbor, and my father finished his PhD in English literature and applied for a job.

[03:21]

And he got two offers. One was somewhere in Midwest, and the other one was in Hilo, Hawaii. And my mom grew up in Connecticut. My father grew up in Kentucky. And so they figured, well, what the heck, let's go to Hawaii. And, you know, thinking about it, you know, they were so brave because, you know, my sister was seven, I was four, and my younger sister was just a couple months old. And I think neither one had ever been to Hawaii. They did the interview over the phone. and you know he got the job and they just we just flew out there and that was it and um so very fortunate to grow up in this place that's so beautiful and safe actually you know relatively um uh you know small town uh everybody knew everybody and um beautiful place lush tropical um I had a lot of experiences connecting with nature. I've had a lot of amazing experiences, seeing volcanic eruptions up close and just swimming in the ocean, the warm ocean, feeling the waves and getting into the rhythm of the waves and going to the beach.

[04:31]

Every few weekends, we'd go to this other side of the island, drive around the island, and this beautiful beach called Hapuna Beach. And You know, you always have to keep your eye on the horizon. You never turn your back on the ocean because the ninth set is always bigger than the usual sets. And so, you know, if you don't, then you just get totally pounded into the sand, you know. It happened to me many times until I figured that out. And the whole beach, you know, you just watch the horizon and usually it's flat. But, you know, there'll be, if it's bumpy, then that means a bigger set is coming. So then you see the whole beach just swims out, you know. all in one mass, and there's this huge wave, and everybody just dives under, and it's very fun, you know, it's very exciting. So, you know, things like that, and I'm very connected with plants, and I had a garden when I was 10. My family wasn't very interested in gardening, but they had made this attempt, and so we had some tools, and my dad used to take me now to the Hilo Farmers Exchange, you know, and get seeds, and grew whatever I wanted,

[05:36]

It's very difficult to grow things there because there's fruit flies and so like to grow cucumbers, I used to like consult with my dad's friend who is also a gardener and like to grow cucumbers, you have to wrap the baby fruits in newspaper and then after the flower opens and it gets pollinated and you cover it with plastic and then you can get a cucumber in that way. but I never worked with pumpkins. I could never get any pumpkins. It was really just big disappointment to me as a child. And, um, and popcorn, you know, I grew things like, you know, popcorn and, you know, and, uh, didn't know about hand pollinating. So, you know, only a few kernels on each cob and, um, The best thing was the peanuts. The peanuts did really well. And this is a very rainy place, extremely rainy. Where my parents lived, where we lived, was kind of up in the hills a little bit. And it probably rained 360 days out of the year, just incredible amounts of rain, like a kilo. It rains so hard that, you know, if you're driving, you know, with your windshield wipers, the fastest possible speed, you still can't see anything.

[06:42]

So it's very, very wet and rainy. And we get these peanuts. We get tons of peanuts. But they were so, like, waterlogged that if you roasted them in the oven, they never get crisp, you know. It's like little mini baked potatoes or something like that. But they were really, they were good. So, anyway... The hard thing about growing up in Hawaii is it's complicated. It's a complicated place, you know. When we first moved there, we were living... I went to school, kind of in this downtown school, and it was kind of a tough place and kind of tough kids, and they weren't that friendly. Then we moved up to this... the place where I mostly grew up, this little elementary school, Kaumana School, and just one class for every grade level. We just grew up together, everybody. And I remember going out on the playground. I was like six, six or seven. And this kid's talking to me, and this kid's saying, well, I'm Hawaiian, Portuguese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, and what are you?

[07:48]

And I said, well, I think I'm English. I don't know. He said, oh, you're just haole. And I said, what's haole? And he said, oh, that means foreigner. And actually, I've learned as an adult that it has other more interesting meanings, but As a child and growing up, I just, you know, I just knew that this word meant foreigner. And so, you know, my sister had the same experience, my older sister. So we'd go home and ask my mom, well, what are we? You know, she said, English. What else? You know, maybe a little French. Is that all? So then we'd go back to school and I'd say, well, I'm Scandinavian and Russian and German. You know, make up all this stuff. And that response was much more... You know, the kids liked that response better because it made us seem more similar, you know. But even so, it was... You know, I was hated. I was hated. There were kids that really hated me. And... And I didn't, you know, I didn't understand it really until, you know, we took Hawaiian history in fourth grade, seventh grade, 11th grade.

[08:58]

And so, you know, I learned the history and it made sense why people hated me because, you know, the history of Hawaii is basically colonial history, you know. The Captain Cook came in and, you know, it's this long history. And then the missionaries came. And then the sons of the missionaries are the ones that started the big plantations of sugar and pineapple and things like that. And the saying in Hawaii is the missionaries came to do good and they did very well. So, you know, then they brought in all these laborers from different places and that's why there's this whole mix of cultures and, you know, people that grew up on plantations, their grandparents were, you know, picking, cutting sugar cane and picking pineapples and things like that. So, you know, that's the kind of shared culture of most of the people in Hawaii. And then there's the Japanese Americans. There's some groups that kind of keep themselves separate. The Japanese Americans kind of tended to keep themselves a little separate, very proud of their heritage.

[10:01]

And like my Japanese friends at school, we'd always go to Japanese school after school. and uh and then the hawaiians to some extent not totally but you know there's you know some pride in being hawaiian and maintaining that heritage as much as possible but you know the hawaiians got totally shafted i mean they're the most landless in their own land they got you know you know some very similar to the native americans here so um so anyway um In terms of spirituality, I was very not interested. My best friend's name was Chris Chen and I used to ride my bike down to his house and have piano lessons from his mom. His mom was also the organist at our church and poor Chris got roped into being in the choir. And this church was predominantly Japanese-American congregation, including the minister. His name was Reverend Yamani. He was a very wonderful man, very genuine and warm.

[11:04]

But I didn't feel anything, you know. I was a kid, you know, partly too. So I used to sit there and, like, make faces at Chris in the choir, you know, and that's kind of how we amused ourselves. But... I didn't feel anything, but my father and my parents were pretty good about like, they went kind of sporadically to church and, um, they would bring us. And after a certain point, they didn't like require us to come anymore. So none of us did, you know, I was like, that's, that's over. Um, except maybe like on Easter or on Christmas Eve or something. Um, so as a result, I'm, I'm pretty ignorant about Christianity actually. In some ways, I feel like I knew more about Buddhism at this point, but, um, uh, Let's see what I want to say about that. My father, his specialty was transcendentalists and his favorite author was Henry David Thoreau. And it was Thoreau.

[12:05]

We have these arguments, Thoreau or Thoreau? It's Thoreau. Anyway, and Emerson. And so, you know, for me, I would go to church and it was felt like it was about somebody else. Like it didn't feel like it didn't speak to me. I didn't feel any of those feelings about God or, you know, any of the things that they talked about. in church but i felt very strong feelings in nature you know and my dad and i used to hike in the volcanoes national park and um i felt very connected to the land and sort of the energy in the land and um the hawaiians call it mana there's like land has certain kind of energy and i could really feel it and my i think my dad also you know felt that way we never really talked about that but um So anyway, what am I doing? So... So it was kind of a confusing place to grow up.

[13:18]

My parents couldn't really relate to our experience and didn't really know how to relate. We didn't really know how to talk about what was going on with us. I remember one time, The bus used to come all the way up to our neighborhood, but we were either the last stop or the first stop. We were kind of way at the end of the line. Sometimes the bus driver wouldn't pick us up. He'd just pass us by. I remember one time this happened. At first we thought maybe it was an accident or something. Then the bus went by, and this kid at the back of the bus flipped us off. It was my sister and I. And, you know, thinking about later, it's like maybe an alternative vision would be, you know, we'd go home and tell my mom and she'd like call the bus company and complain or something. But that just didn't happen. It didn't even occur to me to like tell my mom. It was just like we were both so totally ashamed of what happened. Yeah. So I just said, oh, we missed the bus and whatever. So in high school, it got more difficult. It seemed like there was more separation and antagonism.

[14:21]

I was always very active. I played soccer. In high school, we had recess. I didn't know that other people in high school don't have recess. But anyway, in our high school, we had recess. We had morning recess and lunch recess. So you had to have like a crowd to hang out with because, you know, you had to do some recess. And so I hung out with the soccer crowd. And, you know, we called it Soccer Corner and the rest of school called it Howley Corner. And so I hung out with these, you know, all the guys that got stoned, you know, every day. They just get totally bombed, you know, and go to these parties and everybody was high. And, you know, it was great because I was so shy, you know, I was so inhibited. And so it was great because after a while I realized it didn't matter what I said because nobody could remember it the next day. So this really is kind of freeing in a way. So then I went to college in Oberlin, in Ohio. My parents both went to Oberlin, and my grandfather and his aunt, and it's kind of a long history in Oberlin.

[15:29]

So I went to Oberlin College, and that's actually where I first heard of Tassajara. It was... had taken a Buddhist... I'd taken a world religions class in high school when my dad was on sabbatical in Washington State. But other than that, I hadn't... Actually, Buddhism didn't really appeal to me. It was like Hinduism and Taoism sounded more interesting. But... When I was in college, we had this food co-op, and the students ran it. And so you had to have a job, like everybody had a job. So my friend and I were the bread bakers for a while, a couple semesters. And so we'd bake bread, you know, like 30 loaves, you know, every other week or something like that. And, of course, you know, Ed Brown's bread book. I still have my copy, actually, from those times. When I first went to Green Gulch and I heard Ed Brown speak, I was like, oh, my God, that's that guy. And then the other thing that I discovered about myself in college was I majored in philosophy and actually I majored in women's studies.

[16:30]

I was going to major in philosophy and I got more interested in women's studies, which is a really dumb name. But it's feminist theory, basically. And actually, at college was a time when I learned more about Hawaii because I had this freedom to study what I wanted to. And I was very curious about the history of the plantations and things like that. So I got to learn more. And I discovered that I was gay, that I was in love with my best friend from high school, actually. And she was going to school in western Massachusetts. And so... Uh, that didn't actually work out the way I thought it would. But, um, you know, I would have said, you know, years ago I would have said that never did, didn't work out. But, uh, these days it would say that it worked out differently than I expected and we're friends. And I went to her wedding last year and she and her husband just had a baby and she's very happy.

[17:32]

Um, so anyway, um, uh, so after college, I, um, I came out to California. Um, I thought I was going to get into feminist publishing and that didn't really work out, but, um... and i kind of after that didn't work out i kind of floundered around it um i was uh i took jujitsu for a couple of years and i had this really close group of friends that a lot of whom had also gone to oberlin and and we hung out and we did a lot of things we went camping together and just had a great time and very close and um you know um it got kind of difficult. It's like, I guess we liked each other too much or I don't know. This really close friend of mine was discovering, having memories of being abused as a child and didn't know how to deal with those memories and those feelings coming up. And none of us knew anything about how to deal with those feelings.

[18:36]

didn't have any therapy or any kind of information or any guidance or anything and so there's a lot of behavior acting out and I had this big falling out with my friend and um as a result I lost my whole group of friends and you know I had other friends but I lost this really good group of friends and it was really hard for me because I was also really isolated from my family and um uh, my older sister and I, my parents actually were kind of okay about me coming out to kind of, you know, trying to be good liberals and like be curious about it or something. And, but my older sister and I had this big falling out. We didn't speak to each other for seven years. So, um, so I was kind of, you know, isolated. And, um, so, you know, the usual kind of went into therapy and started reading stuff. And, Um, I remember, but I remember in that time, you know, just being so struck and I remember being in my kitchen, you know, I was living with some housemates and I remember being in my kitchen and like, it was like the rose colored glasses were gone and everything in the kitchen, it felt like I was seeing it for the first time.

[19:39]

It was like, so like in super focus, you know, like everything was like really focused and sharp and clear. And, um, So I started, I decided to, um, to focus on my career. And I hadn't been, I'd been doing all these different part-time jobs. One of them was, um, uh, being a reader for a blind elementary school teacher. He's a legally blind. And he said, well, you like the kids and, you know, you seem to, you know, like doing this and want to be a teacher. I was like, well, you know, I don't have any other plan. So, um, so I did, I went back, I got my degree and I, um, became an elementary teacher and elementary school teacher. And I was very challenging. I was working with a group of kids. Once again, I was like the only white person in the room and it was very challenging, a lot of different things going on for my students. And the same year, my father was diagnosed with melanoma and doctor gave him three months to live and he died almost exactly three months later.

[20:42]

and um i'm lucky because i was actually able to say goodbye to my dad and i went it was very stressful you know i was teaching in san pablo my dad's in hilo and i'm going back and forth and taking a week off and writing sub plans and the kids were wild when i came back and you know i was in hilo and i'm guilty about not being with the kids and i was with the kids and guilty about not being with my dad and it was very hard but um it's very interesting my dad was a great guy and um i remember talking to him about morphine about how morphine works and um uh he was saying you know that the morphine doesn't take the pain away it just um it just makes it so that your brain doesn't care about it and i said oh that sounds kind of like what i've been reading about buddhism you know so um Okay, so I'm just about out of time, but I want to say, so eventually, you know, I decided, I stressed out about my job, decided to start practicing in Spirit Rock.

[21:44]

I've been to Spirit Rock. I've been to different places. Somebody took me to Green Gulch, and I really liked that place a lot. I've always considered myself a farmer at heart. So I really liked it. And then I found out I could be there. And then I found out I could do practice periods. I took a sabbatical. I did practice period two years ago in the fall. And I've come to Tassajara a few other times as a guest student. So just little by little. And I've been at Berkley's Zen Center for two years. working with uh studying with mel weitzman who i like very much and wonderful sangha there so anyway thank you all i feel like this is a very precious opportunity and i know a lot of people who aren't able to be here and want to so i feel lucky to be here so thank you

[22:35]

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