Well, as Andrea said, for many years I taught 5th and 6th grades. I taught for some 34 years, I think. And each spring, when I taught, it was the practice that teachers would take their classes to outdoor And this last two days ago, I decided I would go back and revisit the camp, fifth grade camp, or when I taught sixth grade, sixth grade camp. The kids never called it outdoor education school. It's always camp. And so I went. It's called Camp Loma Mar. And if you know Pescadero, it's inland from Pescadero, about 10 miles on Pescadero Creek. It's nestled in the redwoods above Pescadero Creek.

[01:02]

It's a beautiful, beautiful place. The San Mateo Coast area is gorgeous. So I wanted to go back. to see my colleagues, to see the kids. Actually, one of the teachers there that week, I work with her, and so her students knew me and welcomed me, made me feel right at home. And I wanted to see the place, too. To give you a picture of it, there are two villages, a boy's village and a girl's village. cabins, six to eight students in a cabin, there's a high school counselor, and cabin groups are later combined, one boy's cabin, one girl's cabin, to form a nature group for the week, headed by a naturalist, and the naturalists live on site. They're mostly young, 20-something, wonderful, wonderful young people.

[02:06]

During the course of the week, they visit redwoods, and the creek, and the estuary, the tide pools. There's a real emphasis on teamwork, cooperation, open-mindedness, inclusiveness. They learn a lot about not just nature, but about themselves and connection with things. For many of them, this is their first time away from home. And so there's a sense of real separation from mom and dad, from brothers and sisters, from school. And it's hard for a lot of them. But over the course of the week, students just grow so much in being able to be settled and to relate to the Earth they are a part of. Just to give you an example, they work in the garden for a while. in which a lot of the food is ground for dinner. vegetables and greens. And they have a song called Dirt Made My Lunch.

[03:10]

I'm not going to try to sing it for you, but it's hilarious. And then there are lots of banana slugs around. And a lot of the kids initially are very squeamish around those sticky yellow creatures. And by the end of the week, they're singing the banana slug song and doing a dance to it. A lot of those students emulate the naturalists and they take a new name for themselves. Scrub Jay, Big Red, Wide Oak, Bobcat, Kestrel. And many, many years ago, this inspired me to take a new name. And so I named myself Raven Big Cloud. Anyway, it's quite remarkable. Students begin to see themselves not as separate from nature, but as actually as part of nature.

[04:14]

And they get this at a very sensory gut level feeling. And they really experience the reality of the web of life, I think. And just as a little sidebar, I know myself, Growing up, I always felt very close to the land, to the outdoors, to the sky. There was something about the storms coming in up near the Oregon border. The south wind would blow in the scent, the aroma of the pines and the cedars and the Douglas fir. That's something I don't have here. So I've always been connected to that. In fact, To illustrate this, I might share that my parents say my first words were, and see if you can understand this, but, etu fa fa tu ti tu tu. Which translates to, it is too foggy to see the choo choo. Down on Second Street in Eureka.

[05:22]

So I've always had this connection with nature. Not so much with people, I must say. It's harder for me. I never felt really a part of any group, including my family, for many, many years. It's only more recently that I've been really starting to feel connected to people. I'll just share one experience out of many that I've had. It was last year over a Labor Day weekend that Ken and Paul, where are you Paul? Where are you? Were doing a backpack out of the east side of the Sierra. And we went over into something called Humphreys Basin. This was reenacting a trip that I'd done with my wife Leslie 23 years ago. I thought it was pretty easy then.

[06:27]

So anyway, we were going up toward Alpine Cole, and Ken and Paul were up there waiting for me, waiting for me. And I struggled up this massive talus, and I really thought I was having a heart issue. And at one point, Ken and Paul huddled together and they talked to me a little bit and then they went off to the side and I knew what they were talking about because I'd done this with a person that I had come across many years ago, Amy Racina, where Walter and I had a sidebar conversation, what would we do here? And they were wondering about my life, I think. And anyway, after I reclaimed my breath some and calmed down a little bit. I wasn't mentally disturbed, I was just physically exhausted. And there was only a hundred yards or so to go. And Ken said, I'll carry your pack. And so he did. He had his own pack on the back, he had my pack on the front. And he bounced right up to that saddle, and Paul made sure I made it up.

[07:37]

But it was a beautiful thing, a real connection. I have to say, though, it was ultralight pack, the only way to put it. As I came down, I slipped and fell a little bit. I wasn't hurt, but Paul immediately came up and he escorted me down to the lakeside. I will never forget that. So as I was driving home from camp, I began thinking of the web of life and the similarity with Indra's net. You know, the net in Hindu mythology, which hangs over the palace of the god Indra. And at each corner, each vertex of the net, there's a jewel. And each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels. And then it came back to me, what I had heard on the news earlier in the week, that a black man had been shot in Tulsa, running away from the police.

[08:49]

He was tackled, wrestled to the ground. And Eric Harris, was shot. And he was stunned. I watched it, it's on video. And he said, I'm shot, I'm shot. Oh my God, oh my God. I can't find my breath. He cried out to Avalokiteshvara, not knowing who he was crying out to. And the white policeman said, fuck your breath. And Eric Harris died. And I thought, my God, my God. Is this included? It is. His cry, the cops' response, it's all included.

[09:52]

My heart weeps because I know I'm a part of that. That's all interest net. So today I'm going to talk about practice as intimate relationship. And I think I brought my clock. Carol, will you give me a heads up on time? Yes. Okay. This is my alarm clock. So practice as intimate relationship. Dogen Zenji stressed that we should approach everything we do as practice. And I've been reading a lot of Not Always So lately, and I reread a section called The Boss of Everything. And in that, Suzuki Roshi says, real practice has orientation or direction,

[10:59]

but it has no purpose or gaining idea. So it can include everything that comes. Whether good or bad doesn't matter. If something bad comes, okay, you are a part of me. And if something good comes, oh, okay. Because we do not have any special goal or purpose of practice, it doesn't matter what comes. Yet it does matter, and yet it doesn't matter. Both are included. Since it includes everything, we call this big mind. Whatever it is, is included within us. And Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, we cannot find where the self is. If you say, here is my mind, that is already an idea of self. It is here, instead of there. You think your mind is in your head, but where is it?

[12:01]

No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything, without being enslaved by it. You are able to share your practice with everything. That is how to establish yourself on yourself. You are ready to include everything. When you include everything, that is the real self. So I include you, fifth graders. I include you, Sojin Roshi. I include you, Eric Harris. I include you, unnamed policeman who said thank you. So how does one include everything? I would say it's like Zaza. Where our intention is to include everything without attaching to anything. Paying attention to posture and breath.

[13:03]

When thoughts come, we don't judge them. We don't condemn them. We don't celebrate them. We don't fear them. We don't make them into things. That's our intention. We don't do anything with them. They come and they go. Kind of like the old screensavers they had where images would pop up in one corner of the screen, fade out, and appear someone else almost randomly. This is activity within stillness. But life is practice. Practice is life. On the cushion, when we're not on the cushion. So what is practice when not doing zazen on the cushion? This is what Dogen talked about. This is what Suzuki Roshi talked about. This is what my teacher, Sergeant Roshi, talks about. How do we cultivate stillness within the activity of daily life?

[14:08]

I think I'd like now to reflect a little upon the perspective of intimate relationship means to me, specifically how I relate to whom or what is before me and what is said. You know, going back to me entering the Zendo, probably shaking a little bit, but for me that was intimate relationship. Bowing toward the altar, bowing toward my teacher, being bowed to, being in a relationship with Terry Jo, the Jisha, the Krishan, that's intimate relationship. Because I did not feel separated from it. Now you might say, well, this is all a bit scripted. It's part of a traditional ritual. That's true. There's a lot of ritual and formal Zen practice.

[15:12]

Eating in the Zen Dojo. or practice of orioke. Now there's a great moment, I feel, as a server, when I am holding whatever it is I'm presenting to the person, and we bow together, and there's a slight hesitation or pause at the bottom of the bow. We're not looking at one another. It's real intimate relationship, connection. Now, many things in human interaction are scripted. You might say governed by protocol, rules, regulations, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Take driving, for example. Maybe you remember some of my driving stories. I'm not going to... I have no new driving stories for you. You know, there's an explicit rule that, in California at least, It's okay to make right-hand turns on red lights, unless otherwise posted.

[16:15]

Some states, of course, not okay. Another thing, though, implicitly, every time I drive home, most times from Berkley Zen Center, I go up tunnel road across the 24, and then you're on the upper end of Broadway to get on to 24 East, just before you merge into the Colicutt Tunnel. Now there's an understood agreement by drivers, most drivers, that you take turns. And so when someone doesn't want to let you in, there's a feeling of rise arises of This is not harmonious. I eschew other comments and body language now. Sometimes things are hazy. They're not quite explicit, not quite implicit. This brings to mind, for me, an experience that Suzuki Roshi had with his own teacher during part of his temple training.

[17:22]

Suzuki Roshi thought he understood a protocol, but as he says himself, he had missed the point. So, I know you've heard this before, but I like it. Okay. When I was at Eheji assisting my teacher, he did not tell us anything. But whenever we made a mistake, he scolded us. The usual way to open sliding doors is to open the one on the right. But when I opened it that way, I was scolded. Don't open it that way, not that side. So the next morning I opened the other side and got scolded again. I didn't know what to do. Later I found out that the day I had opened on the right side, his guest was on the right side. So I should have opened on the other side. Before opening the door, I should have been careful to find out which side his guest was on. The day I was appointed to serve him, I gave him a cup of tea.

[18:30]

Usually, you fill a teacup 80%. That's the rule. I filled 80%, or maybe 70%, and he said, give me hot tea. Fill the cup with very hot, strong tea. So, the next morning when there were some guests, I filled all the cups with hot strong tea, almost 99% and served them. Afterwards, I was scolded. Actually, there is no rule. He himself liked very hot bitter tea filled to the brim. But almost all the guests didn't like hot bitter tea filled to the brim. For him, I should have served bitter hot tea. And for the guests, I should have offered tea the usual way. This shows great understanding and great humility, and it is a lesson to allow the intuition to guide. Before going, I'd like to briefly look at the etymology of to relate.

[19:40]

Remember, I was a teacher. Relate, turns out, comes from the Latin referre, to be brought back. Now, at first glance, this might seem like relating might be implying a this being brought back to a separate that. And that's true in the relative sense of form. And at the same time, in an absolute sense, emptiness, the this and the that are not separate, but are simultaneously included in one another. So when we say form, emptiness is already there. And when we say emptiness, form is already there. Because we often relate to others from a point of view of the relative, at least I do, of good and bad, okay and not so okay, like, dislike, this may lead to reactivity rather than response in our encounters because things aren't happening just the way we had intended them to happen.

[20:50]

That we focus on the relative is perhaps because in our self-centered mental story, there is, in our story, a fixed, permanent self. It exists independently, we think, separately, from everything around us, from the universe. It's a very compelling story we tell ourselves. I think it's a survival mechanism, almost. Suzuki Roshi, and not only so, the boss of everything, addresses this notion of self. He says, the self you have to control is the deluded you, not the real you. You have an idea of who you are, and you are caught by it. You are enslaved by the deluded you. You have difficulty or confusion. When these ideas are well controlled by the power of your practice, then that you is the boss of everything.

[21:57]

Then even a confused mind will be supported by your practice. Let yourself be with everything and let things be as they want to be. Let yourself be with everything and let things be as they want to be. That last part about letting yourself be with everything and letting things be as they want to be is helpful, I think. It's helpful to understanding what I mean by intimate relationship. In daily life, we're functioning in the world of duality, the this and the that, the good and the bad, the chair and the table, the realm of comparative values. We rarely let things be just as it is, to use Suzuki Roshi's apt phrasing. In the relative realm, we have to make choices, and we live in the relative realm.

[23:00]

There is often a harmonious way to act and a way that is perhaps not so harmonious. If we only emphasize and are aware of the relative, the world of comparisons, then it's pretty easy to be caught up in dualistic thinking, and in the process, to lose our equanimity and to react rather than to respond to what's before us. As I said, there is no right or wrong in Big Mind. Everything is included. If we emphasize the absolute, though, at the exclusion of the relative, the absolute that everything is always okay, it is what it is, then we may not act when action is called for. We may not use skillful means when skillful means are called for. In a lecture that Sojin Roshi gave in 1992, he called this our existential problem.

[24:14]

How to hold both sides, the relative and the absolute, simultaneously. because we continually must deal with the reality that everything is just as it is. And at the same time, we must try to make good decisions in our life. Bhojan Roshi called this our koan of continuous practice, moment after moment. For me, this koan of continuous practice is at the core of being in intimate relationship. I know, for me, I'm more likely to get stuck in the relative, the world of comparative values. So that's the edge of my own practice. My intention is to remember that everything is included. Nothing is excluded in complete activity. As a trying-to-reform planner, it's good for me to let things fall apart.

[25:21]

One way to let things fall apart is to be more trusting of people, of life. Sojin Roshi again, in that 1992 lecture, said, letting go provides an opportunity for things to take care of themselves. Letting go is a kind of trust. When we hold on tightly to things, it's often because we don't trust that things will be taken care of. a very tight rein, which we must do at times, but the more that we can trust the situation, the more we can let go of it, the better. Even if things aren't going right in the small sense, in the big sense, they will most likely come around or fall into place. What prompts us to hold on tightly to some things? What prompts me to hold tightly to some things? to try to push away things I don't want, to try to acquire more of what I do want.

[26:29]

I think it's, for me, it's often born of wanting to be in control, of it not being okay at a gut level with impermanence, of wanting to protect my own egocentric self. Little Jake. Caught by our egocentric self, we separate ourselves from others. We reify people. We dehumanize them. And we end up reacting to what's in front of us rather than responding from the perspective of big mind. Regarding relationship, Shouhaku Okamura Roshi, in his book, Realizing Genjou Koan, The Key to Dogen's Shobo Genzo, says in his commentary to Dogen, Delusion and enlightenment lie only within the relationship between self and others. As long as we are alive, we only exist within relationship to everything that we encounter in our lives. The subject of practice is not the personal self, but all beings.

[27:37]

To practice is to awaken to the self that is connected to all beings, the ten thousand dharmas. Okumura Roshi continues by saying that Dogen said that to see reality from two sides, form and emptiness, is not enough. He said we should also express these two sides in one action. For me, this is what I mean by saying that practice is intimately relating wherever I go, whatever I do, whatever I say. I'd like to conclude my talk today by telling you a true story about someone who I think manifests an intimate and harmonious relationship in his life, even though everything was taken from him. This person did not see himself as separate from what he did, from where he was, with whatever or whom he met.

[28:45]

I used to tell this story to my students in fifth grade. He was born around 1860. As a child, he lived between Yuna and Banya Creeks, high in the hills of the River Daha, but below the snow-capped Waganupa. This was the ancestral home of his people, the Yahi, who were themselves in the same cultural, and language group as the Yana. The Ahi, for thousands of years, had been hunter-gatherers, harvesters of wild roots, berries, bark, various plants. They were fishers of the numerous creeks, streams, and hills and mountains. There was plentiful deer and other game. which they would track as they made their seasonal migrations up and down high ground according to the snow and the melting of the snow.

[29:50]

They harvested by bow and arrow, by spear. This was their undisturbed way of life for thousands of years. By the time though that he was born, for this man, the old life was already beginning to change. The gold rush, which had begun some 10 years earlier in the California foothills to the south, was moving north. Thousands of miners entered the foothills east of the Sacramento River, seeking their fortune, mostly without success. A lot of these people, failed miners, turned to ranching and farming. Mining damaged the creeks and rivers. If you've ever been up in that area, still see it today. Mining killed fish, deer became difficult to hunt, to find. Cattle grazed lands and intruded upon the Yahi land. These intruders brought new disease, smallpox, measles.

[30:54]

The Yahi and the greater Yana population dropped dramatically, exponentially. Searching for new food sources, the Yahi often came into conflict with the white settlers, the ranchers, the gold diggers. The Ahi sometimes, out of necessity, would steal livestock for food. This led to bounties being placed upon their life. It was 50 cents per scalp and $5 per Indian head. In 1865, when the boy was only five or six years old, a band of angry, determined white ranchers decided that they were going to exterminate the Yahi once and for all. And while the group of them slept in their camp at Three Knolls above Deer Creek, in the early morning hours, in a surprise attack, most of the villagers were massacred, shot as they slept.

[32:00]

Those who could escape jumped into the creek. Many drowned. It was at three knolls that the boy's father was killed. It was later written by a white rancher that that day the waters of Mill Creek had turned red as many Yahi leaped into the fast-flowing stream. Many bodies floated down the rapid current. Only a few survived. Of those few, more than half were hunted and killed. The boy, what was left of his camp group, went into hiding for the next 44 years. A lot of the white people thought that the Yahi were exterminated and good riddance to them. But in November of 1908, a surveying team hired by the Oral Light and Power Company traveled to the heart of what had been the Yahi country, and came upon an encampment.

[33:07]

This was the village of the same boy, now a man, and his younger sister, the elderly mother, and another old man. The old woman was too sick to flee when they heard the coming of the survey team. She was wrapped in blankets, and put away behind the baskets to avoid detection. The others fled. The men came upon the old woman, couldn't communicate with her, and so they ransacked the village. They took everything that could be carried away. Food, utensils, baskets, blankets, hunting and fishing implements, tools, and worst of all, the tools to make the tools. And then they left the old woman to die. The man came back and found his mother, comforted her, and she soon died. The man never saw his sister again. He never saw the elderly man again.

[34:12]

He thought they had perhaps drowned in the creek that was at high flow then. The man buried his mother, weeped for his lost companions, and then sang the death song for each. And then he lived alone for three years, constantly on the move. There were others coming back looking for him, constantly on the move, completely alone. Then in August 29th of 1911, starving, the man came down from the hills to surrender. It was over. He was captured near a white man's village, foraging for some food. Word came to the local sheriff, and he was taken to the jailhouse. Dressed only in a breechcloth, they threw a blanket over him. The man was described as gaunt, of medium height, stocky with an upright posture, with black hair that had been cut short and singed by fire.

[35:21]

Word soon reached San Francisco and the newspapers proclaimed, last wild Indian of California found near Oroville. The plan was to relocate the man to a reservation over near what's now Laytonville. However, there were anthropologists who read the papers. anthropologists from the University of California, and they immediately became interested in meeting this person. One was named Alfred Kroger, and the other was T.T. Waterman. So Professor Waterman went to Oroville by train to bring the man back to San Francisco, and so it was done. The man later referred to it as the demon, because as a child, his mother had described it as sort of a beast spewing forth his black smoke as it crawled in a line down the valley. The man was taken to UC campus on Parnassus Heights near Golden Gate Park and he was given a room amongst the other artifacts of the museum.

[36:27]

Spears, baskets. The man was asked about his name through sign language, but the man would not tell his name. It was not the form to reveal one's name. So the anthropologist Kroeber called him Ishi. which means man in the Ya language. After some time, Ishi and these white people stood, had a good understanding of one another, they understood one another enough to converse, get along. Ishi insisted that he be given work to do. He did not want to just be fed and left to be interviewed. So he was given a job of taking care of the museum room, and of sweeping and such, and of making things. So he made bows and arrows and arrow points, made fire with his fire drill, and he was invited to show his skills to San Franciscans.

[37:35]

Thousands of people would come to see him. He became great friends with many of the museum staff. He lived in Berkeley for a month in June of 1915 with one of the anthropologists and his son, later returned to live in an apartment at the museum. He loved riding streetcars. He shopped at the stores along Irving Street, where I used to live. He would be greeted by the local tradespeople. He would bargain for food that he would take home to cook. He took walks in the Chizutro Forest. He made friends at the inner sunset near Golden Gate Park, one of whom was the aunt of a close friend of mine. He worked with language, helping anthropologists learn the Yahi. He was asked often if he'd like to return to his ancestral homeland, but he always said no. Why would he want to return to the land of the dead?

[38:40]

After much persuasion, he did so. They spent a summer there, and he taught Kroger and others, including the young son of one of the anthropologists, how to fish, how to hunt, where the camps were, how to make fire. Throughout 1915, Ishii became increasingly sick. After a long fight, including hospitalizations, his friends moved him back to his museum home. There, Ishii died in his apartment, March 25th, 1960. There was no one left to chant a death song for him. Ishii's friends tried to prevent an autopsy on his body, since the Yahi tradition was to keep the body intact. But the plea was ignored. Ishii's body was cremated, but his brain was excised, preserved for malachide, and sent back to the Smithsonian Institution.

[39:44]

And there it stayed until 2000, when it was returned to the descendants of the Reading Rancheria and the Pit River tribes. Those interesting were traditional enemies of the Yang. Saxton Pope, a physician at UC, who became a close friend of Ishii, said after his death, Ishii looked upon us as sophisticated children, smart, but not very wise. We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true. His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was wise. He had courage and self-restraint. And though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher. Thank you.

[40:48]

Sergeant Rushing, do you have any comments? I want you to say that word once again. Which word? Oh, my sentence? Yeah, your sentence. Oh, my first sentence. Is it two and a half years? Yes. Are there any questions? Sorry. Keep going. Thanks for your talk, Jake. And I appreciate your example of practice, as always. I was going to ask you, is it too foggy to see the choo-choo? It's never too foggy to see the choo-choo. Even when it's foggy, I hear it all the time.

[41:54]

The sentence that ended, let things be as they want to be, what was the first half of that? Yeah, so since it's from Suzuki Roshi, I don't understand. Oh, here it is. This is Suzuki Roshi, yeah. Letting yourself be with everything and letting yourself be with everything and letting things be as they want to be is helpful. Is that the one? No. We rarely let things be just as it is.

[43:05]

Yeah. I have a question. I just wanted to know, remember the whole sentence. I don't understand the idea Yeah, to leave out the want, you're saying. Yeah, I think the universe unfolds. So for me, I look at wanting as it's unfolding the hand of thoughts, unfolding the hand of the universe. It's an unfolding. It's not necessarily volitional, that sort of thing. It's, you know, Jupiter travels around the Sun, it's an euphobia. Things happen, mysteriously. tell anybody what their names were.

[44:27]

It was just an amazing experience for the kids and for me. And they had read one version of the book. So it was great to hear you tell the story and then I was just curious what you were talking about at the beginning where you told the story and then you tell the story of the man who lost everything but still had this dignity. Oh, intimate relationship? Well, Ishii did not separate himself from anything. He lived a life of wholehearted activity. And so to me, that manifest intimate relationship, it was his life.

[45:38]

And for me, as Dogen says, practice is life. Life is practice. So his life was practice manifesting intimate relationship. That was the connection for me. In fact, to add on to that, to emphasize that point, when he went on the month's hunting sojourn into his country, he was taken to meet some of the ranchers. They wanted to meet him. And one of the ranchers was the one who had taken, who had been at the village and took his baskets. And it said, Ishi showed no Ranker told him he knew it was his.

[46:39]

He did not ask for it back. And even engaged in conversation with the man. To me, wow. I wish he asked for the asbestos back. Yeah, I really do. Interesting, it also seems to exemplify an intimacy of dependent co-arising. He's looking at the basket stealer and recognizing what he recognized, which is why he didn't demand it back, but maybe he thought he still possessed it through that person, or maybe he didn't and choose an opportunity to separate. Right. That's right. Seeking to understand, perhaps.

[47:39]

Right. And what you're saying, back to what Sue said, wherever he went, he was home. Because he had that subtleness here. It's remarkable. On the other side, there were white settlers who went with the Indians and stayed with the Indians because they preferred that. So, that's just the other side of that. Okay. Well, I think that's it. Thank you.

[48:32]

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