Good evening. So this coming weekend, Sunday morning here and Saturday afternoon, we have a special guest coming, Rebecca Solnit. Saturday afternoon she'll be at DePaul University from two to four and then she'll be here for the regular Sunday morning Dharma talk next week. And I thought I'd Well, I encourage you, if not to come to one of those if you can, but also, or else, just to read some of her works. I'm really looking forward to it. So what I was going to do tonight is just somewhat randomly mention some different little bits of things from her writings. So I'm going to start with a book that I'm in the middle of now called A Paradise Built in Hell, which is very interesting.

[01:06]

It's about disasters. And she starts with the 1906, is that it, earthquake in San Francisco, but she covers Hurricane Katrina and a whole series of different disasters. And what she discovered in her research, and there is a whole field of disaster studies now that she leans on, but that people come together in times of crisis. And she makes the case that this is really important in terms of understanding who we are and the potentials for how we can cooperate and act together. So, she talks about the assumption that happens that in times of crisis there'll be mobs and looting, and she talks about that in terms of elite panic rather than people panic.

[02:17]

the powers that be are concerned with maintaining the status quo and the peace, and they assume that there will be this panic. But anyway, I found all of her works extremely interesting, but I thought I'd just take a little bit from this. She talks about disasters having redemptive moments that people come together in. And this happens pretty commonly, that the people on the ground often more than the officials, will actually help out and help each other. And she talks about, this is raising the question of redemptive moments without disasters, and how Well, she talks about individuality and separateness as both our privilege and wound, but that what these moments bring forth is this sense of possibility of purpose.

[03:32]

She talks about inherent sense of purpose, the recovery of this purpose and closeness. Without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human. Perhaps the dawning era of economic and environmental disasters will solve the conundrum for us more harshly, and that relates to what she's going to be talking about next weekend. But she talks about this question of how people find meaning and purpose in the middle of extreme situations. So, again, I'm just reading a few bits of things from this. Actually, she talks about Viktor Frankl, who was a survivor of Auschwitz, who talks about the people who survived were those who somehow were able to find meaning in the middle of that. She says, purpose and meaning are less commodifiable phenomena, and a quest for them often sends seekers against the current of their own society.

[04:39]

She refers to a number of sociologists, one who speaks of the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual's basic human needs for community and identity. It is only because calamities provide as a side effect what is often unavailable otherwise that they become what he calls social utopias. And as she's speaking here, it occurred to me that she's talking about how I see Sangha and what Sangha is. She says, in a society where immediacy, belonging, and purposefulness are already ubiquitous, disaster would only be a disaster. As for those close to the bone hunter-gatherer societies, you can imagine life in them as an ongoing disaster of sorts, one in which there is much risk, much struggle, much strain, much need for cooperation, and much reward. We have traded that reward for ease, safety, and individualism, and the other slower, less visible disasters of alienation and omni.

[05:48]

Not that we bargained it away individually. Larger decisions with unseen cumulative effects were undertaken collectively, and sometimes steered by powers whose interests are not ours. as seen by the institutional alarm almost every time we do agglomerate as a civil society. So again, this sense of responding and cooperating and finding meaning in our collaboration is something that I think is important in terms of Sangha. And she talks next about religion in a variety of ways. religion as another group to belong to rather than as a practice and set of beliefs. Religious beliefs can generate many kinds of reactions to disaster. But she also talks about religion in the Buddhist sense, and she does have some Buddhist practice.

[06:54]

She doesn't hold that out particularly, but she refers to it in a lot of her books. Another sense of religion is not as community or belief, but as practice, as a craft of refining the self into something more adequate to the circumstances we face, more able to respond with grace and generosity, to achieve less temporary liberation. Most religions turn their adherence toward the thing we are afraid to face, mortality, death, illness, loss, uncertainty, suffering, to the ways that life is always something of a disaster. Thus, religion, or we could say practice, can be regarded as disaster preparedness, equipment not only to survive, but to do so with equanimity and respond with calmness and altruism to the disaster of everyday life. What a phrase. Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities, from the congregation of the faithful to all beings everywhere.

[08:07]

So this produces a sense of everyday practice in the mutual aid and altruism that sometimes is delivered suddenly by disaster. And actually she goes into a section of talking about the fire at Tassajara and how people responded and quotes some of the people talking about that. five monks including Steve Stuckey, the abbot who was here, who went back and saved Tassajara even when there was fire, 40 foot high fire coming down on them from all sides. So part of our practice is to encourage that sense of something that happens, seems to happen in many cases in when there's an emergency. She gives many examples, Hurricane Katrina and others, where people actually help each other. So part of our practice is this sense of being ready for

[09:20]

The unusual, doing this practice of sitting, settling, being present, feeling the difficulties of thoughts and feelings as they arise, or whatever. It gives us a sense of resiliency, I'd say. So I'm just going to skip around here. This isn't kind of greatest hits because it's pretty random, but I just picked some things that I liked from some of her books. One book that I talked about a couple of years ago in our practice period, we were talking about the Mountains and Waters Sutra and the Green Mountains Walking. And we talked a lot about this book Wanderlust that Rebecca wrote, A History of Walking. and walking as an activity. And there's so many interesting things she says about that that are helpful in terms of thinking about what our walking is as a practice.

[10:29]

So again, somewhat at random, she talks about the evolution of humans walking. and how that developed from apes, and the study of that from paleontologists, and how walking upright, the arms were freed to evolve into ever more sophisticated manipulators of the material world. She quotes a scientist as saying, human walking is a unique activity during which the body step-by-step teeters on the edge of catastrophe. Going back to disaster, man's bipedal mode of walking seems potentially catastrophic because only the rhythmic forward movement of first one leg and then the other keeps him from falling flat on his face. So we can feel that a little bit in walking meditation, you know, the unsteadiness of it, you know, because we're walking so slowly that we actually feel what that's like and you raise a foot and put it down and we trust the floor will be there to receive us, but there's a kind of unsteadiness and wobbliness in this human walking.

[11:44]

Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them. The desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence, from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling. And the fall meets the fall. She talks about, it's literally a history of walking and she talks about walking lots of different ways. Intelligence may be located in the brain, but it affects other parts of the anatomy. Consider the pelvis as a secret theater where thinking and walking meet, and according to some anatomists, conflict. One of the most elegant and complicated parts of the skeleton, it is also one of the hardest to perceive, shrouded as it is in flesh, orifices, and preoccupations.

[12:48]

The pelvis of all other primates is a long vertical structure that rises nearly to the ribcage and is flattish from back to front. The hip joints are close together, the birth canal opens backward, the whole bony slab faces down when the ape is in its usual posture. as do the pelvises of most quadrupeds. The human pelvis is tilted up to cradle the viscera and support the weight of the upright body, becoming a shallow vase from which the stem of the waist rises." So, I just like the way she writes. It has been argued that the limitation on our intelligence is the capacity of the pelvis to accommodate the infant's head, or contrarily, that the limitation on our mobility is the need for the pelvis to accommodate birth. So, the way these things fit together is fascinating. Again, I'm just kind of reading somewhat randomly from passages.

[13:52]

So she talks about various kinds of walking historically. When pilgrims begin to walk, several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world, which continue over the course of the journey. They develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies. and the landscape. A young German man expressed it this way, in the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can't escape yourself. So a lot of the books she talks about the history of walking in Europe and how people took up walking as a thing to do, to go walking in the country as opposed to something that was functional.

[15:05]

She also mentions walking in Asia. She refers to Gary Snyder, but she talks about the mountain walking, it wasn't ascending so much as being in the mountains that those poets, sages, and hermits celebrated, talking about China. And the mountains so frequently portrayed in Chinese poetry and paintings were a contemplative retreat from politics and society. In China, wandering was celebrated. To wander is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic. I just love that, you know, because as we're sitting also, you know, the mind wanders. And we can, you know, other spaces become available. So to think of wandering as being ecstatic, as a Taoist term, is interesting to me. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces, but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism.

[16:34]

Walking is in this way the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations. Walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of a private property. So she talked about the Sierra Club and how that started as a walking club. Thus the Sierra Club fought for boundaries. Oh, and she talks about the difference between British and Western nature walkers. While British walking activists fight against them, but the boundaries laid down in America are to keep the land public, wild and indivisible, to keep private enterprise out, while in Britain they keep the public out. Private property is a lot more absolute in the United States, and the existence of vast tracts of public land serves to justify this, as does an ideology in which the rights of the individual are more often upheld than the good of the community.

[17:50]

So she talks a lot about the commons and how walking is related to that. So again, I'm just, I'm reading somewhat randomly and she's so provocative in terms of new ways of thinking and making connections. So I'm just trying to give a little taste of some of that tonight. She talks about suburbanization of the American mind. The decline of walking is about the lack of space in which to walk, but it is also about the lack of time. The disappearance of that musing, unstructured space in which so much thinking, courting, daydreaming, and seeing has transpired. Machines have sped up and lives have kept pace with them. So walking is a space in which we can allow some deeper possibility of space.

[18:53]

So again, there's so much in that book. And I'll just mention another book that is really wonderful called Men Explain Things to Me. So amongst other things, Rebecca's a feminist. And in this book, it sort of starts from a story in which she was at a party and the host, sort of after the party, as her, a friend of hers, a woman friend, and he starts to tell her about this wonderful book. And he's going on and on telling her about this book, and Rebecca's friend says to him, she wrote that book. And he just continues going on talking about it and explaining it to her. And it turns out he didn't even read it. He read a review of it. So the women are all smiling because you understand. I think for men to, that book goes on to talk a lot about the way in which men are, women are in our society abused and victimized and responding to that.

[20:12]

So anyway, that's another of her books that I highly recommend. especially to men. I'll talk last about another book, The Far Away Nearby, which part of it I referred to in our Sashin in December, because she has a section about Che Guevara, who's not one of our Zen ancestors formally, but he, in his wanderings in South America, he was a doctor before he took up trying to heal society through revolution, but he was involved with lepers. And what she says about the disease of leprosy is, I think, important to our practice. And I brought it up in Zexin because the third ancestor of the first six ancestors in China, the Zen ancestors, was a leper. And this story about him talks about his disease. But he says, It was not the disease of leprosy itself that caused so much damage to hands and feet.

[21:18]

The disease strangles nerves, kills off feeling, and what you cannot feel, you cannot take care of. Not the disease, but the patient does the actual damage. just really interesting and important about our practice. She says, pain serves a purpose. Without it, you are in danger. What you cannot feel, you cannot take care of. So this relates to the first noble truth, which sometimes people take as negative, that there's this truth of suffering. And it can be translated in other ways, unsatisfactoriness or misalignment. But it's a noble truth because we can face it. And lepers are injured because they're physically, neurologically numb to it. So the importance of actually facing pain is brought up in this. So she says, leprosy is a bacterial infection to which most of us are immune.

[22:22]

A small percentage who aren't have a hard time catching it. It's among the most incommunicable of communicable diseases. And the method of contagion is even now a little mysterious. The bacteria is particularly at home in the cooler parts of the body, skin, hands, forearms, feet, and lower legs, nose, and eyes. In almost any of these places, infected nerves can swell up and then strangle on their sheath and die. The nerveless part of the body remains alive, but pain and sensation define the self. Interesting phrase. What you cannot feel is not you. What you cannot feel you do not readily take care of. Your extremities become lost to you. Pain protects. You get something in your eyes, you do something about it. Delicately, gingerly, or it hurts. You flinch, you blink, tears flow. With leprosy you might stop blinking so your eyes go dry or you rub them too hard and scar the cornea or fail to notice some injury at all.

[23:25]

Thus blindness is a common consequence of the disease. So some of the Some youths who were treated for leprosy described their hands as no longer part of themselves. And the doctor's job was to teach them to take care of these insensible alienated limbs with kindness with which they might tend someone else. So we actually lose the sense of a connection with ourself. So the title of the book, The Far Away Nearby, which covers a whole lot of things, it starts, she has a way of connecting many different things. It starts with her mother's, starts and ends with her mother's Alzheimer's and goes through leprosy and some stuff I'm gonna read about the Arctic.

[24:29]

But she says, after years in New York City, Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved from the far away nearby. So that's the phrase that she uses as the title of this book. And how we see things far or close is at play in various ways. The doctor she mentions says, I believe this quality of shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being. And when the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton went to investigate the psychology of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he coined the term psychic numbing to describe the survival strategy of disassociation and apathy, a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. And this is something that Joanna Macy, who I talk about a lot, is concerned with, and that part of what our practice can do is wake us up from psychic numbing.

[25:35]

But all of us have that. Our culture has this kind of psychic numbing. It's hard to face the reality of the possibility of nuclear bombs, the reality of climate damage, the reality of our current election. We develop this psychic numbing In this book, though, she does some other interesting things. She talks about the Arctic, and she's actually spent a lot of time as an environmentalist and a climate activist. She's been, in the last year, traveling in the Arctic a lot, looking at what is happening. She was just up in the Himalayas recently with Joan Halifax, looking at the melting glaciers there. And she has a section on Frankenstein, the story of Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, who it turns out is the daughter of a great early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft.

[26:42]

Anyway, she puts together so many, Rebecca puts together so many interesting things, but this is about, In the story, I don't know how many of you read it when you were kids, that the Frankenstein monster ends up wandering off into the Arctic. And there's a big part of the story that happens there. So I'm just reading a passage here. Not to know yourself is dangerous. to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion. And their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more. A landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel. You see the not knowing in wars in which the reality of death, the warm, messy, excruciating dismemberment of bodies, the blood and the screams and the unbearable bereavement of survivors is abstracted into collateral damage, or statistics, or overlooked altogether, or in which the enemy is recategorized as non-human.

[27:55]

This happens so easily, you know, in war. And now we're caught up in endless wars, it seems. Many, as Rebecca says, many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the far away near so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species in remote places impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts us to act. And she talks about the suffering before each of us in our own lives. The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. I love that way of thinking about who we are. In some ways, I think of that as Zazen, too, that we're creating Buddha on our cushions and chairs. So we're all Buddha artists, you know.

[28:58]

But she says that the self, too, is a work of art. that we all have been creating and continue creating. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then and the consequences live on. Oh, she says this thing about, she's talking about Mary Shelley's book. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet. What a cool phrase. Okay, just a couple more things from this book. She talks about time she spent in Iceland, also talking about the Arctic and how that is.

[30:08]

Of all living things, Arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses. like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. The far north is an unearthly earth where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. And she talks about being in extended light or dark. Winter is a night as long as that summer day, running near the end of October until the middle of February. The 24-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe between the great day and the great night that each lasts a thousand hours or more.

[31:13]

There's so many wonderful phrases she has just at random. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, which is very relevant to the harmony of difference and sameness. The life comes out of the darkness, out of our not knowing. And I was going to... I'll skip that some. But what Rebecca's going to focus on, both Saturday at DePaul and Sunday morning here, is climate. Under the same sky, climate connects, demands, and informs us. So she has a wonderful way of seeing the possibilities in difficult situations and how The current, really dire crisis of climate is an opportunity for us, amongst other things.

[32:30]

read little excerpts just to encourage you to come and hear her Saturday afternoon and or Sunday morning here. Or else, if you can't, to read some of her works. There are many others. And I'll just stop now. And so I've been kind of all over the place in this terrain. But if anyone has any comments or responses or wanderings to share, please feel free. For the last three years, I've been exploring walking next to the top of the building.

[33:46]

Thank you, yes. I've been doing more walking than I used to also, and it's, just as an activity, very interesting. But again, I'm recommending Rebecca Solnit, her writings and talks this weekend, because she has this interesting way of putting together, you know, all kinds of different things and making connections, which is part of what's, I think, creativity. And again, there's an aspect of this that has to do with our, very much with our practice, and to think of, the mind-wandering in Zazen as not the opposite of what we should be doing. People think we should be focused, and that is valuable. There's a side of meditation that is about stopping and calming, but also to allow a sense of spaciousness and the possibility of making connections.

[35:40]

Thank you, Laurel. responses or comments. Just about the climate stuff, I'll mention that on truthout.org, there's a monthly report by a very fine reporter named Dar Jamal, who's worked with Joanna Macy on this. And he had another one today that was You know, it's the kind of thing I hesitate to read because it's so serious what's happening, and yet our practice is to respond. So I'll just read a little bit of the beginning of what he says. As the presidential campaign circus dominates headlines across the United States, glaring signs the planet is undergoing abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption, which is named for climate damage, abound, human-made climate damage, disruption.

[36:51]

A major study published in Nature Climate Change shows that the planet is warming a stunning 50 times faster than when it comes out of an ice age. The implications of the rapidity of this warming for those who care to digest it emotionally are horrifying. As though to reinforce the point, NASA recently released data confirming that February was the warmest month ever measured globally, at 1.57 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial baseline temperature average. The new record easily smashed the old global temperature record, which was set just one month before, in January. This means that while it took from the advent of the industrial age until October 2015 to warm the planet one degree Celsius. Humans have managed to warm the planet another 57 degrees Celsius in just the next four months since then.

[37:56]

Or .57 degrees, excuse me. And then he says, let that sink in for a moment before reading further and I'll let you look that up if you want. So, you know, for Rebecca to come here and talk about how climate informs, demands, and connects us is powerful medicine. And as bad as it may be, how bad it will be, into the future is kind of up to us. So I talk about it occasionally because I think it's important, but I don't want to, you know, it's important not to feel browbeaten by it either. Anyway, I'm sure Rebecca will have interesting things to say about our situation.

[38:49]

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