No? Yes? Yes. Don't worry. It's fine if you don't, it's not that I can't have anything great to say, so. Sometimes I like to say that ahead of time so I don't feel the pressure to enlighten you on the spot. My name is Ed Brown, or Edward Brown, I like to think that I'm headed Edward, becoming more myself. So I'm not Philip, most of you knew that. So it's Mother's Day, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about my mothers, and we can all think about mothers and mothering. For one thing, it's interesting how much we all want some instruction for meditation,

[01:18]

how to do it, how to do it better. I've been at this for a long time, and I don't think meditation is about doing it better, but about feeling something with your heart, and if your heart is anything like my heart, this is not at all easy, very challenging. Sometimes it seems like the last thing that I would like to do, or be willing to do, would be to feel something with my heart, because it seems like to do that would be very painful. I think we all have a lot of heartache of various sorts. Anyway, there is one of the Zen teachers, Dogen Zenji, in his instructions to the cook,

[02:22]

he said, let your heart go out and abide in things, let things return and abide in your heart. It's interesting that somebody has to say that, but most of the time I think we have the idea that I could have some peace and quiet if I didn't have to relate to anything. Happiness is never having to relate to anything. You can tell your body to behave itself and shut up and not bother you, and that would be nice. And maybe you can get your mind to be quiet too, and that would be great. And then it would be very peaceful around here. And when you go to the grocery store, all those little boxes that are going, buy me, buy me, buy me, buy me. And I don't know if you ever stop to ask, but if you ever ask them why,

[03:28]

they say, I'm quick, I'm easy, you won't have to relate to me at all. Put me in the oven or microwave, set the timer, I'll be there for you. And of course, moms are someone we end up having a lot of relationship with, or even the fact that we didn't have much relationship means that's a lot of psychic space, or a lot of non-relating can be a lot of relating too. And it seems like, again, that if there was some way to, what do we do with all of that? Is there some way to work it out? Is there some way to clean it up? Is there some, you know, how do we make it okay?

[04:30]

You know, have some forgiveness or allow there to be some love, sometimes there's love and there's attachment and there's worry and there's clinging. We don't want anything to happen to mom. Today's my first Mother's Day without my mother. She died last July the 4th. This is my second mother. She was my mother for, my goodness, 52 years. I thought it was pretty amazing that she died on the 4th of July,

[05:36]

since, you know, at one point she vowed to live long enough to see the Republicans out of office, and wasn't a big fan of American foreign policy and, you know, nuclear weapons and all of those things. And because the 4th of July is in 1826, you know, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826. They waited for that day to die. Those are the people who started our country. That's, you know, a lot of something going on with those guys that the present leaders don't seem to have. Maybe it's because now things are quick and easy and... It's great now the bumper stickers, you know, let's not elect to push again. Ah, boy.

[06:38]

So, my second mother, you know, married my father when I was seven. And... She'd been looking for someone with children because she had decided not to have children of her own, which I didn't really understand until after she died. We invited some relatives over to my house after the memorial service last August, and her brother said... Her brother who... They're so ironic, aren't they? My mother, and she said, I am not your stepmother, I adopted you, so I have to be careful about my language. She's my mother, and the other mother is my birth mother. So... So, my mother's father was a radical communist from Denmark originally,

[07:45]

and her brother actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, you know, about 1936, and he's now coincidentally become a partner with another friend of mine who was his in-student for 15 years over in the East Bay, and they now own rental property. And my uncle was never very successful as a contractor building houses, and my friend, of course, didn't earn any money for years being his in-student. And my uncle says, I'm a lot wealthier now being a capitalist than I ever was as a communist or a socialist. Life has its ironies. But my uncle said, well, you know, we were standing around toasting with champagne and sparkling apple juice, and he said, well, the real tragedy of Anne's life,

[08:50]

and he got a little distracted for a while, and we said, what were you going to say? And he said, oh, well, you know, and then he finally agreed he would tell us. So, it turns out that when he was 12 years old, 1932, my mother was 18, and he said, I watched out the back window of the house while the bankers gave my parents eviction notices. They owned at that time five acres in Palo Alto that was a raspberry farm, and they had been making their living growing raspberries. And apparently their mother was so upset, losing the property, she went out to a shed in the backyard and hung herself. Only the beam broke.

[09:53]

This is your grandmother? Yes. This is my grandmother. And after that, she was in an institution for a year and a half or two years. And, you know, by the time I knew her, she came to live with us for many years, 8 or 10 or 12 years she lived with us. She seemed fine to me. But my mother, Anne, got very worried about having children. She thought, my mother's emotionally unstable. I don't want to pass this on to any children. And she decided that she wanted to have children nonetheless, so she was actually looking for someone like my father who had children. So when I met Anne, I was... Well, actually, it turns out, just the other day,

[10:58]

I'm kind of looking through my mom's stuff, and here are these letters from Anne and Frank, my father, going back to before my mother died, my birth mother died. And I thought, wait a minute. I didn't realize these people knew each other before my birth mother died. I thought this happened later. So... Well, this tour is a little unclear to me here. But anyway, Anne married my father when I was seven, and we all moved back home together. And my brother, who's a bit older than me, never really connected with Anne, my mother. But my mother, in the last few years, as she got older, she said, do you remember when you connected with me? Do you remember what happened? I said, no, I don't remember.

[11:58]

And she said, one evening, you and your brother were living downstairs at our house. This was on 44th Avenue in San Francisco. And you had been climbing in and out the window to the backyard, and you'd gotten stuck. And you were screaming, bloody murder. And I came and got you out and got you in bed. And I sat down in the bed, and she said, you stared and stared and stared at me for the longest time. And then you said, no more brown eyes, but I have you. My birth mother had brown eyes like my brown eyes, and she had these same scars on her eyebrows. I look a lot like my birth mother. And Anne had hazel, gray hazel eyes.

[13:04]

No more brown eyes, but I have you. And I actually, growing up, felt closer to my mother than my father. My father was rather distant and aloof, and kind of prone to kind of indirect anger. The republicans, the catholics. War in Vietnam. So if I had problems, I'd talk to my mother. My father was an approachable. And my mother loved literature and poetry. She wrote poetry. She used to recite her own poetry and others' poetry from heart. Now that I think about it, I didn't think to bring you any of her poems tonight.

[14:11]

I brought another poem. And then she was a librarian for 19 years here in Centerville. So, you know, I ended up writing books. I ended up being quite interested in writing and poetry. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I was home with a bad flu. And for five or six days, I read all of the MFK Fisher books that my mom had. The Gastronomical Me, How to Cook a Wolf, ABC or A to Z. And I decided I would write about food the way MFK Fisher did. More recently, you know, things are so interesting, you know, finally.

[15:18]

And my mom used to come to, I had a Thursday night meditation group for many years. Maureen used to come up at the Unitarian Church, which was my mother's church and the church that my mother and father had gone to. And my mom was the most consistent regular member of that group. She would come every Thursday, even the Thursdays that I wasn't there. She came, in all the years I did that, over 10 or 12 years, she came all but about three Thursdays when she was going to a play opening. Maybe two Thursdays when she went to a play opening and one Thursday she was sick. And otherwise she came to my meditation group. So she was like, in some ways, you know, more the leader of the meditation group than me. She was there more often. I could never get her, you know, she liked to sit in a chair, which I don't mind, I think sitting in a chair is great.

[16:20]

But she always picked out the chairs, she wanted the chair with the arms. And then the arms would be so that she'd sit like this. And I thought, couldn't you have a chair without arms and just have your hands on your lap and let your shoulders down a little bit? But she liked having her shoulders where they were. This is the kind of things, you know, that you struggle with, parents, children, children, parents. Why do you have to be like you are? So one night, one time, I finally, you know, this occurred to me, I finally thought, you know, to sit down with Ann, my mom, and I said, Mom, do you remember, do you remember after you married my father?

[17:22]

And we first moved in together, you know, Frank sat us down, my brother and I, and he said, I don't want you boys talking about your birth mother, Frances, around Ann. It makes her nervous. So after that, we never talked anymore about Frances. And I said to Ann, did you know that he asked us about that? Is that true? Did that make you nervous? I was only been following this rule for 50 years. Or at that point, you know, something over 45 years. This is a rule. I never thought to check it with her. And she said, no, I don't, I don't. I didn't know that he did that. I said, would it have made you nervous? And she said, well, I'd like to think that it wouldn't have and that it would have been fine. Seems like it would have been very natural for you to be thinking and talking about your birth mother.

[18:27]

So I thought, oh my, I guess the person that would have made nervous was my father. Before my father died, he was, and some people say, you know, when somebody is dying, people who have died before come to you to kind of greet you and to welcome you. And before my father died, he was back with his first wife, my mother, my birth mother. My birth mother was from South Dakota. So a few days before my father died, he said, I had a dream. And he said, I dreamed I was driving through South Dakota. And the gas, I was getting low on gas and I was also getting tired. I pulled into a gas station, but it was a different kind of a gas station than usual. They had this big parking lot and you just went to sleep in your car.

[19:33]

And then when you woke up, it was all gassed and ready to go again. And then he said, don't tell Ann. Because he was back with Frances. But my mom surprised me sometimes, you know, as she got older and when she died last year, she was 89. She'd been living in her house here in Centerville for more than 40 years, 45 years. So she didn't want to leave her house. I used to joke with her, Ann, I think you're going to have to leave your house sometime. Whether it's before or after. Or in the process.

[20:37]

But she wanted to stay in her house. And my daughter moved in with her. But my daughter said, I'm not here to take care of Ann. And it's so interesting, you know, this person is my adopted mother and I feel so connected with her. And then I feel that, you know, if I get around her sometimes, she and I have like, I learned how to be anxious from her. Because she would get anxious or upset about something. And I just feel the same feeling. And sometimes when I touch her, I go like, oh my God, she's got that too. I think we learn these things, you know. We get our limbic systems attuned. So even though she wasn't my birth mother, I was very attuned to her feelings. And it was very difficult sometimes for me to be around her. And I used to, finally when she was sort of fading, you know, and she had to stop driving.

[21:46]

And she'd been overdosing on Coumadin, mistakenly. Thinning the blood so she was completely white. And I finally took her to the doctors. So I used to say, you know, I would really feel better, you know, and worry less about you if you were to move to the Redwoods. It's a great place. She said, yes, I have a lot of friends there, but I want to stay in my house. And finally, last Memorial Day, my daughter was over at my house and said, you have to do something about Ann. What am I going to do? Do I start hiring people? I don't want people in my house. I don't need people in my house. Yes, and you've also said, I don't want to cook. I don't want to clean. I don't want to do anything. I just want to sit in my chair and read. And I don't want people in my house and I don't want to go anyplace.

[22:47]

So my daughter says, you have to do something. You have to do something and you can't do anything. And so I called up my mom and they said, my daughter said, you can't call Ann while you're angry. I was kind of angry that my daughter was telling me I had to do something that I couldn't do. I said, all right, I'll call her. And I called up my mom and said, you can't call her while you're angry like this. You stay here, I'm going into the other room. So I called up my mom and I said, Ann, we've been talking about this for a long time, but I would really like you to reconsider about moving to the Redwoods. We'd gone through a number of permutations by that point. And that's all, you know, and I just said very briefly, and then I said, so, you know, think about it, let me know. And about two hours later she called back and she said, I'll go.

[23:53]

And she was like elated for about a week or 10 days. And she said, it was like an enlightenment. And she said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what was going on with me. I used to be saying, I can't leave my home. I can't leave my home. And she's doing these little things. I can't. I'm not leaving. No, I can't leave. She said, I don't know what I was doing. I don't know what that was all about. So she moved to the Redwoods and two days later she had a stroke. And six days later she died. So I spent a lot of time with her in the hospital. My brother came finally for part of that time. And my daughter was there sometimes. And we had all this, you know, sort of talk about, you know, do we try to save her? And my mom had made me the medical power of attorney.

[25:02]

And it says, I do not want to be artificially kept alive. Something like this. If I am terminally ill. And I said this to the neurologist and he said, Ed, your mother is not terminally ill. She had a stroke. I said, I know. That's the problem. She's terminally alive. But it was pretty clear that my mom was not going to want to, she was never going to understand anything again. Her favorite thing, the only thing she would like to do anymore was to read. She wasn't going to be able to talk. The stroke was at the communication center of the brain. So we finally convinced my brother, the Catholic, that this was going to be all right. And he said, okay, I'll call my son because my nephew is studying to become a Catholic priest. And my brother said, he's had a lot more of these ethics classes than I have. Because there's a sort of feeling like stay alive longer and you gain virtue by suffering.

[26:06]

So wouldn't it be good for her to be an invalid for a few years and not be able to wipe herself or eat for herself? And I didn't think so. And her brother, when I called him, he said, Ann would never want that. Anyway, my brother checked with his son and the son said, Dad, if that's your wish, that's what you do. Thank God. Oh, Buddha. So it's been challenging letting go. So, you know, I'm studying or practicing how to have mother's love come from someplace besides mother. Wouldn't this make sense?

[27:14]

You know, mother's love from Guanyin or to let my heart go out to things, let things return and abide in my heart. Let my heart go out to my heart. To reside more stably in my own heart. So I want to tell you also a little bit about my birth mother. When she became pregnant with me, she had, she'd had cancer actually since she was a teenager.

[28:20]

She had a tumor in her neck off and on for many years that was removed two or three times by surgery. And when she was pregnant with me, she had cancer. And the doctors, some doctors said, you should have an abortion, you'll live longer. And my mother decided not to have an abortion. So I'm here. Someone suggested to me recently, you know, I thought, whoa, that was, you know, loving on her part. Somebody suggested to me recently, she probably thought that you would be the savior child, the savior baby. And my father says, oh, I think your mother lived longer

[29:24]

because she had a baby. And it gave her interest in me. And it gave her interest in living longer and being there for you. But I think it was, you know, there are various notions about, you know, being in utero. Sometimes it's described as this kind of idyllic or very pleasant or maybe. But I think it was pretty intense for me. My mother had cancer. When I was, she was carrying me and I think it was very distressing for her to have cancer. I think she was ashamed. I think she resented it. I think she was angry. I think she was scared. I think she was very sad. I think it was a very intense place to be.

[30:26]

To have that intensity of an experience. Anyway, I was born premature by a month. And again, sometimes people suggested to me, you got out as soon as you could because it was so intense. And after a little while, you know, three or four months, you both realized, you and your mom, that you weren't going to save her. And you both knew it. You thought you would save her. She thought you would save her. And that's not what was going to happen. So you got out. And it only got worse. So my mom went home from the hospital after a week and I was there another two weeks. And in 1948 or 1945, I don't think they were doing, you know,

[31:30]

holding the babies. So I think of that as my first meditation retreat. Two weeks. With very little connection or contact. So you see, it's either, depending on how you look at it, you know, this is either, so Zen practice is, you know, about as close as you can get to post-traumatic reenactment because you just sit, and in Zen it's better, you know, more than Vipassana because we sit in little rows, you know, just like the little cubicles. With no possibility of contact. You don't talk to anybody or look at anybody or connect with anybody. You just do your practice. So a little post-traumatic reenactment or else being born premature like that was, you know, James Hillman, sort of the sales code and, you know, the acorn theory, you know. Little early practice for your destiny. So every year at that time of year,

[32:38]

those three weeks are very intense for me. They just finished. The day I came home from the hospital was April the 16th, so 17th of April, I feel pretty good. And coincidentally then, that time is also when my mother died. April the 8th, which in the Zen tradition in Japan is a celebration of Buddha's birthday. So many people are kind of happy and celebratory on April the 8th. I'm very sad. Year in and year out. We remember these things. So my mother, my birth mother, died April the 8th, 1948. I was three,

[33:40]

just after my third birthday. And then three days later, my brother and I were in an orphanage right here in San Anselmo called Sunny Hills. Now it's a kind of residence for emotionally disturbed adolescents. In those days it was an orphanage. I was the youngest person there. I did my second meditation retreat. I sat in Little Rocker on the front porch for seven or ten days. My father said they weren't sure they could keep me there. I wouldn't play with anybody. I wouldn't talk to anybody. I just sat and rocked. Because then I'd not only lost my mother, but my father and my brother. My brother was in a different part of the orphanage and they told him not to visit me. It wasn't allowed. Except for if I was having a intense tantrum, they called him in to calm me down. But this is all,

[34:46]

you know, for many years I thought all of my feelings of anger and resentment and sadness and shame and terror and grief and sorrow and anxiety, it's because I was abandoned. Because my mother left. And then one year, around Mother's Day, I don't know, it was six or seven years ago, I was thinking about my birth mother and I realized, you know, after she died, I decided I'll always remember you. I'll never forget you. And the way I remembered her and didn't forget her is I went on feeling her feelings for her. Because those feelings weren't my feelings when I worked on that and I studied that and those feelings were her feelings. Those were all the feelings that she'd been feeling when she was carrying me

[35:47]

when I was a little boy. So I knew those feelings. And then I went on feeling those feelings and eventually, you know, you feel the feelings that are around you and it's not until, you know, you're four that you know, you know, at some point, you know, it takes a few years before you know the difference between I and you and then you just take all the feelings that you've been feeling all those years and now they're suddenly mine. And then you make up stories about why you have them. That's what we do, my mother didn't want to leave me. I think she was terribly sad. And I also think that she was scared. But interestingly enough, you know, she also had

[36:49]

a certain religious impulse. About 20 years ago, my brother went to a family reunion in South Dakota and he came back. My aunt gave him a box of letters that my mother had sent to her. And this letter is, you know, nowadays you just talk to people, AT&T, Bellphone, but this is single-spaced, typed letter. This is page 5 and 6. It was one week before she died. We got one homemade mimeographed card at Christmas which has an excerpt on it from that ultra-smart magazine, The New Yorker. And this excerpt, Alan Hunter and Dr. Thurman

[37:52]

and the young co-minister of Dr. Thurman's, Bob Miners, all liked it so much too that I typed off copies for them. Here are some lines from it for you. Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It is a duck right in the ocean, a hundred feet beyond the surf, and he cuddles in the swells. He can rest while the Atlantic heaves because he rests in the Atlantic. Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is, and neither do you, but he realizes it. And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it. He reposes in the immediate as though it were infinity, which it is. That's religion, and the little duck has it. I like the little duck. From The Little Duck by Donald C. Babcock and The New Yorker.

[38:52]

And the letter goes on. She says, There you have it, Hattie. My sister, my aunt was named Hattie. There you have it, Hattie. He reposes in the immediate as though it were infinity, which it is. That's religion. In other words, rest today. Rest calmly without worry, without fear. I understand for it. Rest today as if it were infinity, for today is part of infinity, part of all time and space, part of God. I find that thought so very specially helpful. Rest in the immediate as if it were infinity. That's religion. Accept the universe. It's big, and many disturbing things for a little more time. Let's settle down into the ocean and let the waves

[39:54]

carry us along and hold us up. We had a lovely Easter and so forth. My birth mother and my father had a kind of old-fashioned idea that we would just forget about our birth mother and bond with a new wife that he would marry. And that worked for me. I didn't forget about my birth mother,

[40:55]

but I did bond with my second mother as well. So each of us has our story. Letting our hearts go out to mothers and mothers coming into our hearts is very profound. Very profound both as something we struggle with and also something that supports us. This is part of the basic religious question of how is it we can open our hearts to one another, to our family, to our friends. Because people come and go and those we love

[41:59]

have intense feelings. It's not always easy to be with them. And it's not fixable. So I think I'd like to stop and we'll do a little stretching and then sit for a few minutes. I would just like to say that I express my gratitude to my mothers. Each of us in our way is doing absolutely the best we can. Sometimes it's a little confused and sometimes we get upset or lost

[42:59]

and we're doing the best we can. And also again to remind you that there's always the larger mother's love or love that is you know, free. It's not dependent on how well or poorly we're meditating or anything else. And that's something that you know, it's kind of just a decision. Just letting my breath into my chest, into my heart. Anyway, I wish you well with you and your mothers. Thank you.

[43:47]

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