Last fall, I wanted to put in a cover crop in my little garden, which I have out in Inverness. So I got a seed catalog from a friend of mine, the Territorial Seed Company in Oregon. And I looked through there and I decided to order some clover. And I also ordered something called Agronet, which you can put over the ground to keep the birds off, protect the seedlings from getting eaten. And I ordered some little packets of wildflowers. When I ordered them, the woman said, Oh, I think we'll have to backorder the clover because we're out of stock right now. So we'll send you the rest of it. So a little while later, I got a box in the mail. The Agronet is supposed to be six feet long, and I was thinking it was somehow kind of stiff.

[01:05]

I didn't see anything six feet long, and it was this little box. And they told me they were going to backorder the clover. So I didn't even open up the box, just left it on the counter there. It would have been a good time to put in the ground cover. About six weeks later, when it was a lot colder and there was a lot less sun, one day I opened up the box and I looked at the invoice. And the invoice had everything listed there. So then I looked at what was in the box, and sure enough, everything I had wanted was in the box. And then I noticed each packet of seed, it said, The best teacher of gardening, Dash. Careful observation of the obvious. It takes some of us a while to learn these things.

[02:11]

But I thought that was a rather nice saying. And it seems to apply equally well to a lot of other activities, like cooking or carpentry or plumbing. Maybe even the world situation. And in fact, it's rather similar to something in Zen, which is, it's very similar to the expression, careful or compassionate attention to detail. Careful observation of the obvious. Because it's the obvious, of course, that we are always, we have our habit of generally of overlooking, in our search for something better. Nicer, more enjoyable, more pleasant.

[03:19]

So we can set aside the obvious, not paying attention to it, and try to get on to what's deeper or juicier or whatever. So Buddhism just keeps reminding us to come back to the obvious, the everyday, in some more careful way. And this is true then not only in various activities, like gardening or cooking, but of course it's also true in relationships. And it's true in personal relationships and group relationships. One of the things, like recently, you hear in the,

[04:24]

I see in the paper, or I think I probably got a letter back from President Bush, you know, when I sent him a letter, and it said, the choice is his, for war or peace. Oh no, I didn't have anything to do with that, did I? Isn't that, I mean, and then it's sort of like, well isn't it pretty obvious that both sides have to have something to do with it, and to make a statement like that is not particularly, you know, acknowledging the obviousness of the fact that both people or both sides are in a relationship, and both are part of that? I don't know, that seems pretty obvious to me. But it's also then pretty simple for us to make statements. And we do it ourselves in our own relationships, much of the time that, you know, we can blame the other person. No, I'm fine, the choice is yours for war or peace, or the choice is, you know, you're the problem. We have some tendency to do that,

[05:26]

and not to own our own part in the relationship. And of course, this is also the same in meditation practice. We make a kind of careful observation of the obvious of our physical sensations, our breath. And careful enough so that we begin to notice the space or calmness in our breath, or some quality of well-being in our life that doesn't have to do with things coming and going, what we have or don't have. And we begin, and then we notice unobserved feelings and thoughts. And there's another category we observe of what, for lack of some better expression, I'll call dharmic truth.

[06:28]

We observe, we begin to observe some truth about things, such as there's no lasting happiness that we can get hold of and keep. There's no lasting peace that we can get hold of and have. And that kind of truth can be very profound, and somehow it's something we keep overlooking. About 20 years ago, I was at a Seshin. Here's an example, right? 20 years now, 20 years ago, I was at Seshin in San Francisco, and I think it's something that all of us who were there remember it very well. Some of us, though, think the lecture was in the morning, and others think the lecture was in the afternoon or evening. But we remember the talk. And right near the beginning of the talk, Suzuki Roshi said, we had sat down, and then he said, this is like the middle of Seshin, this is the fourth day.

[07:29]

Even if you've meditated one or two periods, you know that it can kind of hurt after a while. But he said, the problems you're now experiencing, I thought he was going to tell us how we could get them to go away. And he said, the problems you're experiencing will continue, and I thought, until we wise up, right? We'll continue, and there's this little, he was very sly, you know, there's a little pause there. We'll continue for the rest of your life. And we all laughed, like you did. And we relaxed. And then we started thinking, well, maybe there's some exceptions. Is this really the way it is? What are we doing this for then?

[08:34]

So even though we hear this kind of truth, somehow we have to hear it over and over again, and we have to experience it in our life over and over again. There's no lasting happiness. There's no lasting place apart from the problems. There's no, you know, all the time things are coming into being and going out of being. And our body is subject to decay and sickness. We can't even, you know, we can't control our thoughts or our feelings. We're kind of at the mercy of things in some way. But I think it's pretty important about problems because, I guess in that sense, I would say that the point of practice then is more to learn to live with problems

[09:42]

rather than thinking the thing to do is to get rid of them or solve them. Because when we get impatient about living with problems, and I know, you know, this is a very complicated thing, right? But just, you know, for the sake of my talk, we can talk about it more later, you know. But generally, you know, as a general kind of thought, when we are impatient with problems and we want to get rid of problems, that's when we start fighting and when we go to war. The United States didn't want the problem of living with, you know, the Iraqis or Hussein. We didn't want that as a problem to live with. We wanted to get rid of it. We wanted to have an end to the problem because we were impatient. And it would have been harder to live with it than, seemingly it would have been harder to live with it than to just get rid of it.

[10:46]

Whatever the cost is, let's just get rid of it. And we're often, of course, again, we're like this often in our own lives. So this is harder. It's harder to, you know, appreciate, I think, that the problems we have will continue. I appreciate it a little more now because it's been 20 years and so far he was right. You know, it takes a while for these things to sink in. Anyway, there was another Zen teacher.

[12:07]

I think it was Yaku-san, one day he said, whatever you say, whatever you do, is of no avail. And his disciple said, yes, but not to say and not to do, that's also of no avail. Now what? And the teacher said, it's like planting flowers on a rock. And the disciples answered, you can't even insert a needle. So how do you find that, you know? Is that something that you can live with? Is that something that's discouraging or does that mean that we shouldn't do anything, you know, with our lives or, you know, make any kind of efforts? You know, I think we have to look at,

[13:08]

you know, what does it mean is of no avail? So we should understand something about that. And so our effort is not directed to, you know, doing something that's not possible, like getting rid of all the problems in our life. There's a wonderful article in the present windmill lecture by, or talk by Darlene Cohen, who's worked a lot because of her own arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. She's worked a lot, learned to work with people who are sick and not well in various ways. And she makes the same kind of point. If you're obsessed with getting well, there's various things you can do to get well and meditation practice can help you in some ways. But when you obsess about it or you're preoccupied with it, then everything you see is in terms of, you have little victories and setbacks, big successes, big setbacks.

[14:10]

You're all the time, you know, discouraged, encouraged, because everything that happens is a little sign, health, illness, health, and because they go together. The more preoccupied we are with health, the more illness comes up. And we notice how bad it is, how good it is. And then we're always winning and losing. And a statement like Yaku-San's is so we can, you know, drop beneath that. I like dropping beneath things instead of rising above them. I don't believe in transcendence. And then our life is on something solid. Because all the time we're going to be subject to sickness and health.

[15:14]

All the time we're going to have problems. So what do we do then? And this other level of things is where we can acknowledge our own sincerity, our own wholeheartedness. And where we can just appreciate things and have some gratitude. And where we're willing to carefully observe the obvious. You know, because we understand that there's not something more there that we can grasp. And our life is in this careful, you know, in the obvious, in the ordinary things. And we stop being so, in so much of a hurry to get past the ordinary things so that we can live. This is one of the things, again, that Darlene mentioned, how we, people, it's as though, you know, when we're sick then people want to get well so they can go back to doing the things that got them sick.

[16:18]

You know, I want to get well so I can go back to being mindless the way I was before. She didn't say that exactly, but she says something like that in a little more eloquently than I said it. Do you understand? But there's not something to get on to or get back to or, you know, we're kind of stuck in this place. So we may as well, in that sense, you know, relax in some way and appreciate the simplicity, the simple things in our life. And begin to notice how things work and what we can actually do. When I thought about this, I was reminded of, you know, then the other side is, so then the other side of this, we say, is of no avail.

[17:19]

But the other side is then, as Kali Giriraj used to say, let the flower of your life force bloom. This is different than, you know, being healthy, getting rid of illness. Just let the flower of your life force bloom. It's not, it's a kind of, it's hard to know what does that mean, practically speaking. But it's some way to try to say what to do that isn't getting involved in winning and losing. Getting rid of problems. It's something to do with living with problems and flowering in the midst of your problems. . Or Yaku-san, I think it was the same teacher who said,

[18:22]

who said, whatever you say, whatever you do is of no avail. He said, so what did he do? He said, awkward in a hundred ways, clumsy in a thousand, still I go on like this. And I have to do the same thing, you know, recently I've been feeling, I did a sitting here yesterday and I gave some talks and I have a sitting group on Thursday nights in Centerville and I gave a talk and I've been feeling sort of not very eloquent and I realized this morning what that's about, you know, is that for all the talks I've given, it hasn't done a darn thing to stop the war, you know, who's ever right or wrong, but you know, or no, it hasn't done that. So it's like, isn't my, so aren't my words a bit like, you know, flowers on the rock and I can't even get a little needle in any place

[19:23]

to make the world come around to the way I think. Right. Wouldn't it be nice to just have a lot of power so you could. Then you can get in big trouble. Cool. So in terms of healing, I think it's important to recognize or in a situation that we're, you know, with problems, we still need to, in some way, even if we don't get rid of the problems, we need to heal. We need to, in some way, let go or relax or be able to be with things. I find, you know, sometimes I think it's,

[20:27]

it's hard to do, right? Because if you relax, then you don't know what's going to happen next. And I don't think that healing is about just having the capacity to not experience the sensations that are unwanted. You know, the sensations that we label illness, pain, I don't think healing is about getting rid of those. Healing is about getting rid of those. You know, otherwise, if it's about that, then we're always kind of on guard. Are we about to have one of those? And then when it gets there, we have to say, get out of here. Go away. I don't want to. And consequently, our mind is always kind of agitated and, you know, our being is kind of guarded and we're struggling to have one kind of experience and not the other one. And we need to do something like that, right? But mostly we overdo it. And we don't relax in the midst of it.

[21:29]

We don't find calm or peace or harmony in the midst of it. So I appreciate it when somebody like Steven Levine, who's worked a lot with dying people, you know, says and points out, healing doesn't necessarily mean you get over your illness. You might still die. We're all going to die sometime. It doesn't necessarily mean you get over your illness, that you never have to have the sensations you didn't want. That's not what healing is. Healing is much more to do with a kind of forgiveness. Isn't it? We have to forgive our body for betraying us. And forgive people who have hurt us and forgive ourselves for harming others. And we have to, and we look into our own life when we're sick, when we have a big problem.

[22:30]

We look into things more deeply. We're more sensitive. After the earthquake, it was the same thing, wasn't it? There was for a few days, a little tenderness and there was a kind of appreciation of, of each other. The kind of friendliness that wasn't there before. So that's, you know, that's the other side of something like, whatever you say, whatever you do is of no avail. What does that mean? Suddenly there's kindness. Suddenly there's friendliness. Suddenly there's a little tenderness. Suddenly you can touch someone. Someone can touch you, people you didn't even know. And in that vulnerability, we feel that kind of, you know, it's interesting. Then we can feel gratitude. And sometimes people, when we're, you know, when we're sick, it's the same way. We find out what's, what's really important in our life.

[23:32]

And it's important for us to acknowledge again and again, what's really important in our life. Even if, you know, practically speaking, we don't see it manifested. So I'll tell you one of my favorite stories about this. The one that I think of over and over again. And I've used it before. So if you've heard it, you know, it's pretty obvious. But the story is about how Avalokiteshvara got 11 heads. And Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion that hears the cries of beings and comes to their aid. To support them in their struggle. And one day Avalokiteshvara decided, we're not sure if he's he or she. I like to think of her as she. But Avalokiteshvara is known to appear to beings

[24:34]

and whatever guys that they would like to see. So Avalokiteshvara can appear as a fisherman to a fisherman or appear as a carpenter to a carpenter. So I call her she. One day she decided to go to hell and save all the beings who were in hell and lead them out of hell. And this turned out to be extremely difficult because they're all in hell there and they know what's what. And then, you know, she's saying there's some other place and they're going, what are you talking about, lady? You know, it's another wino on the street. Here's another person with another bunch of daydreams and spilling on about this or that, you know. We know better than that. And so it was really hard for her to get all the beings together and lead them out of hell. She finally got them all together. They're on their way out of hell. The last one is leaving. She turns around and guess what? Innumerable more beings wandering into hell. And it, in the vernacular, blew her mind.

[25:40]

And literally her head exploded. Well, she was in a bad way. But Amida Buddha gave her another head. Thank goodness. So guess what? She decided to go back again. She didn't say, well, to heck with those beings. If they're going to be that stupid, I'm not going to worry about, you know, forget them. No, she went back again. She finally convinces them. She gets them all together. They get to the frontiers of hell. She turns around, innumerable more beings wandering in. Another head explodes. Well, she had to do this 10 times before she got a head that could survive this kind of activity. Okay. This is why she has 11 heads altogether.

[26:48]

And you see statues of it. You know, there's all these little heads. She had a big head and then lots of little heads up above and maybe a Buddha up on top of those. Maybe even there's 12 altogether. I don't know. But this is how we grow. This is to acknowledge our deep intention to be of benefit in the world. And it doesn't work, right? Over and over again, it doesn't work, right? And then, but it's still important to acknowledge that kind of intention to be of benefit, not to cause suffering, not to harm. And so we renew that kind of intention, try it again. We get shut down. It all comes back to us. It all comes apart. And guess what? Then we get another head. You know, Buddha gives each of us another head too under those circumstances. And it's not the one that we had before. It's not quite like the one that we had before

[27:50]

where we were going to make all the difference. We were gonna get lasting peace. We were gonna solve all the problems. It's a head that's actually, you know, a little bit more able to deal with things as they are and relate to the ordinary things and relate to the obvious and be with things in a more simple and direct way. Yeah, this is the way it is. And yes, I'm gonna do what I can do. I'll let the flower of my life force bloom. Whatever that is, I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know what will be the flowering of your life force. And basically each of us finds out when it flowers. You know, we don't decide ahead of time. I didn't decide 25 years ago, I'm gonna be a Zen priest and 25 years from now, I'm gonna be lecturing at Green Gulch. I didn't decide that, you know.

[28:51]

I didn't decide to, you know, when I was 10 years old that I was gonna write cookbooks. We don't decide these things ahead of time. You know, we let our life, something flowers in our life. Then we can look and say, well, what is it that's flowering? And how could we, you know, how do I acknowledge what's inside me in such a way that I can come out and express itself? How do I give what's inside of me form? There's an old Chinese saying, when you ignore what's inside of you and don't bring it out, it will fester and be a cause of distress and sickness. When you acknowledge what's inside of you and bring it out, it will be a cause of health and a source of your wellbeing. So it's like that. And somehow we need to do that kind of, in some way, even though,

[29:54]

whether it's of any, you know, avail or not avail, it doesn't matter. We let the flower bloom. Then we come apart and we try again. Okay. Isn't that the way things are? And when we're, when we have sickness or when there's an earthquake or a war, we can come back. We come back to that. It brings us down, down to that again. And it's kind of a relief in a way,

[30:56]

and a kind of a blessing in a way, ironically enough, even though it's so terrible. Okay. Well, I'm going to give you a short Rumi poem. Rumi was a Sufi poet, probably lived in Iraq. Maybe Syria.

[32:03]

It's just a short poem, but it seemed to be applicable. And after I do the poem, we could sit for a few minutes and I enjoy doing that with you to sit quietly. Outside the freezing desert night. The other night inside here grows warm and friendly. Let the landscape outside be a thorny crust. We have a soft garden in here. Continents blasted, cities and little towns. Everything become a scorched blackened ball. The news we hear is full of grief for that future. But inside here, the news is there's no news at all.

[33:08]

So I'd like to sit quietly for a few minutes, perhaps, or we'll see. Just to settle into our being, carefully observe the obvious. And to see if we can't acknowledge that our own inmost request or what's really important finally for us in our life. Thank you.

[34:47]

Thank you very much for your large heartedness and I hope that you can let the flower of your life force bloom, even if it is of no avail. Okay, thank you.

[37:19]

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