Good morning. I'd like to talk this morning about the cultivation of spaciousness and the effect of pace in our lives and on our state of mind. And I'd like to begin by reading from a book that I hold in high regard called The Old Shrub Roses by Graham Stewart Thomas. And I'll be reading from the introduction or the foreword by Vita Sackville-West. I remember that many years ago, in the bazaars of Constantinople, we used sometimes to spend a fabulous Arabian tale of an afternoon, not propped on banks of Amaranth and Mowli, but on divans and cushions in the warehouse of a great carpet merchant, sipping sweet, thick Turkish coffee from cups

[01:28]

with filigree containers, while the treasures of his collection were rolled out at our feet by innumerable servitors, picturesque in their blue trousers, broad red sashes, and baggy blue trousers. Those were the days of extravagant leisure. Looking back on them, it seems as though they had occurred centuries ago, instead of merely in 1913, just before the first of the two world wars. There was no need to hurry. Rush and speed had scarcely entered into man's conception of the desirable life. Flying machines were still something to bring housewives out on their doorsteps to stare at. Statesmen and politicians had not yet begun to dart backwards and forwards between America, Europe, and the Far East, descending on Delhi and touching down somewhere in Australasia on the way.

[02:40]

Expressions such as breaking the sound barrier would have been incomprehensible to our ears. How soon we forget. But what is all this to do, you may ask, with the old roses which are the subject of Mr. Graham Thomas's book? Perhaps not so very far removed. Mr. Thomas swept me quite unexpectedly back to those dusky, mysterious hours in an Oriental storehouse where the rugs and carpets of Ishfahan and Bokhara and Samarkand were unrolled in their dim but sumptuous coloring and richness of texture for our slow delight. Rich they were as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, freckled as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes.

[03:46]

It is of these that the old roses remind me. And she then goes on for another several paragraphs, which I won't read, but which I invite you to read. Talk about specific and descriptive. This time of year, I have a particular attention with the so-called once-blooming roses. There's a beautiful one here, a climber, called Lavender Lassie. And out on the corner, Agnes. And in the back, and now on the altar, Apothecary's Rose. A blast of Who knows what you call that color, cerise pink with beautiful bold yellow stamens.

[04:50]

What I notice as I, year by year, spend some time with these so-called once-blooming roses is how much I delight in them in a way that includes the fact that they may be here in their splendor for a month or five or six weeks, but certainly not likely to be longer than that unless they misbehave, which they sometimes do and bloom for longer. how much in the busyness of contemporary life we miss these encounters with what is brief and splendid.

[05:56]

I have for the last little while been seeking to have a greater sense of spaciousness in which some activity may arise. Somewhat in the way that sometimes during retreats I suggest when there's sound to let ourselves bring attention to the silence in which sound occurs, arises. So I'm looking into the possibility of having an abiding sense of spaciousness in which activity, if you will, arises, but where that's not the primary focus. And my experience is that when we have a regular time every day, and a regular time every week, and a regular time every month, when we actually let ourselves be still and quiet, we may have that taste of some spaciousness which can be so easily forgotten.

[07:33]

in the pace of our lives. And my experience is that there is a significant relationship to pace and access to spaciousness externally as well as internally. So if I set aside periods of time when I intentionally practice silence slow down my pace by quite a bit and keep in mind experientially the sky-like spaciousness of the mind. I'm less likely to feel done in by the kind of imploding of the busy world

[08:36]

We're reorganizing some of the rooms in the garden here, partially to cultivate some quiet places where people can stay during the summer retreat, but also ongoingly to have some enjoyment of the parts of the garden that are quiet over against the parts of the garden where the summer busyness of the road impacts. So yesterday we had something of a, actually not yet just yesterday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we had something of what I call the three ring circus. Aided and abetted by the very considerate and dear a heating man from the plumber we use, lying there on the floor with his head in the closet where the heater is trying to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.

[09:52]

He even went back to the office at 6.30 last night to get a diagram and came back to see what he could do. But I did get sunk with the busyness that was significantly in evidence, especially yesterday. And I think that having that experience so fresh in my mind, what I'm struck by is There's a kind of incremental buildup and we just keep busy and pushing, sometimes over some extended period of time. And then there's a kind of, what I experience is a kind of imploding with it all.

[11:00]

I spoke a few days ago with a friend of mine who normally lives in New Mexico, up near Taos, and who has been trying to make a life with her partner in Palo Alto. She said, I can see that this was once a lovely and perhaps even somewhat sleepy town. but the humming and thrumming of busy Silicon Valley life has sent her in her car with all her stuff back to New Mexico yesterday. Talking with her, reflecting on her experience of being in the Bay Area since the beginning of the year, and listening to her descriptions as they resonated with some of my own experience about the pace of our lives in this beautiful area where we live, around the Bay.

[12:22]

In thinking about the pace of contemporary life led by us Americans, importing this busy life out into the rest of the world. What I recall is Kadagiri Roshi's response a number of years ago when he wanted so badly to buy the land in southeastern Minnesota to build a small monastery. And someone said, why do you want to do that? Isn't the center in Minneapolis enough? He said, as the world changes and as human life becomes more difficult, people will have a yearning for the old ways.

[13:30]

And he was describing the kind of life that he envisioned at Hokyoji to be a way of returning to what he called the old ways. I noticed in the paper yesterday or the day before, some couple who live in a brownstone in Manhattan spend their weekends in a 200 or 250 year old house with quote, no amenities, no electricity, no running water, an outside, an outhouse, literally outhouse. And the benefit that they enjoy from living inconveniently.

[14:37]

My friend who has gone back to Taos is somebody who has lived there for quite a long time and she's made an odd but very interesting house that is sunk into the earth and uses passive and active solar and has not ever had a utility bill. About eight or ten years ago she bought a house in Santa Fe so she could be in the bustle of Santa Fe. It was the first time she'd ever had a utility bill and she was just appalled and eventually sold the house and went back to Taos. She's someone who never buys anything until she has the money to pay for it. She said, you know, living here, I feel very naive and like a pauper.

[15:54]

She and her companion were renting a very small one-bedroom apartment and she was having a lot of difficulty with the kind of cramped space, so they rented a studio apartment nearby so she would have a place to write. She said, we were paying $4,000 a month for rent. They did that for two months, and I think that speeded up her flight to returned to her home in Taos. She found in her walks through Palo Alto one vacant lot and next to it a house, a very old small house, vacant with wires and stuff kind of hanging out of it. Definitely a fixer-upper. So she called a real estate agent to see what the price of the house was and

[17:03]

It turns out that the house and the lot next to it go together. And the asking price is $3 million. We have to be very, very busy to be able to live in the modern world. just to pay the bills. And I think that part of what has happened for us in these modern times is what I call how to boil a frog, how to cook a frog. If the frog is in cold water, and the water doesn't heat up to a boil too quickly, the frog doesn't know to jump out.

[18:07]

And we perhaps are at the boiling point. So part of this inquiry into the cultivation of spaciousness in one's life I think will bring up increasingly questions about how much of what I'm doing is what I have to do, how much of it is the accumulation of habit over time that might be beneficial to reconsider from the perspective of some time out. I do know that it's possible to have a very full life that is sustainable.

[19:13]

But to do that, we have to be very much in attention with the regular return to this spaciousness of mind, both internally and externally. We have to keep an eye, at least in my experience, on whatever we need to do to stay in some kind of balance, or we will slowly get swept away. I've been, since our last retreat, talking to people both in the retreat and subsequently about the integration of a kind of groundedness and spaciousness that comes with walking meditation into one's daily life.

[20:19]

And how if each of us has some substantial experience of walking meditation for half an hour, 45 minutes an hour, We can then go and walk with attention on the bottoms of the feet and the physicalness of walking and breathing for four or five minutes and drop into that vast spaciousness and groundedness that we know from having done walking meditation for some extended periods of time. But we do need to have enough taste of dropping deep in moving, in walking and breathing, in order to have the access of a few minutes. Some years ago, someone went around and asked various and sundry religious leaders and teachers, what can we do to bring about world peace?

[21:41]

And I was struck by particularly the Buddhist teachers who were asked this question. The two I can remember particularly being Thich Nhat Hanh His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who both said, although it seemed like this was a shared view among the people asked, what we need is for people to set aside a day a week for mindfulness and meditation practice. Now this was a few years ago, and I remember at the time when I brought this up, this kind of reaction of That's not possible, I don't have time to set aside a day. What about a half a day? I think that's at least the weekly minimum requirement.

[22:47]

I decided because of the concerns about Redwood Creek and the flora and fauna who live in the creek, mostly the salmon, steelhead trout who spawn in the creek, that we would do our best to keep our water usage as low as we could during these months when everything goes very dry. So I've been doing hand watering and have not turned on the irrigation system. So I water a few things deeply and as infrequently as I can. But it does mean that I'm tied to the hose on a fairly regular basis. And I am so grateful to be tied to the end of the hose. especially on the days when the water pressure mysteriously vanishes and we get this kind of little trickle.

[24:01]

And just standing there holding the hose or setting it with the bubbler at the base of a plant, but staying nearby so that I don't let it run too long. I am continuously amazed at what I see with just standing around. Very close to the states of mind in meditation actually. The roses are screaming at me to be deadheaded. Help! Help! Or leave me alone and see what happens. But I do know that when I deadhead a rose, there is something similar to standing at the end of the hose.

[25:18]

Physical activity which doesn't go well if the pace is too quick So what's on my mind and what I want to invite each of you to consider for yourselves is your own process with the cultivation of some sense of spaciousness in your life. And to invite you to consider the relationship between that quality of spaciousness in one's life with

[26:32]

pace, to invite you to not only notice the consequences of the pace of life, but to imagine and actually practice interrupting a busy pace briefly, very, very briefly, but often five or six times a day. for the space of one inhalation and exhalation, maybe. My experience, if I can just remember those practices of the half smile or focusing on one breath or a few minutes of walking meditation, how easily that wider frame is to have access to. When I've worked this territory, what I've begun to notice is the effect not only of pace, but of the number of transitions in a day.

[27:55]

The more transitions, the more exhausted I am at the end of the day. So then the question arises, okay, let's say I have a day with more transitions than I'd like to have, but this is what the day is bringing. Then even more importantly, can I remember to interrupt the pace of the day with these very brief mindfulness practices. And of course what I'm talking about is everything about how we integrate what we taste in formal meditation practice into the lives we actually have. if we do that integration, because we will then begin to notice more about the lives we have.

[29:10]

And we may even begin to think again about how we shape the lives we have. Someone in the Right Speech class, which just concluded this last Thursday, was talking about having a day recently in the last week or so when she was extremely unhappy. And she kept doing bare noting with whatever was arising with being unhappy. And she finally decided, I should put this attention on the unhappiness. What am I unhappy about? So she, inspired by the gratitude practice, that quick 10 things I'm grateful for, She wrote down, OK, quick, 10 things I'm unhappy about. So she made her list, wrote out her list of the 10 things she's unhappy about. And she said, when I stepped back and looked at the list, I realized that five of them were things that I could do something about.

[30:19]

I then asked her, to what degree are the other five things you're unhappy about. Things that maybe you can't do something about, but that you have some reaction to. And can you do something about the reaction? How often do we have a day where we feel like we don't have any choice about how the day goes? and then sink. But of course what I'm talking about rests on our developing ability to notice what's so, and to notice our state of mind rather than be so subsumed with it that the reactive states seem like they're in the driver's seat.

[31:31]

I think that's enough. I wonder if any of you have some comment or observation or something you want to bring up on this or some other topic. Jenny. I went to an event last night, which happens every year in Oakland, at a columbarium called the Chapel of the Chimes. It's a place where people's ashes are stashed. There's an amazing building with probably 50 little rooms, maybe more. It's a Julia Morgan building. In Oakland? In Oakland, by Piedmont Avenue. Oh, I know where that is, sure. So, this is what I noticed. I've been in schools now, so I'm walking a lot more and calming down and getting to do a lot of things that I don't feel I have the time to do in schools in session. the new contemporary music scene sort of takes over, it does, it takes over the Chapel of the Tribes every summer solstice.

[32:53]

And people who, normally their audience is about three people. How many? Three. Three. Because they're playing, you know, experimental guitar with a bamboo stick whacking against it, you know, or playing through a tube, or whatever they're doing. But 30 of these artists come together and they all put themselves in different rooms and then hundreds of people come, hundreds. It's incredible. You wander through this maze, beautiful maze of rooms, and it's unlike, I feel like people are looking for ways to slow down, because you may say, okay, I'm gonna go for an hour. Three hours later, you're still wandering through this maze and finding time to sit with 30 20 or 15 other people, the biggest audience this person has ever had, to listen to somebody do their experimental music. And kids, too, little kids, bring the family.

[33:55]

And I was writing in my journal when I got home, I was writing about what a wonderful experience that was, how time really stopped for us, and we kind of oozed around this building. So delightful, and then I realized we were surrounded by dead people. there are thousands of urns on the walls. And as you walk through every room, the walls are, it's very beautifully constructed, the walls are glass doors with people's urns behind them with their names. And one woman was singing the names of the urns in her room, filtering it with a lot of effects. There's a lot of technology in this people's work. And the work is very beautiful. I know a lot of the people who were performing there. But then I thought, My first thought was, we were surrounded by the dead. Maybe that's why we were slowing down. And then I thought, no, we're not really surrounded by the dead.

[34:57]

We're surrounded by their ashes. There's no one really there. But there's this constant awareness, hey, we have this short time. And this is how hundreds of people were choosing to spend the summer solstice, in the company of people whose time was up. or in the company of his reminders of people whose time was up. It was an amazing experience. It was really wonderful. And I thought, you know, we should hang out with the dead a little bit, or with the reminders of death. Not with the dead. I don't know. With this present reminder that, yeah, our time is short, so slow down. I can't remember if it was yesterday or the day before we were in the kitchen and As some of you know, Kunga and the young turtle were with us for a little while. And Kunga's English for all of the time that he has spent with us is not so good.

[35:59]

But I remember one of the first conversations he and I ever had with his very limited, much more limited English at the time, He kept talking about metapa, metapa, metapa, which is Tibetan for impermanence. And this conversation we had yesterday or the day before, he said, well, if we don't remember metapa, we will be very unhappy, much suffering. And when we remember metapa, then we can be happy. when we can remember impermanence, particularly our own. Now, I'm also reminded with what you were just describing, Jenny. A couple of weeks ago, I went with Wendy Palmer down to Santa Cruz to meet a woman who has been practicing Buddhist meditation since she was three.

[37:09]

when she would meditate sitting in her father's lap. She's German, and her father was friends with Thomas Mann, and they were part of a group of people who were reading a lot of Buddhism, which was, of course, translated in the 19th and 20th century into German. they had learned, this group of people had learned meditation from these texts that had been translated. And this woman, who is now in her early 80s, has her father's bell. She's very keen on the sound of the bell. And a lot of her association with meditation with her father as a young child was with the vibrations from the sound of this very big bowl bell.

[38:11]

So when we got to her little apartment, she welcomed us very warmly and said, you know, please sit down. We sat around the dining room table and she said, first we must have the sound of the bells. She had two bowl bells and she went, And she had two bells and she hit them a number of times and we probably sat together with the bells, sound of the bells, for 15 or 20 minutes and then we began our conversation. And when I called her later to leave a message about something that had come up in our conversation, her message on her machine, you first have to listen to the bell and then you get the beep and then you leave the message.

[39:30]

And when she called me to leave a message, first she rings the bell. So you listen to the bell and then there's the message. I mean, it's just awe. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, if you really sit and listen to the sound of the bell, there's rising and passing. It's great. Just was so wonderful spending time with her. Pretty good to get a head start at three. Yeah, yeah. This is a kind of sneaking up on. Yes, Karen. Risk it. I will. I will. I was just going to say about the bell, it reminded me of when I bought a bull bell in Catton and Duke.

[40:36]

played a whole bunch of them. And the man who had the shop, he would strike the bell and then he would hold it against, almost touching my chest, not quite, and the vibrations in my body. And it wasn't just my ear, he was giving me a whole sense of where I vibrated with that sound and it came to me. And it was just really wonderful. And every time, I often would lift the bell up and just bring it close to me. Because the deep feels like I can't really vibrate. During the retreat that we did at the end of May and beginning of June, someone commented to me, was it you, Art? Somebody, that the sound of the bell that's hanging from the corner of the little clear story is the sound that I start with when I'm chanting. Same pitch and tone, which I cannot realize, although that bell, that particular bell, is a bell I listened to during month-long retreats with the late Tarantulku in Hawaii.

[41:58]

So it's a sound I've been listening to for for a number of years. In your bones? In the cells. I have a very strong response to this big ball bell. I wasn't finished. Oh please, yes. Excuse me. Carry away. There were two things. One is that I'm not sure when we talk, you know, often in practice, talk about taking time out to go to a place of either a reduced speediness or a quietness and an openness. And then it always polarizes that place against the rest of my life. And I have difficulty with that because it almost seems as if I'm emphasizing the distinction between my regular life and my

[43:01]

quiet or meditative life, and how to deal with that. So I wanted you just to address that. And then one other image that I had, when I was sitting several days ago, I had, no, actually once, the last time we were here, and spaciousness and openness and emptiness and all of those sort of images have been where I've been focusing my own practice. And as I was sitting, I had the sense that from here to here was this sort of round shape, and it became totally clear. It was just open, and it was framed. It was like a long oval. And then two days ago, so that was just, it appeared, and it's come again when I breathe out. And a couple of days ago, I was sitting, and that image came, but more strongly. Although my head was in a Greek painting, and it was clear blue, but there were clouds across it.

[44:11]

And I finally, the other day, as I was describing that to somebody, I realized that it was just that division between my mind as a place that is still filled with stuff and has clutter, and the total openness with the rest of myself. And it was just a reminder, I took it as a very, I was appreciative of of learning that about myself and remembering that there's a part of me in the hardest part to the most difficult part to open and clear. It's not my heart and not my body. So another possibility would be to imagine this big open oval that includes head, heart, and to begin to notice what leads and what isn't part of that possibility of the openness of heart and harm.

[45:16]

Let me go back to what you were bringing up about that tendency to have a kind of compartmentalizing or polarizing between formal meditation practice and the rest of my life. My experience, and this is very much in the literature, is that we have these periods that we might call time out from ordinary daily life. where we set up, as much as possible, the conditions for attention and presence. Change of pace, quieting, settling, stilling of the mind, in order to have that alignment between head, heart, And in order to have enough experience of what's possible with respect to presence or resting in attention, if you will, when we start talking, we start moving at a different pace, we begin to be engaged in the world.

[46:45]

That so-called time out is until and in service of cultivation of qualities that we can and if we're really, if our practice is really vibrant, the authenticity of it is in that integration in our daily lives. to move between the pace and fullness of contemporary life and what happens with periods of formal practice is, I think, particularly challenging. I think for me, it feels as if I tend to forget It's as if I've done my work over here and I don't bring it along with me into the rest of my life.

[47:49]

It's just a kind of really being aware of that and taking it with me, not leaving it when I leave this window. But, of course, this is where, you know, I think of all those coyote stories where a coyote slaps his knees. Oh, I knew that. I just forgot. You know, there wouldn't be all those stories that end the way they do if forgetting wasn't a very big piece of human experience with respect to wisdom. And, you know, exactly what I'm talking about in terms of if I have enough experience of walking meditation for an hour or a half an hour or 45 minutes, over time then in five minutes in the midst of my day, I drop as deep as I have come to be able to do in an hour. And I stumbled on this process, which is really articulated in Vajrayana, where you do a practice briefly at least five times a day, if possible, somewhat evenly spaced through the day.

[49:02]

And what I discovered in doing some meditation practices five or six times a day was that pretty quickly, whatever the cultivation was began to be like right here, like the backdrop of the day. So there's some insight about that integrating process that I think is worth paying attention to. Now, of course, how do I remind myself about the practice that I've decided I'm going to do five times a day? Well, this is where our creativity and imagination need to be called upon. And we also have to understand that once we cook up some devices, it's not so useful to think, well, now I've done that, because any reminder becomes completely part of the scenery and I stop being reminded in about three days.

[50:06]

So I have to cook up some other trick. I can remember Some years ago, a woman who was practicing here, who was a nurse, midwife, and she decided to do various brief practices, and she would set the beeper on her watch, so once an hour, they'd go, beep! Well, she was just surprised at how quickly she just didn't notice the sound. The beep would come and go, She wouldn't even hear it. Anyway, I think that the issue that you're raising is crucial. And of course, every once in a while, I run into somebody who's decided to become a monk or a monastic.

[51:10]

is going to be the solution because then all my habits will not follow me into the monastery. Dozo, please, be my guest. Different external landscape. I mean, I think that periods of monastic practice, that is periods where the whole way a day goes. I mean, that's why we do retreats, is to have periodic opportunities for simplification, for more silence, for the cultivation of mindfulness, et cetera. But from my point of view, crucially, in service of our ability to begin to integrate what we cultivate in those contexts into the lives we have.

[52:20]

Yeah. I had an experience of that, for which I'm very grateful. In the last two and a half months I've spent a lot of time in hospital, First in Marin Hospital, where there was a wonderful walking path by a creek and lots of water birds. And then this very recently at UCSF, a very different setting for a hospital. I had found the walks to be extraordinarily helpful in being in the hospital day after day. And I had a lot of concerns about being at a big city hospital. One among many being, where will I walk? How will I find my way to a place? And of course, what actually happened was I'd walk outside the hospital and many of the days that I was there, it was quite warm and sunny in San Francisco.

[53:36]

And there was the world and beings of all kinds, human and not human, all up and down the streets. And I would find myself walking very fast to get out of the hospital. And I'd hit that door and everything would just slow down. And then I would just walk. And found wonderful places to walk, very close to the hospital. That quality of being able to be in one's body and walk in one's body, which I thought I wouldn't find in San Francisco, I found very quickly. And I'm very grateful for it. It helped a great deal in just being there day after day after day. And the next opportunity is walking in the hallway. Yes. Yes, but I probably will get it at some point.

[54:46]

What jumps to my mind is an experience I had some years ago when I went to Oslo to do a retreat on death and dying with a group of therapists. And the people who were hosting my visits were very keen on developing a meditation center somewhere up in the mountains where there would be no noise, where people could be away from the city. And of course they couldn't find any place at that point because everywhere they'd gone to see about possible sites, if there were no other noises, they would be in the pathway of some international flight pattern. And I remember at the time, they were not open to the possibility that right there in downtown Oslo might be just a dandy place to do something.

[55:56]

But I remember in the context of this visit and the conversations we would be having, being grateful for having cut my teeth on meditation practice on Bush Street, which was, and still is, extraordinarily busy, heavily trafficked, not so noisy at five in the morning, but very noisy by six. And again, then when the Zen Center moved to Page Street, the back alley, Lily Alley being where during the late afternoon meditation people would repair their cars. Bang, bang, bang, bang, shit. Bang, bang, bang. God damn it. And that would be the music to which we would meditate at 5.30 every afternoon.

[56:59]

But of course, we want it to be perfect. Not in the city, by some water, with lovely birds. Well, I want to thank you all for your cooperation, even though you didn't really have a lot of choices about the temperature of the room. One of the things I've learned is that a radiant heat system, wonderful as it is, is a whole other thing when the floor is emanating cold. I actually think once we got on our rugs and mats, it was probably actually quite wholesome for meditation practice, but maybe a little more difficult for the last hour or so. Thank you very much for your putting up with that, and we'll hopefully get it fixed, the mysterious boiler get fixed.

[58:15]

Take good care of yourselves. Our next half day will not be until August, because we'll be closed for retreat in July. Do you have some brochures for the... After that, I do. Also, if any of you have access to the internet, well, it's up with a lot of bugs, a lot of mistakes, etc., but the schedule is up. You can get it. What's your address? Little gold thing, GoatInTheRoad.com. What else? And if you don't have access to the internet, please let me know because I do have something hard copies as well. This is an experiment because of course printing and mailing the calendars is really expensive and we're feeling the pinch so we're trying this.

[59:17]

We'll see if it works. And I'm very interested in feedback since we're still in the fixing it stage. There's also, there's a retreat the first weekend in November that's going to be essentially on habitual judgment and so-called causes and conditions for our various states of mind. And we'll get that up on the website, on the calendar part right away. So thank you very much. Take good care of yourselves.

[60:00]

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