I'd like to talk about homeland security this morning from the Buddhist perspective. I've been, as some of you know, reading this book by a German man who took a French name after the Second World War, Jean Emery, called At the Mind's Limits. He was in several concentration camps and he writes in this book about the consequences of torture and imprisonment and exile. And it's a book which I'm recommending because I think a lot of what he is writing about is quite relevant. to the issues that are in front of us in the world we live in today.

[01:05]

But he's got a chapter here, How Much Home Does a Person Need? So that was really the stimulus for me for what I wanted to say this morning. Because of course, at least as far as I've read in what he has to say, he's talking about that need for home and security in external terms and the relationship internally. And there is certainly in the Buddhist tradition a very clear description of the external conditions that are necessary in order to have a sustained meditation practice.

[02:06]

That if our lives are chaotic and if there are too many uncertainties about having a roof over our heads and having enough to eat and all those kinds of considerations, that we have to first address those life issues. But there is also, throughout the tradition, a very clear articulation of the possibility of cultivating the quality of heart-mind where one is at home in each moment, in each situation, where what we experience as home and what we experience as security is the consequence of some inner state and is, I think, one of the ways of talking about the positive consequences of our capacity, our developed or developing capacity for being present.

[03:18]

that when we're present and at ease, we are more likely to have that sense of being at home in the moment under the circumstances. When I started talking about this focus a few days ago, Bill told me about a quote which he can't find a reference for, but which he can. It's the reference that arises out of his own memory from some Greek that says, a wise man's homeland is the whole world, which I think echoes with this possibility that is laid out in the Buddhist meditation tradition. And there is, of course, many of you know throughout the Buddhist tradition a very strong focus on the benefits of the so-called homeless life that is free of clinging and free of attachment and of course we get to find out what our capacities for the homeless life are when our

[04:49]

or home base is somehow threatened or assaulted. I think this whole kind of musing on my part came up out of your experience, Janet, of having your truck stolen. Because there's a way in which your truck is part of your homeland security. Few of you have such trucks. to your home when you come to do retreats, right, Sarah? Don't have to worry about sharing the room with some snoring person. Pretty soon the whole parking lot will be filled. We might even buy a few and call them retreat houses. So one of the questions that I want to raise for our

[05:51]

individual and mutual musing is what's being pointed to in the tradition in this description about cultivating our capacity for being homeless. And of course, I think classically coming out of Asia where the tradition has been carried very strongly by the monastic tradition, It really is a tradition that rests historically on being a home leaver. The historical Buddha himself, his whole story is about leaving home and family, the kingdom, and going into the forest and living for many years as an ascetic, wandering, homeless monk. But the question that comes up, I think, for us here in the West has to do with what are the implications here for us given that very few of us are leaving our home and very few of us are planning on leaving our home.

[07:12]

And in my own experience, what comes up for me as I sit with the history of Buddhism and the function of monasticism and how to practice as a householder. One of the things that I know directly out of my own experience is that home leaving that happens when we go on retreat. We for small, medium and large periods of time live in a way that's not the way we usually live. We give up. a lot of the whole realm that has to do with picking and choosing and preference, for example. Live with a certain kind of simplicity and particularly in longer retreats, take the classical vows that are associated with monastic life. Celibacy being one of the

[08:23]

vows, but not the only one. So I think that part of the challenge for us as Westerners is to discover how to be householders and how to live in the world without being caught by the world. Not getting caught by the traditional conventional aspects of success. One of the subtitles for the meditations on permanence is dismantling attachment to conventional success. Nothing like a little death and dying meditation to bring up all that territory. So it seems to me that part of what we get to consider is how to cultivate this kind of freedom, this capacity for dismantling the velcro, the places where we do this, this grabbing on, that kind of grabbing on that's described as clinging or grasping, that entangles us in the world of suffering so that when

[09:50]

change occurs, which it will do, we won't be bereft or even surprised. Or if we're surprised, we can in time cultivate our capacity to come back into the present moment, giving up for that moment, that grabbing, that clinging and grasping. And particularly in the beginning years of practice, the process of meeting, clinging and grasping, and opening the hand, opening the mind, feels like it's going to take lifetimes. But if we're consistent and persistent, we begin to discover our capacity to abide in the world with change, with experience coming and going, with things constantly changing, whether we like the changes or not, without getting caught with grasping.

[10:58]

How much happens when we begin to cultivate our capacity for a more spacious, open mind? What happens with the cultivation of the qualities in particular of generosity and patience. Particularly in relationships where things aren't going the way we want them to. With our spouse or our child or our friend or someone at work. How often in those moments do we tighten and hang on rather than come back to aligned and centered, grounded in the body, breath, and a kind of spaciousness?

[12:05]

Every time, pardon me, Every time I find myself in a situation or in a relationship where I feel like I've just stepped into wet cement, some sticky, challenging, difficult situation, which I simply do not know what to do with. Over the years, I've been blessed with remembering Suzuki Roshi's teaching about the way to control your sheep or cow is to put them in a big pasture. And his amplification of that suggestion that that doesn't mean that you avert your gaze. You keep your attention on the sheep or cow or friend or spouse or child.

[13:16]

But you give up any doing. or fixing or rescuing or whatever. You just rest with spaciousness but with attention with that person and the circumstances of your connection with that person. And you may be surprised at what can happen In reading this section in Omari's book, where he's talking about being in exile, living in exile, and the kind of violation and disconnect that happened for him as a result of being tortured

[14:25]

What arises for me is the possibility that is demonstrated more than we know by our friends in Tibet, particularly the monks and nuns imprisoned in Chinese prisons in Tibet, and in most cases undergoing torture that is hard for us to imagine. And over and over again, what I read and what I hear from listening to some of those people when they finally are released from prison and can speak about their experience. How much out of their own trust in the Buddha Dharma they have a capacity to stay connected with themselves, and the torturer.

[15:30]

They don't see that person who is the agent of torture as other. Quite remarkable. I ask myself, especially in difficult circumstances, would I be able to do that? I don't know. The last time there were two nuns who had been in the Drapchi prison in Lhasa, who were in the Bay Area this last year, listening to them, you know, they were in their early twenties, listening to them talk about their experiences and how unwavering they were able to be with what they knew to be what I'm calling from a Dharma standpoint, Homeland Security.

[16:35]

Their confidence in His Holiness holding them in his heart, their confidence in the Dharma, their confidence in the rightness of staying in connection and of in fact recognizing and taking on the suffering that was being accrued by the people who were torturing them. Quite remarkable. So, Part of what I want to invite you to consider is what are the minimum requirements in your life in terms of what you need to have some sense of stability and a fairly calm life such that you can actually engage in meditation practice.

[18:05]

And at what point does attachment of the clinging and grasping sort begin to arise? I ask myself this question rather often, having lived here for 30 years, in this acre. and having lived within a 50 mile radius of San Francisco all my life. What would it be like to be ... to uproot myself or to be uprooted by some circumstances? A couple of years ago when Bill and I were somewhat actively thinking about the possibility of moving from this place, I was very interested to see where the clinging and grasping was.

[19:23]

It wasn't with the house, but it was with some of the plants in the garden. I was surprised. And I realized that I have a kind of sense of rootedness or groundedness or home with what is characteristic of the North California coast. And it's largely because I know the geology and the plants and animals and birds. So I have access to a sense of relatedness. But as someone who knows me quite well said in the midst of all of this, she said, I have complete confidence that you and Bill would find your relatedness through the earth and the

[20:37]

plants and the birds, et cetera, wherever you were. We were at the time that we were having this conversation in Oaxaca, in Mexico. And what were we looking at? Plants and birds. And through that, meeting people who had some similar resonance. As we consider the increasingly fragile aspect of Mother Earth, can you imagine what it would be like to lose her? If we poke around, we'll find where our edges are.

[21:43]

It may be with Mother Earth. It may be much closer in. And the border here may change from one day to another, even from one hour to another. How much of our fear about losing what we need what we call home arises when we start thinking about what could happen in the future, the demon expectation. And how that going to the future keeps me from tasting and savoring and enjoying what is so right now, this morning. How often do we get caught with seeing some situation as imperfect and we get fixed on what it would take to make it perfect without allowing ourselves to see the perfection in the moment right now?

[23:10]

There is in the Tibetan tradition a practice called Tamlin or taking and sending. It's not a practice to be engaged in until one has some fairly developed sense of relationship with one's own suffering and has developed a certain degree of confidence in one's practice. But it can be a remarkable practice because what one does is to take on whatever we experience as other and take on the suffering of whatever that other is internally and externally. Take on that suffering and send compassion and ease and happiness to that other. in our mind stream and other beings.

[24:32]

I have a shell that surfaced in one of the boxes I started going through a few days ago that was on the counter in the kitchen. I was washing it this morning. I'm thinking about using it as a kind of offering bowl on one of the altars. And after I rinsed it out and poured the rinse water into the sink, there was this, looked like a little miniature dragon. I don't know what it was, given that I didn't have my eyeglasses on. That may have contributed to its dragon-like appearance, but some little creepy-crawly So I got a flat edge of a spatula, coaxed it onto the edge and took it outside. And I've been doing this kind of thing now for long enough so that I don't really think about it the way I used to.

[25:56]

Well, am I going to squash this or put it outside? But I was struck again this morning by the quality of mind that arises from actually going for lifting this little miniature dragon and taking it outside over against squash. One of my finches, who lost her mate about a year ago, and who was rather elderly for a finch, called a hooded nun. The other morning when I went to feed and water the birds, I saw this very significant trail of ants. And I went and I thought, oh my goodness, she's died. She was completely covered with ants.

[26:57]

They'd already started doing what they do. Munch, munch, munch. So I took her outside. She's now sitting in the cool air outside the front door with a gazillion ants all over her. And I didn't go back in and try to clean up the ants that were in the library. They pretty quickly figured out that it was time to look for other venues. My experience is that when I respect all the different beings who consider wherever I am home and respect those beings. There is some effect in the mind.

[28:04]

And a kind of opening up about what constitutes home for me, for Bill, for the dogs and the cat, for the birds, for the spiders. I kind of wince at the end of the year when we clean the spiderwebs out of this room. I was comforted when somebody said, on New Year's Eve, well, the spiders actually abandon their old webs. They like new webs. I thought, hmm, just like us. But of course, what I'm talking about that really contributes to this quality of feeling at home wherever one is, in many different circumstances, really is significantly a piece of the uncovering of experientially, the uncovering of what is actually so, which is the relational aspect of the world we live in, of interdependence, of the inseparability

[29:23]

of the suffering of any being as though that could be theirs and not mine. And the more we uncover experientially that quality of relationality, my experience is that we begin to have more and more experience of resting with that sense of being at home wherever we are. Some of you know about this stone that's on the, what I call the main altar, perhaps hard to discern for some people, that's covered with barnacles. And yesterday, there was a little piece next to the stone and the barnacles. I went and got my glasses, it looked like a piece of tooth, and I realized, oh, one of the barnacles broke off. What about the barnacles of my mind?

[30:30]

Did any barnacles of my mind break off? Just fell off. Didn't tear it off, didn't break it off, didn't yank it off. It just fell off of its own accord. And I think this process of uncovering our own experience of the relational aspect of the world goes best in that way where we kind of stumble into the experience. So there's not too much efforting. There's not too much striving for, gotta get it. So I don't know if, Any of this resonates for any of you, but this is what's on my mind this morning, has been for the last little while.

[31:32]

And I wonder if any of you has something you'd like to bring up on this topic or some other topic. I'd like to welcome you back into this end, Bill. Sure. Please. Well, I was just thinking about what you were saying about home and being home anywhere. And what kind of occurred to me was I realize sometimes I'm in my home. It increases my sense of self versus other. This is my area. Yes. Everything out there is out there. Something that occurred to me just now. Yeah. I can see where the homeless life may and help let go of that self and other. That's just a thought I had. I also think that one of the ways we can erode the habit of grasping and clinging is to describe in language other than my and mine.

[32:46]

This is the place which I call home for now. I grew up with a very possessive mother who basically decided that my life was hers and she would live through me. And when I had my own children, I decided that I would need to pay very close attention if I was not going to replicate what I'd grown up with. So, fairly early in my kids' lives, I took on as a practice treating whatever kids were in front of me as though they were my children. And of course, not so surprisingly,

[33:52]

apartment and backyard were filled with most of the neighborhood kids, much of the time. But it was a practice that helped me erode that sense of your mind, that kind of hanging on that at a certain point in a child's life may be appropriate, but not for very long. So yeah, I think you're right, that this is mine can make that kind of boundary. Years ago when I was involved with the Trust for Public Land, one of the features that I discovered about Sweden was that there was not the same sense in Sweden that there is here

[34:55]

of someone owning a piece of property, but much more the sense of being a steward of property. So if, for example, you were a farmer or raising dairy cattle, had a dairy, there was a sense in which, as a steward of that land, you would put in styles that would allow hikers and picnickers to have access to the property and to use it. But they, of course, also had the responsibility to not upset the cows and curdle their milk or leave the gate open, etc. A kind of mutual sense of stewardship. We have fairly new neighbors on this side of the property, and when they first moved in, the previous owner had cut a great stand of native willow that had created a kind of screen for us from Highway 1 in that direction, but also was an enormous amount of habitat, not just for birds, for all kinds of creatures.

[36:18]

So when the previous owner cut it all down, I was just amazed at the kind of grief I felt. And how could he do that to our willow grove? But there was no hour about it from his standpoint. So, you know, every day there are a couple of scraggling conifers over there where various birds perch. And so every day that those trees are still there, I think, hi, nice to see you. Who knows when they'll either get blown over or cut down. Yes. This conversation led me to think of Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall.

[37:23]

He cites the folk saying, good fences make good neighbors. I think he does so ironically. Because the wall he describes that she and his neighbor maintain is as much a connecting wall as it is a dividing wall. the dark pine forest on one side, the light apple blossom orchard on the other. Yet, together, there's a hole. There's a fence wall in, or a wall, a fence wall in, or a wall out. One is a flower, a... One is a plant, a flower, and one is a weed. And sometimes it's a matter of which side of the fence it's on. The weeds all think they're at home. It's us gardeners who have a different view.

[38:25]

This morning when I was walking out, I was getting lines from songs coming into my head. And this one's come up a lot, which is, The Gift Was Ours to Borrow, which is from this Broadway musical. And I was thinking about that, like, oh, you know, like, even this life is just this borrowed gift. My children are borrowed. Everything is sort of like borrowed and then you take care of it as a gift and then you give it back. Well, you know, in the book that Lewis Hyde wrote on gift giving... I was just about to say it because I just read it. Yeah, marvelous, marvelous book. I recommend it. And he talks about the characteristic in gift giving cultures that a gift dies if it doesn't keep moving. Mine.

[39:33]

So somehow that goes along with the big field too, especially with children. Yeah, I think so. How you give them, when you give them. And forth. You know, I just had this flash, I had a rather mad great aunt, Aunt Kitty. Most of my viewings of her were driving in San Francisco on the way home from something or other, visiting my grandmother. My mother would say, oh, there's Aunt Kitty. And I'd see this cloaked eccentric kind of upended in somebody's garbage can. She lived in a basement apartment for many years, and there were these narrow passageways, I'm told, through the rooms that were, the walls were basically stacks of handkerchiefs that she would buy at the old city of Paris. And newspapers, there's a genetic thing here.

[40:35]

I'm not doing it with hankies. And she never opened them, never used them. And, of course, my mother had that. There were all these things that were too nice or too good to ever use. I remember when we moved my mother from our house and I found all her silver in the wall. Kind of hard to set the table if the silverware is in the wall. And of course, the things that you keep because they're so precious, and then one day you open the box and they've completely vanished from disintegration. It's wonderful. So yeah, I think this notion of gift is quite wonderful and very rich. And for any of you who don't know Lewis Hyde's book, I recommend it.

[41:42]

It's dense. as his writing tends to be quite dense, but it's worth it. How wonderful to think about what we have as a gift that we can use for a while. One morning at lecture, Suzuki Roshi took his glasses off and he said, How kind of you to let me use your glasses. I haven't thought about that for a long time until you just spoke, Caroline. Yes, Sarah. I'm thinking of the story of impermanence. I don't know who it was, but some Roshi and a glass broke,

[42:46]

or something that he could have really treasured as a beautiful thing. And someone looked at him and he said, oh, don't worry, it was broken when I bought it, or it was broken when I got it. And it's a completely classic meditation to take something that you really treasure and love and to consider it already broken. And what happens then in one's experience with whatever that object may be. I was thinking about this some years ago when Bill and I were in Berlin. We were staying in the Turkish section of the city and there was a kind of weekend fair and there was a woman, I don't know where she was from, someplace in Eastern Europe, but she was selling pottery that was made in Poland.

[43:48]

She may have been from Poland herself. And so we bought these two coffee cups and a little cream pitcher. And we each have our morning coffee in those two cups. And whenever the cleaning women come, we call them the canaries because they speak in Spanish and they sound like little singing birds. We hide the cups because the canaries might break them. And I noticed the last time they were here, I didn't put them away. Because I realized, a little clinging there. Just a little. Yes, Cliff? I've thought about this idea of home a lot over the years, because even though I moved to California in 1982, I've often felt like I'm curious about it, because I feel like there's an edge in there where, on the one hand, I can work at accepting what is, broadening my field to include more kind of non-move elements, like the smell of the air.

[45:14]

I feel like there are times when I need to be an active agent in creating something, expressing my will in a tangible form to create something, to see if that is it or not, to create it without attachment. Well, that's inflicting some idea of detachment. Yeah. I think there are certain circumstances and relationships where attachment's not the problem. It's the grasping and clinging that's the problem. How do you differentiate those two things? Well, I think the attachment that any of us as parents have with our children during the period of their lives when they need our care and attention and nurturing

[46:32]

is appropriate. Attachment that's a sense of connection, as long as it doesn't have anything of this, of mine, in it. And of course, that's tricky, because... Just don't let one of those Buddhas hit you on the head. Well, there is, you know, in spiritual practice something called being accident prone. You kind of accidentally fall into being awake. I think the kind of celebrating or emphasizing attachment and detachment can sometimes be quite confusing and not help us see where The big problem is this, this. If whatever is so in my life rests in an open hand where I'm not the agent, I'm not controlling when the bird or the child or friend goes away.

[47:42]

And I think it's tricky. I think it's very tricky because where we have an overly developed sense of relationality, we get caught with that kind of clinging and grasping without quite realizing that's what's going on. towards them. And I think isn't it interesting that attachment and aversion are often articulated in the same breath. May I be free of too much attraction and too much aversion.

[48:42]

Attraction. And we get attached to what we find attractive But we get just as attached, in a negative way, to what we have aversion with. And there is definitely a relationship there. Which I find very interesting. It's, I think, much more like two faces of the same coin, if you will. The mind that's very full of of attraction is likely to also be very full of aversion. It's not so likely that you have the one without the other. Becky. I had a very personal experience with Homeland Security in the Oakland fire about 12 years ago.

[49:47]

The fire came within a couple blocks and we were evacuated. And the point I'd like to make is that some of my friends who lost their homes actually were liberated in that and had a great sense of feeling their priorities got very clear. I, on the other hand, will put on how attached I really am to my house, my home, and that I actually wanted to stay there with the garden hose. That's how much I felt I had some power to control that fire myself. That's how powerful that attachment is. Well, you know, it came up in Tassajara some years ago when there was a huge forest fire that went all the way around Tassajara. the students who were there at the time were evacuated and snuck back in and put the irrigation system from the garden on the roofs of the kitchen in the Zendo with a pump that was in the creek.

[51:07]

So where is there an edge between the imaginative effort to protect the place where I live, the place I call home, and allowing that kind of extreme and sudden form of change. Someone once said to me as I was digging out from some mess or another, what you need, Yvonne, is a good flood or a good fire. Well, I had a good flood. But you know, it's amazing what you can get busy washing the mud off of instead of just saying, well, it's gone. And of course, you know what you're describing for the people you know who actually lost their homes in the fire. is very similar to what happens for people with life-threatening diseases. Suddenly, one's priorities get clarified powerfully.

[52:08]

That's not always people's response or reaction, but often it is. Yeah. Well, I also look disappointed in myself in a way. Ah, sounds like judgment. A great friend of mine. It was a valuable teaching experience too. And I don't know that I still, I still feel I'm attached to my home. But it may not be quite so stubborn. You might shave away the clinging and grasping part by paying attention to how would you describe the house that you call home. without using any of the language of mine, my or mine. I'd like you to meet my husband. This is my house.

[53:13]

These are my roses. They don't feel like my roses when they keel over dead in the morning. Or when I watch some gopher go, Much of the garden actually belongs to the gophers and my relationship to the garden is much more lively since we had this wild gopher invasion this last year and I realize it really is the gopher's garden. Is there a way for me to garden with some imaginative relationship to who is living underground and sometimes not very out of sight? I mean some of you have had the experience of walking meditation and seeing someone gopher stick his head up and walk around that kind of way. But that language that carries my and mine, when I begin to play with other ways of describing the place where I sleep at night, where I go for dinner and a sense of refuge, it's not so encapsulated

[54:26]

if I begin to play with the way I talk to myself and to others about whose it is. One of the consequences of living in a floodplain is that what's mine ceases to look so much like it's mine. The creek has a much bigger say in the picture. So we still, we build things up above the flood level, unless it's going to be a really big flood, and then forget it. Yes? Well, I find it easier to think about giving up the my part of my things, which I have lots, including papers.

[55:28]

One of those papers was a recent New Yorker that has an article about that brings to mind my body and how I see, my sight, my hearing, my ability to do this with my hands. Oh, the article on locked in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. It's your favorite thing. My favorite thing. Yeah, I recommend it. So how do you, how do you recommend viewing? Well, first off, the article was good because it, for the first time, gave me the idea that maybe there's something other than total terror involved with being locked in. Being locked in is where you can't communicate, right?

[56:33]

You can't move. Maybe you can see and hear, but no indication to the outer world, whether you're able to understand anything, because you can't communicate outward. The last thing to go may be an eye movement. Right. Well, witness the guy that wrote the butterfly in the bell jar. A little movement in one eyelid. Yeah. But then that can go. Yeah. So I guess There is some movement in my mind of letting go at least of the holy terror part, the possibility that something else can happen inside that changes. Well I do think that this is where the sustained practice of meditation in extended retreats for most of us, given the busyness of our lives, is the way to have some taste of what happens when consciousness is not embedded in the realm of language, where there is some level of attention underneath language and a kind of deep resting.

[57:55]

And that the more we experience those states, the more quantumist we might be with the possibility of being locked in. When you're saying locked in, I'm not sure what that reference means. It means, well, as Guy said, it means not having any ability to communicate outside of yourself, so that you lose any ability to move. You can't speak. You can't move any part of the body, including the last to go maybe some movement of facial muscles or movement with the eyelids. So the brain is completely alive and well, if you will, but there's no way of communicating in the usual sense. Maybe because doctors are the ones who know the most about that syndrome.

[59:01]

Those are the people that I know who have expressed the most fear of being in such a condition. But as I was reading that article in the New Yorker, I was thinking about what it's like, especially in long retreats, where there is that kind of dropping underneath language. and a kind of stillness that has a deep quiet and calm and spaciousness with it. And it's exactly why I am convinced that people who have a developed meditation practice are ideal for keeping people company when they're dying, when all the usual means of interacting, all the usual capacity for doing begins to fade and shut down.

[60:06]

To say nothing of the dress rehearsal aspect, if you know what I mean. But you know, how often does fear arise for most of us with what is unfamiliar, what we imagine, what we think might be, but what we actually don't know directly. Well, once I thought that article again reminded me of the work I know that's been done asking people who are quadriplegic, say, what the quality of their life is compared to what we think the quality of our life would be if we were unable to move our arms and legs. And it's much more positive than we would expect.

[61:15]

So it would be a good number. Yeah. Sarah. There's a beautiful story in Jeff Kornfield and Christina's book of stories. And this man relives his experience as a boy when he went blind, which has some aspects of what we're talking about. And this incredible or this very different sense of perception that he acquired about how he was in the world. which is something that goes beyond this level of language again. And it's very, very... Yeah, I remember that story. Well, it also reminds me of a story that Doliver Sacks writes about in one of his books about a painter who lost his capacity to see color, could only see gray.

[62:16]

And when he was offered the possibility of an operation, that would restore his capacity to see color, he didn't want to do it. He had come to be very fond of the world of gray. I think it's that aspect, there's an aspect of that in our everyday life. Cultivate. Yeah. Certainly as we're aging. Well, you know, it's the challenge that not all of us meet, but yeah, everything the Buddha said about the body turns out to be true. Change and decay. Those ants are just waiting.

[63:18]

I was thinking, as you mentioned, I feel so at home with that, and I think it was because there was no place else that I wanted to be. I couldn't imagine a place that I would rather be than there. And when I look at my life day to day, I'm always imagining a place that I'd rather be than where I am. You may just have described something extremely

[64:24]

whatever it offers. So maybe this is what is being pointed out in the Buddha Dharma about no place to go and nothing to do. Being no one, no place to go and nothing to do. No place I would rather be. So having had a taste of that, once we taste something, we can have access to that realm of experience, I think. It's great. Maybe on that note we can end. It's very nice to see you all. Through a variety of circumstances, I'm not quite sure what they are anymore. We're going to have another half day sitting next Saturday I put some calendars out.

[65:38]

I want to point out that in the calendar it has said erroneously that there would be a sitting on the 1st of March and the calendar lies. There won't be a half day sitting on the 1st. There will be one on the 15th and the 29th and that's been corrected. Nice to see you all and if you brought a lunch you're welcome to sit in the garden, it's remarkable day. Those of you who are here for this afternoon study group will meet in here at 1. Take good care of yourselves and I look forward to seeing you all again. Oh, these, there are 10 tankas that have got little orange stickers. There's one behind art. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 that are for sale, and I'll leave the price list here on my bench if any of you are interested.

[66:46]

And also, for those of you who haven't been here, the stone figures on the back table, there's one in the shrine house here, there are three over on the front porch of my office, and there are several iron pieces in the house that all came from a temple in China that's about to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. And these are figures that were kind of rescued from the temple before it was flooded. So they also are for sale if you're interested in them. And I think there are prices on all of them. So thank you again for coming and I'll see you again soon. Hi. My one is that I'd be interested in learning more about what it means to be a woman. And I was wondering if you ever did a reading or did you ever do a reading about what it means to be a woman?

[67:56]

Sure. Another one would be interesting to know if that's something Sure, it's part of what I do all the time because, of course, pain is a big issue for a lot of people, and working with pain is one of the facets of meditation practice. So is she in a position to come here? No, it would be too hard. She's a resident. She lives with me. I'm in Berkeley occasionally, so it's conceivable that I could come do a session with her while she's with you. Yeah, that would be the best thing. Good to see you. Put it on this piece of paper right here. Make sure the pencil writes. Now, where is David?

[69:07]

David, did we say 4? 4 o'clock. Excellent. Yvonne? Yes? Will there be a break, a sleep? I'm thinking about where to park my dog. Sure, in fact, if you want to bring your car into the front and just shut the gate, you can just let her run around there. You're certainly welcome to do that.

[69:29]

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