Good morning. There are several things I'd like to talk about this morning. Beginning, of course, with acknowledging this anniversary, this marking of the events of September 11th, 2001. When I think about the experiences that many of us had on that day, and the experiences that I know of, particularly for people who were living in New York at the time, and what I can imagine for those people who were in the Pentagon building that was

[01:04]

destroyed. This was, of course, for us as Americans, a huge experience, a huge wake-up to what many people in other parts of the world have experienced. And a huge wake-up call for considering our relationship with fear and our relationship with expectations and our tendency to grasp for certainty. the certainty that the next moment or the next few hours will be like what we've experienced before.

[02:20]

And the kind of turning away that we culturally turn away from, turning away from impermanence. I think for many of us our fear of what we don't know, the fear of what is unexpected feeds the tendency or habit to turn away. It's not somehow what we intuit that, oh, perhaps there's some benefit in turning towards fear, for example. But as long as my reaction to literally anything is aversion, I will be caught in suffering. So there is this paradox

[03:35]

Oh, if I turn towards fear, perhaps I can begin to be a little curious about what is the nature of my relationship with fear. And in the seeing the characteristics of my relationship with fear, I may begin to see how I inadvertently feed fear rather than develop my capacity to be even with this. Thursday night, when Bill and I were driving home after the class at the yoga room, on the corner of Ashby and Shattuck, there were a number of people participating in a vigil with their candles and their big banner.

[04:40]

And I can feel tears arise even now as I remember that experience of seeing them and honking in solidarity with them as we went by. And as did other cars as they went by, this kind of ripple. I think that the arising of fear is big for us as Americans and has been for a long time. So I think it behooves us to pay attention to that reactive emotional pattern as familiar ground and that gets Fed. If you just give up reading the newspaper and listening to or watching the news for a few days, you may notice, oh, fear settles and quiets a little bit.

[06:00]

If we're open to noticing when and how fear gets pumped up, escalated, that can be very useful. We can so easily get caught in trying to change the mindstream of others, like those who are leading the country, for example, as a distraction from doing the one thing that we can do something about, which is studying one's own mind stream and training one's own mind stream. And it is so difficult, I think, for most of us to actually understand that one person being more awake than less awake makes a difference in the world.

[07:16]

I think some of you may remember my telling stories some while ago about a young woman who lived in a very small town I think it was in Florida. She was a waitress in a local cafe. And she was planning to move somewhere else. And there was a kind of uproar in the town at the prospect of losing her. She was just this young woman working in the coffee shop. but people felt better when they were around her. Of course, for so many of us, we think, well, if I'm not able to be present all the time, then what's the point?

[08:27]

But of course, what we're missing is that if I can be present with whatever arises, whatever arises, including fear, including aversion, that even the briefest moment of presence with whatever arises can make a difference. And I would propose that the difference is That's the only way our reaction patterns, our suffering can begin to dissolve, dismantle. Some of you have heard me tell this story on myself some years ago when we had a lot of snails in the bed here under the crabapple tree and my gathering them up and putting them on the flagstone area next to the tree and jumping up and down on them.

[09:41]

And what came up in my mind, I was studying with the late Tarantulku at the time, and what came in my mind very quickly was Rinpoche would not approve of this behavior. Because of course, I'd seen him when we were visiting a monastery one time, not walk on the concrete path, but walk on the grass next to it. Because he said, later I asked him about it, and he said, well, if I'm stepping on some creature in the grass, they are more likely to survive my footstep than if I step on them if they're on the cement path. And I remember at the time feeling like that capacity for the experience of relationality with all the critters and bugs seemed almost impossibly far away.

[10:50]

That was, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago. hindsight seems like a flash, a 20-year flash just like that. This weekend I went to pick up some cellophane that was on the kitchen counter and I didn't realize that there was a wasp inside the cellophane so when I went to squeeze it He stung me, and of course, in my squeezing him in the paper, I killed him. And I really noticed that I had killed him. in a way that was not a capacity I had that day I jumped on the snails.

[12:09]

So from the perspective of that moment of recognition after jumping on the snails, began a very slow process of paying attention to that kind of behavior and the effect on my mind stream. From a snail's point of view, that was the snail's experience of violence, of aggression, of hatred. So in addition to marking, remembering the people who died, the people who were hurt and suffered then and in many cases still are from the events of September 11th, 2001, can we also look at

[13:20]

what arises in our own mind stream and in our own behavior that has some of the same characteristics of aggression and violence. I was driving home from San Francisco yesterday and on NPR there were interviews with different people, particularly young people who were, this particular group of people were 11 or 12 on September 11th, 2001. And this one young man said, how could they have done that to us? We hadn't caused them any harm. And what arose for me was Is that so? How much do we know about our individual and collective harming?

[14:43]

And of course, what arose out of September 11th, 2001 was his question about how can so many people hate us? It's an extremely important and potentially revealing question. I'm struck by how much what arises in the mind that leads to the impulse to harm others, harm ourselves and others, really arises out of, if you look deeply enough, out of fear. Fear and expectation about what's going to happen if, what's going to happen when.

[15:49]

And I'm not in any way talking about being blind to the nature of a situation. Quite the opposite. I'm, these days, quite struck by the shift I'm noticing in my relationship with the insect world. I was sitting in the kitchen a couple of mornings ago, just at first light, and We have spiders in the house and I do my best to allow them to do their thing, which means we have unseemly collections of spiderwebs, especially in the kitchen. And the woman who helps us keep the house clean despairs because I'm not interested in having her clean out the spiderwebs

[17:01]

And when we're not here, what I notice is she cleans. And of course, what she doesn't understand is that especially that one spider up there in the skylight is my friend. Every morning, right under her spider web are little bits of wing, fly wing and legs, the parts of the flies that she's not interested in eating. especially as it starts to get cold and the flies come into the house a little bit more often. I'm very grateful for her help. Anyway, as I was sitting reading in the kitchen a few mornings ago, this uncharacteristically large spider just suddenly clunk onto the page. Who are you? And what are you doing?

[18:04]

Bill immediately, when I told him about her, said, was it a black widow? How would I know? Will you turn her over and see if there's an hourglass on her belly? And I said, I wouldn't dream of doing that to the spider. I mean, I'm not sure how I'd do it. I don't think it was this black widow. But she's just doing her job. Just because some being is small doesn't make it any less of a being. So let me make a few observations about fear and about some ways of cultivating some shift in one's relationship to fear.

[19:18]

First, let me say that being present with the arising of fear for literally a nanosecond is good enough. It's the way one begins to get the taste of the capacity that I may not yet know I have to be with even this. If I can be in attention, come back into attention in the moment of fear arising, I'll have the chance to notice how I keep the fear pumped up, keep the fear continuing to rise. Oh, if I don't do that, it not only rises, it disappears. How many of us remember that even fear has the mark of impermanence?

[20:27]

How many of us have at times said, oh, I've been frightened all day. I have been frightened. Somebody came to see me recently and said, in certain situations and in certain relationships, I get caught. And I said, oh, I'd like to spend a little time with that sentence. He said, I knew it. I knew you'd nail me for my language. Which was, of course, not at all what I was interested in doing. But as some of you know, I'm very interested in how paying attention to what I say can help me see the patterns in my thinking. And there's a kind of solidifying and externalizing about the source of I get scared or I get caught.

[21:38]

The agency is outside of myself. Or there's the illusion that that's the case when I speak that way. And of course, what we fail to notice is It doesn't matter what happens around me. What arises in the mind is arising in this mind. And I have choices about what arises. One of the choices is to go to helpless, which doesn't feel like a choice, but it is. If that other person would just stop doing what they're doing, then I wouldn't feel fearful. I wouldn't be afraid. Yes. Is it that you have choices about what arises? Yes. Or is it that you have choices about how you respond to what arises?

[22:42]

Both. Both. Both. But my choice, my choice, my experience of choice about how I respond, what I do or don't say, depends on my relationship with what arises reactively. And if I go to helpless about, oh, fear or anger arises and I can't help it, I can't do anything about it, that's a delusion. It's the kind of statement that comes from not yet knowing I actually can do something about the reactive patterns that arise in the mind. Yes, Kathy? Could you give an example of I'm kind of stuck on what you were saying about what it was a choice about, what arises.

[23:47]

I'm with you about the choice of doing something. Right. But the first one I have a harder time with. Sure. And I think you have lots of company. And I think that one of the reasons why, at least for some of us, we keep practicing sitting down and walking with the cultivation of our capacity notice reaction and come back into the present moment is in order to have the taste of what happens when I'm present. Even if it's the briefest of moments. Because when I'm present in the midst of a reaction arising, I get to see how I keep it pumped up, I get to see what happens when I'm not pumping it up, when I'm just present with the reaction of fear, for example, arising, and I'm more likely then to experience, oh, it arises and disappears.

[24:55]

If I'm not feeding it with storytelling and scary descriptions of what could happen or what might happen or will happen, all that stuff that comes out of expectation and assumption. And this is a kind of unlocking or unpacking of Shakyamuni Buddha's description in the first turning of the wheel that there is suffering, there are causes for suffering, there is a possibility of a cessation of suffering, and the articulation of how to do that. So in contemporary language, if you will, If I'm in attention, in the midst of reaction arising, the reactive emotional pattern of fear arising, and I'm not feeding it, I'm present, experiencing fear, gone.

[26:02]

That moment is a moment of the dismantling and dissolving of that particular reaction. It's another way of looking at our suffering. And if I keep showing up for whatever arises in that way, reactive patterns begin to dismantle, dissolve, fall away, weaken, soften, get more and more faint. And my understanding of this promise that we can do something about our suffering, if we understand that suffering is arising in terms of all these reactions that we have, which are entirely based on the past, they're not at all about what's happening in the present moment, and that I can actually do something about the dismantling of those reactions, I'd be, you know, some days,

[27:07]

I feel a little bit like a born-again Buddhist. Hear the word, the good word, you can be saved, but who's going to be the agent of saving? Me, for my mind stream, you for yours. And what I find remarkable is the briefest moment of the experience of what happens when I'm present in the midst of reaction. the slightest opening of a door that had been closed. But that taste can be the source of encouragement, of confidence, that, oh, I might try that again. You know, you make a cup of tea, and you taste it, and you think, hmm, I think I'll have a second sip. Does that? Yes, that's very helpful. So you know, my continual harping about cultivating our capacity to come back into attention, another way of talking about coming back into being present in the moment, is because it's the only way I know, well it's not the only way, but it's the primary way of dismantling what I understand as suffering, reactive patterns.

[28:33]

Now there are also the ways that have to do with cultivating positive qualities, antidote practices. But I'm not convinced that antidote practices are nearly as effective as they might be if they're not in concert with this practice of cultivating attention. Because antidote practices can get fueled by the impulse to feel good. It can arise out of aversion to habitual judgment, for example. Does that make sense? Bill? If I follow you, I understand you to be saying that I can through diligent pursuit of various mind training exercises, choose to have presence occur?

[29:49]

No. No. No. That's passive voice. To have presence occur. I can choose presence. I'm interested in this proposition that I can choose what arises in my mind stream. Apparently that's prospective. I can choose what will arise. Is that what you're saying? No. Although I do think that over time I begin to have more capacity for the arising of wholesome states. But that doesn't happen in any kind of reliable way without fairly significant dismantling of predominant reactive patterns that get to be like a big wet blotter over these more wholesome capacities.

[30:51]

So what is it that I can choose to have arise? Presence. I can choose in the moment of noticing absence, if you will, being reactive is not being in attention, it's being out of attention. It's out of attention. And I can build slowly and steadily if I don't have the harpy of habitual judgment. If I'm willing to notice Oh, reactive emotion, reactive mental pattern, and then cut and run into attention. I'm more likely then to begin to notice the pattern, not the content, and I'm more and more likely to develop the capacity to note the pattern, absent content, and come back into

[32:03]

the present moment. It's what I'm calling cutting and running, cutting with Manjushri's sword. That's the act of wisdom. And it's the act of ignorance that keeps me listening, hanging into, storytelling, feeding the reactive pattern. And we don't recognize, oh, I have a choice about that, because it doesn't feel like a choice because it's familiar and conditioned. so familiar from the time I'm a little kid that it feels like the very air I breathe. And I don't feel like I have a choice about that stuff. John and then Ann. Excuse me, would you open a window back there so we get a little air? Yes. Can you unpack Manjushri's sword? Well, if you look back there, there's a statue and behind it a painting of Manjushri with his sword raised in his right hand.

[33:10]

Flaming, it's flaming. Are we talking about coming back to breath? Are we talking about coming back to body sensation? Coming into presence, that's what I want to... We're talking about cutting in the moment of noting and then cut. Do not linger with the reaction. Come back into attention. Do you know how to do that? I'm practicing it. How? What are you doing? You may be sorry you raised your hand. I'm never sorry. Watch out for never. Coming back to awareness and breath. Nope. Too subtle. Way too subtle. especially if the reaction that arose was hot anger. You don't have a chance. Not a chance. Breath is way too subtle. The entire field of mindfulness practices yokes something particular with the physical body and then breath.

[34:21]

and you come back to the physical body first because it's gross level and most accessible, breath is more subtle. So they're yoked together. Now, if you take into account, what's the manifestation in the physical body when I'm in attention? Pay attention, get curious, get interested about how's the body What can I learn from noticing something about the way the body's arranged when I'm in attention rather than out of attention? The difference when I'm driving, if I have the window rolled down and I've got my elbow like this and I'm steering with this hand, I am not as attentive a driver as I am when I'm sitting like this with both hands on the steering wheel and the foot on the accelerator echoed with the other leg being approximately arranged the same way because I'm aligned.

[35:24]

The head center, the heart center, and the hara are aligned with each other. If I'm lucky, I have some experience of gravity from the weightedness in the jaw and shoulders and arms. And then breath. This is the posture we sit in. and that we are in walking meditation is, you know, it's why in Zen there's a lot of fussing about the details of posture because we'll learn something about attention by paying attention to the way the body's arranged. You will be much more stable if you have both feet on the ground. I'm not making any I'm just saying, you'll be more in attention if you sit a little bit forward or have a cushion under your feet so that both your feet are on the floor and the head, the heart center, and the heart are aligned.

[36:34]

That's just how it is. And if you need to stretch something, then you do that. But you pay attention to what's the change in my posture and what's the relationship with the way the body's arranged in state of mind. And if I practice coming back into attention several hundred times during the morning meditation, and then a few more hundred times during the day, in less than a week, my capacity to notice out of attention and come back into attention will increase exponentially. But it's not gonna happen like rain. Oh, rain, falling, attention falling. Just not gonna work. It's gonna come from training and practice. And intention. Yeah, intention makes a big difference, yeah.

[37:37]

Ann? Well, I have an experience to relate that relates to this. Okay, great. Anxiety attack last week. I used to have a lot of them. I have fewer of them now. But it was pretty severe. I hadn't slept the night before. My mind felt very confused. Lots of different things coming in. Meditation wasn't very successful since I fell asleep going to not having slept. And when I walked, I became more anxious. I tend to, when I walk, generates more anxiety. Better sitting. I just started going through my morning making applesauce and I tried to make applesauce slowly but I was very uncomfortable and my neck and back were beginning to hurt and get stiff and the anxiety was quite strong and I had a great urge to go and take a lorazepam to calm myself down, a practice that I used to do all day long.

[38:42]

or just to have a glass of wine with lunch, but I didn't. And I said to myself, you know, this is very uncomfortable, but it will not kill you. And you can just put up with this. You can just put up with this feeling. So it's not a great feeling. And the amazing thing was that by afternoon, not only did I feel better, I felt good. which usually, when you have one of these, it just goes on and dissipates very slowly, like a bad backache or something. It takes a while. It just went away. It just went away. It had the mark of impermanence. Well, I would like to propose another alternative, should something like that arise or descend, depending on your point of view. actually a practice that Sarah and I talked about a week or so ago, and which I've talked about with some of you before, the practice of long breath.

[39:53]

Because there is an irrevocable, inseparable relationship between physical body sensation, breath, and state of mind. not separatable. If I notice, oh, I'm feeling anxious, there'll be certain sensations in the body that will accompany feeling anxious. And there will also be certain characteristics of the breath with anxiety. It will tend to be higher up in the body. It will tend to be more rapid. It will tend to be rather rough. Sometimes when I've been with someone who was having an anxiety attack, I've actually stood behind them with their permission and put my arms gently around them so they could feel my breathing against their back.

[41:05]

And I've done very slow, long, deep breaths. Now, of course, especially in such circumstances you're describing. If I've not practiced long breath, it's not gonna be in my repertoire. But believe me, it's really useful and I recommend practicing long breath. That is inhalation that's about the length of five seconds or longer. exhalation that's about a length of five seconds or longer. And if my breathing at any given time is two or three seconds in inhalation or exhalation, oh my God, no, just coax gently toward that capacity for longer inhalation and especially longer exhalation, including if there's

[42:17]

space at the end of the exhalation or at the top of the inhalation, just resting for that moment. You never know when that practice will be a resource. Thursday night, Bill and I were driving to Berkeley for the class I'm teaching at the yoga room. And we left here at six, which is the time that we've left for going to the younger home in times previous. And it took us from here to the entrance of the San Rafael Bridge an hour and a half. Long breath was quite useful.

[43:19]

And at a certain point I said to Bill, do you think we'll make it by eight? The class starts at 7.30, right? With meditation. Do you think we'll make it? And he was very optimistic. He said, oh yeah, I'm sure. And a little while later he said, I'm not so confident now. Very reassuring. So we got to the class at 10 of eight. and stood outside, because everybody was inside meditating. And afterwards, several people came up to me and said, well, a few of us thought that you did it on purpose as the first lesson in the class, because then we had to figure out, well, I guess we'll meditate, and how long will we meditate, and who's going to ring the bell, and where is there a bell to ring? And through us, and it's on the subject of the student-teacher relationship, And these several people thought that I'd intentionally cooked this up.

[44:23]

I thought this was terrific. That I'd cooked it up as a device for encountering being your own teacher. And it's, of course, a great practice when you go to the dentist and other, you know, experiences that you look forward to with dread. Focusing on long breath can make a remarkable difference in one's capacity to be present with one, what one has expected is going to be terrible, etc. Sarah? It was only a few days before the procedure. It was a medical procedure. And it was only a few days that you introduced it to me, although I'd heard it before. And it made such a big difference. In terms of your states of mind leading up to the time of the procedure?

[45:27]

When the surgeon came in, she said, how are you doing? And I could say, good. I was really quite relaxed. laid on the table for like maybe 15 minutes before the doctor actually came in the room. And by the time, and used the breath, and by the time she came in the room, my body was pretty relaxed. So, and so it didn't take long. Yeah, that's right. To learn it. Yeah. I was desperate. Well, desperation will often be a great agent for, you know, it's like the proverbial fire under my butt or on my head. as the more classical rendering. But, you know, that can be very useful. Just a few days would be amazing. Paula? Well, you know, my daughter's sick and I've had all this fear arise. And the doctors and the medical people seem to be more fearful of a lot of times than my husband and I were.

[46:29]

They were feeding the fear and asking us to reassure them because their case was so unique. And, well, one of the things, you know, often I was able to notice the fear and have a brief moment of knowing, you know, that they had a lot of fear. They wouldn't say that. The things they were saying, sometimes very harmful things to us, were coming out of fear. But I also, and I still feel like this sometimes, sometimes I have to sort of, store that fear somewhere and then come back to it. I can't just, you know, notice it and let it dissolve every time. But I'm not suggesting, Paula, that you go into a kind of intellectual thinking analysis. I'm talking about direct experience and

[47:31]

you know, to the degree that the situation with your daughter, which, by the way, I think, I know from my own experience, as a parent seeing my child in real trouble and feeling utterly helpless to do anything to help her, I think that that's a kind of suffering that has a particularly potent kind of energy to it. I'm not talking about thinking about the fear, I'm talking about my willingness to experience fear, but not feed it. And there... Even when she's present? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think I'm trying to protect her from my fear, you know. Well, for one thing you can't. You have no control over how she experiences what's going on with you.

[48:34]

Desperate as you may be to protect her, your ability to protect her is limited. And I mean, this issue has come up for me over the years, sitting with people as they're dying. And that if the person I'm sitting with is experiencing a lot of fear, and I also am experiencing fear arising, I can either be afraid of fear arising for me, or I can be willing to be with fear arising within me, which has this paradoxical effect of, oh, that's possible. for the other person. But I can't be working with fear within me in order to help them.

[49:36]

My goose is cooked if that's my motivation. It can only come out of recognizing I can't do anything about your fear. I can only be present with what's arising in me. And to the degree that I do that, I'm present with everything that's happening in the room, including this other person. And that impulse to protect our child is so deep. But you know, at a certain point, those days are over. And the best I can do is to show up. And sometimes that means showing up with what feels pretty ragged, pretty challenging. But you know, there's something so remarkable about acknowledging and sometimes even naming what I'm experiencing when I'm with another person, where it's a kind of relief because anybody who's, any being who's in the room with me

[50:54]

is registering the whole gestalt in that situation. So you mean naming aloud? Sometimes. You have to be, you know, that takes a certain amount of just learning about what's skillful and what isn't, but I can imagine when I, you know, I've put myself while I've been doing practices for you and your daughter, put myself in your shoes. And yeah, if kind of my gut sense is for me to acknowledge that I'm feeling scared or worried or concerned about how this is gonna go, there's a kind of relief with describing what's actually so. I recently made a couple of new friends, both of whom are shortly going to be leaving the country.

[52:15]

And one of them is an Italian woman. She and her husband own a restaurant in San Rafael. And she's the pasta cook. She cooks at night. Her husband cooks at lunch. They have three young children. So whoever isn't cooking is taking care of the kids. And her name is Christina. And Bill and I started, kind of stumbled into the fact that, especially on Monday and Tuesday and sometimes Wednesday nights, we could go for dinner and pick a table and watch what Bill came to call the floor show, which would be Christina making ravioli or tagliarini or fettuccine or gnocchi, you know, the whole works from scratch.

[53:17]

She'd take a big piece of four by eight plywood on a couple of tables and put flour in her pasta machine and we would just watch this stuff go in the machine and come out and she put it through a number of times until it was so thin you could see through it and it was just amazing. So we would intentionally go and you know watch the floor show and then you'd get to have for dinner what she just made. And over time we got to be friends and usually after dinner Bill would go to the bathroom or be out heading towards the car and Christina would stop me and tell me some really dirty joke that was at the expense of men. I survived that phase of our getting to know each other. So now when we go

[54:25]

to the restaurant. She comes out from the kitchen, it's an open kitchen, and gives me a big wet kiss and apologizes for being sweaty. And we have a little conversation about good sweat, et cetera. And I really love her and feel very loved by her. She and her husband and kids are moving to Chile. They have not been able to make it financially. here in the United States. So they're going to Chile. And she asked me to give her our address, which I did. And then I asked her for hers, and she said, oh, you think I'm not going to be in touch with you? I don't lose friends, she said, with this kind of fierceness. And I said, no, no, no, it's not that I don't trust you to be in touch with me.

[55:32]

It's just, I'd like to know where you are. It just helps, you know, to visualize you. So, the last time we were there, which has been embarrassingly often, she came and sat down at the table. I can't remember how it came up, something about, well, I can't come on Saturday because I'm working. And she wanted to know, well, what kind of work do you do? I thought, oh, anyway. I said, I'm a priest. She said, what? She's right now very angry with the nuns at the convent school she sent her kids to. for some pretty understandable reasons. So that was not a great opener. She said, what, a priest?

[56:34]

I said, yes, I'm a Buddhist priest. She said, you do Nam-myo-yo, that stuff? I said, no. What kind of priest? I said, well, mostly I teach meditation. What's that? How long? What for? How long does it take to have a calm mind? It was like the whole thing just went like that. And she really was curious. Anyway, before they leave, we talked about her coming to visit. This morning, when I took my seat, I thought, what will Christina make of this room? She'll understand that altar in a minute. In a minute. The rest of it, we'll see. But you know, to meet somebody, she comes from a completely different culture.

[57:41]

Her life is really having children, raising children, and cooking. She's like the classic stereotype of the good wife. The more I've been able to just be myself with her, the deeper the connection that is less and less hindered by our differences and more and more informed by what we have in common. And I had a similar experience. A carpenter up in the Anderson Valley came to talk about doing some work on the house. And it turns out he's a fine and much experienced pianist and an artist.

[58:46]

So he invited us over to see some of his work. And we started out, Bill and a friend of ours were kind of eavesdropping at the other end of the house, listening to us talking about, you know, construction stuff. And then he and I went down to another building. And in the course of being down there, what we dropped to out of a conversation about aesthetics was that we have a very shared aesthetic sense. So that was out of earshot. Then we came back and sat out on the deck where our friend and Bill could hear the conversation. in which this man just told me his whole life story. And it was like, in that, I don't know, we must have talked for at least an hour. But there was that kind of dropping and opening. He's gonna go back to, he's a Swiss German, but he's gonna go back to Northern Italy sometime this winter or early spring.

[59:59]

But again, in that connecting, you know, we may or may not ever see each other again, but there is that sense of connection that's not hindered by the future. But I don't think that kind of experience happens if we're, you know, this term, hedging our bets, wanting some guarantees about what it's gonna be like later. Well, I don't want to invest in this or turn to this connection because I may never see you again. And can I bear that loss? And I think we pay a huge price when we hedge our bets. Because of course the next moment completely arises from this moment.

[61:08]

And if I am willing to go 100% go for broke in this moment, who knows what arises from that. But I think it's fear that keeps us from being able to do that. And I think that part of the acknowledgement of this heartbreaking anniversary hopefully can help us be more open to our own suffering and the suffering of all beings, literally. Somebody wrote to me a few days ago, her much beloved And I gather, rather, old Kat was hit and killed by a car out in front of the house. And she's very caught between making the distinction between her experience with the death of a human being and her experience with the death of her dear Kat.

[62:21]

I think what's much more accurate is beings are beings. And we have this kind of hierarchy about more important beings and other lesser... I mean... And then we end up closing ourselves off from the actual experience when, you know, I inadvertently squashed the yellow jacket. Now, of course, I don't have the same kind of degree of connection and layering of connection with the yellow jacket that I do with Bill or my children, but it's not quite as different as I'm accustomed to thinking about the difference. Karen? My cabin has turrets. Ah, yes. And when I was up there last, it had this powder on it that I didn't recognize.

[63:31]

So I asked a handyman who came by and he recognized it immediately. And it turns out we have them in several places in the cabin and a termite man is coming on Tuesday to examine it. So there is on the one hand precious life and on the other hand my fear Because I've seen it in three places and who knows how many I haven't. And it was quite a dramatic pile of sawdust on the dish drain. I mean I literally, there's this fear arises of the whole cabin crumbling and the termites winning. Sure. What do you do with that? When you're talking about not, I mean I've actually started taking ants out of the house on a piece of paper rather than crush them. just put a little baking soda where they're coming in, because they don't like to come over. The ants? Uh-huh. We use cinnamon. But what do you do with the termites?

[64:34]

Well, it's a tough question. I mean, a couple mornings ago, early in the morning, when I turned the light on in the kitchen, I heard rats in the attic. And we really went to great extremes to You've heard our rat stories. And then last evening I heard some in the wall back by the fireplace in the living room. And I've gone around the outside of the house and the only thing I can imagine is they're coming up through the walls somehow. Maybe they've chewed into the wall where the wall comes into the foundation. I don't know. I think our chances of inviting the rats out versus trapping them, if they're in the walls, not so likely. But you know, the very fact that we are committed to living rests on dying.

[65:49]

And killing that we do with rats or termites, it's very different when I know that's what I'm doing, have some intention about what it is, have some regret about that, and do what I need to do. You know, what did it for me was watching the rats run along the soffit as we're eating dinner, or having them get in the kitchen and eat some of the bananas. And I thought, uh-uh, they carry diseases and it's not, if they come in the house, that's not okay. But it means really coming to terms with the fact that I'm living means that there are beings who die, whether it's for food or, you know, roadkill. As some of you know, I'm intensely interested in roadkill.

[66:57]

The amount of roadkill is just staggered. Staggered. So it's not just not killing, it's also recognizing killing that happens, dying that happens, and not turning away from that. Then my relationship to what's going on will be different. I think it's very easy to miss that this path is about cultivating my capacity to be present with huge letters, flashing neon letters. Whatever arises. Not what I like, not what I don't like, the whole works. And of course, you know, between where I am and getting to that capacity, I get to see picking and choosing.

[68:01]

So, okay, one more question and then we should stop, please. It's just a comment then, about your comment about the thousand U.S. military death in Iraq. What I've noticed myself is that I was very moved to see the photographs of all the young people has a very emotional reaction when they show you next of kin on Channel 5. But at the vigil, or hand at the vigil, when they're holding the candles, people would come by and ask, you know, why are you here? And we would say, to honor all who are dying or died in Iraq. And what I've noticed is how little our media is showing us the face of the rest of those who are suffering. And then, for myself, kind of reaching toward and reaching away from seeing that place, really realizing the extent of suffering in Iraq.

[69:08]

We don't come close, even if we have the capacity, to counting the number of Iraqis who've died or been harmed in terrible ways, much less what we have done to that country with bombs that have nuclear waste as part of the bombs that's now in the very dust embedded in the earth in that country. I think we don't begin to know the harm that we've caused so far. I just think we We don't know. And you know what has helped me in sitting with the suffering and dying from this war is remembering that every single being, American, Iraqi, whoever, is someone's child.

[70:23]

That helps me a lot. It was beautiful testimony in the next of kin on the impact of these losses to the individual families, especially the mothers and fathers. Yeah. Well, then extend that to all the mothers and fathers who have lost a child. without regard to nationality or political persuasion. There are also those who have not died, but just like the ones in the prison who were... Yeah. To live in a world of such violence and hatred changes. Well, also, out of our ignorance of the culture, I don't think we have any idea what shaming the men in the prison, the consequences of that for them in their cultural context.

[71:47]

It's a kind of invisible harming, invisible to us out of our just not knowing that culture. But you know, my own experience has been that only to the degree that I'm willing to touch my own suffering can I have some access to the suffering of others. And it takes developing a certain kind of stamina, and that's not quite the right word, but something like that, kind of emotional and psychological and spiritual stamina to allow that opening to happen. Okay, nice to see you all. Take good care of yourselves. I put out on the front the dates for the sittings through October and also we're going to do a retreat in October on jealousy and envy.

[73:01]

and the details for the winter retreat and a retreat I'm going to do in the spring in March. So if any of you are interested, that information is out on the front table. And also, if there are any of you...

[73:15]

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