This weekend I've been referring to Dogen's Mountains and Water Sutra, talking about how we are connected with the mountains and rivers and prairies and lakes. And so I want to do a little bit of review to start. In some sense, the starting point of this teaching is This saying by our great Chinese ancestor, Furong Daokai, one of the many names we're reciting on our midday service this weekend, he said, Furong Daokai said once, the green mountains are constantly walking. A stone woman gives birth to a child by night. So the green mountains are constantly walking. Oh, and another time Master Yunlan said, the eastern mountains travel on the waters.

[01:07]

So what does it mean that the green mountains are constantly walking? So there are many aspects to this, and I'll just touch on a little bit today. I focused yesterday on walking and the walking meditation of the mountains. But also the mountains are not separate from us, and the water is not separate from us. So, someone said this weekend, 86% of each of us is water. Maybe it's more than that, I don't know. Anyway, we are expressions of mountains and rivers, prairies and lakes. We might think that sometimes people hear statements like the Green Mountains are constantly walking and think this is some Zen riddle or Zen nonsense or irrational teaching.

[02:12]

None of that's true. Anywhere you hear that Zen is irrational or illogical or nonsense, that's just someone who doesn't have any understanding of the Dharma and is desecrating the Dharma. This is not an irrational statement. How do we understand the Green Mountains walking with our walking? So walking, this Chinese character for walking also means conduct, as in ethical conduct, but also just functioning, performing. So the Green Mountains, part of this is to change our perspective on reality. we have this very, very, very limited human perceptual faculties, human intellectual faculties, human spiritual faculties. It's not that we should not use our intellect or appreciate that which we perceive, but Dogen is talking about, and Zazen is really about something that's much deeper than

[03:24]

just mere human psychology, although that's important too. But how do we appreciate the presence of the body and mind on your Kushner chair right now? How do we see that this is just one expression of mountains and prairies constantly flowing? So, again, by way of review, a little bit about the limitations of our view, amongst the many other things that Dogen says. He talks about it in terms of mountains and he also talks about it in terms of water. There are those who see water as jewel necklaces.

[04:28]

Nevertheless, that is not seeing jewel necklaces as water. As what forms would we see that which they take to be water? So, for fishes, water is something very different than it is for us. For fishes, our air is like fire. It couldn't live. And we don't know how to breathe water. As what forms would we see that which they take to be water? Their jewel necklaces we see as water. There are those who see water as beautiful flowers, but they don't use flowers as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or as pus and blood. Very unfortunate situation. Dragons and fish see palaces and pavilions in the water. Maybe they see as they swim through Lake Michigan, they see the dragon game, like the one on our altar, which a fish enters through and becomes a dragon.

[05:35]

We can't see those, only we can sit them. Some may see water as precious substances and jewels, or as forests and walls, or as the natural state of pure liberation, or as the real human body, or as the characteristics of the body and nature of the mind. People just see it as water. It is an interdependency of killing and bringing life, giving birth. So, we see mountains and waters in different ways. How do mountains see mountains? How does water see water? So, of course, in geological time, mountains are, of course, constantly walking. The Himalayas are still rising.

[06:39]

The Smoky Mountains or the Alleghenies are still settling. Mountains are constantly flowing, walking. Then we might think, oh, geological time, well, that doesn't count. Well, of course, we don't experience it. But our time may seem vast to insects who live a few days or a week or whatever. And trees seem very short-lived to mountains. How do we see the limitation of our own perspective? So it's not that there's something wrong with our perspective, it's our perspective, it's our perception, it's our view. But Zazen and Zen practice and Zen walking is about something deeper. It's about feeling the presence of this body-mind. Learning to know how it is that we know, or see, or perceive.

[07:50]

And not being stuck on our view of things. Developing a wider capacity to respond, to be present, to see and enjoy and give life to our world. So, this is section in here about, again, my way of review. The green mountains are not sentient nor insentient. The self is not sentient nor insentient. One should not doubt the walking of green mountains. our way of seeing awareness and consciousness is just about human consciousness. And of course it's important that we have people who can help with that and study human psychology.

[08:53]

It's not our business to study the psychology of, well maybe some of you study the psychology of dogs and cats, but what about birds and dolphins and trees? What's the psychology of trees? we might think, oh, they're, you know, and actually I talked about how in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, they didn't consider plants and trees and grasses and weeds as really having any sentience that, those are insentient beings and not part of Buddha nature, Chittagatagarbha. But as Buddhism developed in China, even before Bodhidharma came and before Zen started, there was this, realization that, as one of the early Madhyamaka school scholars said, that if you separate buddha nature into sentient and non-sentient beings, then there's no buddha nature anywhere. So, you know, maybe it's easier to see that dogs and cats and maybe even birds and fish might have some consciousness, but

[10:06]

You know, the trees outside and the flowers, you know, they're breathing too. They're breathing in carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. Should we discriminate against all of them because they breathe differently from us? You know, this is like discriminating against certain people who have different beliefs and come from a different country or something. In fact, without the plants, exhaling oxygen and inhaling carbon dioxide, we'd be in big trouble. So the clear-cutting of forests affects the quality of oxygen that we breathe. So, this teaching of, you know, not just... Oh, and I'll just add that as Buddhism developed in East Asia. And this is actually about the founding story of the Soto lineage in China.

[11:14]

Dongshan came to his teacher, the founder of Soto Zen in China, because of this question of how to see how so-called non-centric beings expound the Dharma. So we say dharmagates are boundless, I've got to enter them. How do we learn from not just trees and grasses, but from tiles and pebbles? We are deeply interconnected with this world. We think that because we have a certain kind of consciousness, that makes us superior to some other beings. And we don't even bother to wonder how it is that green mountains walk, or how it is that green mountains think. So this essay starts with a very deep perspective on what our existential reality is. What is it like to actually be present?

[12:16]

And inhale and exhale. So he starts by saying, the mountains and waters of the immediate present, that's right are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas. And we receive this path, we receive this practice through many generations. We're chanting them at midday. Ninety-some generations. Together abiding in their normative state, these mountains and waters have consummated the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. Or another translation, they have realized completeness. And here it gets really deep. Because they are events prior to the empty aeon, they are the livelihood of the immediate present. Because they are the self before the emergence of signs, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. to say that mountains and waters are the events prior to the empty eon.

[13:23]

That's like saying the empty eon is the time period where there's nothing existing in between other time periods where they do exist. So we could say, because mountains and waters are events from before the Big Bang, in terms of our own understanding, they are the livelihood of the immediate present. What does it mean? that mountains and waters are events, not objects or things, they're not dead, but they are events from before the Big Bang. Because they are the self before the emergence of science, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. What is this non-mediation? What is the actuality that is not mediated by science? So all of our human thinking is dependent on science, names, attributes. We identify things based on certain signs. Some words signify some other things.

[14:24]

This is why Zen talk can seem illogical or irrational to us, because it's not based on our usual signifiers. Because they are the Self before the emergence of signs, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. by the height and breadth of the qualities of the mountains, the virtue." And another translation says, the power to ride the clouds is always mastered from the mountains. And the subtle work of following the wind, as a rule, penetrates through to liberation from the mountains. I've talked about how in China and Japan and California, mountains and rivers is a natural way of talking about reality. In fact, this text, the Sansui Kyo, Kyo means sutra, scripture.

[15:27]

Sansui is literally mountains and waters, but together it means landscape. So this is the sutra of our landscape. So here in the Midwest, we could say prairies and lakes. Fits. You could just substitute. How is it that the prairies, the green prairies, are walking constantly? He says about green mountains constantly walking, mountains lack none of the qualities proper to them. For this reason, they forever remain settled and they constantly walk. So, you know, to talk about mountains, maybe to talk about prairies seems like one of the most stable things we can imagine. And yet, that's constantly moving too. The whole world is alive. And our way of thinking based on our language of subjects and verbs and objects, we kill the world. We think that that's just a mat or this is just a cup.

[16:29]

that this cup brings me water without which I couldn't live. And I mentioned the last couple of days this statement by one of our great American early Zen writers, Paul Reps, who said that rocks are people who sat there long enough to become them. So this is also about our zazen. How do we sit still, like mountains? How do we sit steady? And how do we realize that the zafus and zabutons and cherries in the room are constantly walking? Cherry zabuton moved from there to there overnight. So, to finish up the review of the last couple days,

[17:56]

And again, there's a lot in this text about our landscape. And it's not talking about our human landscape. It's talking about something deeper that we are included in. Of course, we are part of the landscape. We are very smart monkeys that scamper around. Thought scamper around. But Dogen says, though mountains belong to the territory of the nation, And we might think prairies and lakes too, you know, are part of, you know, they belong to the federal government or whatever. The mountains belong to the territory of the nation. They are entrusted to people who love the mountains. When mountains definitely love the owners, saints, sages, and those exalted virtue are in the mountains. When saints and sages live in the mountains, because the mountains belong to them, The trees and rocks are abundant. The birds and beasts are sacred.

[18:59]

This is because the saints and sages affect them with their worthiness. You should know that the fact exists that mountains like sages and saints. So how do we appreciate and enjoy the prairies and lakes? I would say that great lakes also like sages and saints. How can we enjoy Chicago, whatever that is? How can we see that Chicago is constantly walking? Maybe that's not so difficult. So again, mountains and waters of the immediate present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas.

[20:17]

The path of practice of the ancient Buddhas is not somewhere else. It's in this landscape. It's not somewhere. It's not some idea. It's not some abstraction. And it's not only on some mountaintop. It's on the sides of the mountains. It's in the valleys between the mountains. It's on the prairies. It's right out there in the Great Land. Abiding in their normative states, they have, here it says, normative states. Karl Bielfeld says to that, each abiding in its own dharma state, or dharma position, has consummated the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. What is it like to actually fully occupy your cushion or chair right now? Well, it's just like this. We just did it again. How do we fully occupy this state, this position?

[21:24]

Humans sometimes, you know, it happens sometimes when people are sitting sasan, especially over the course of three days as most have been sitting. It happens sometimes that some of the people start to have thoughts. or even two or three thoughts, it can happen. And some people even have the thought that because they're busy thinking, that they're not doing zazen, or that they're not present, as if thinking was somewhere out there. Thinking is a biological fact. People think the way people think, mountains think the way mountains think. Here we are. consummating the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. So, I want to jump to the end of this and talk a little bit about that.

[22:27]

Know that mountains are not the realm of human society, not the realm of heavens. So, and this is true of prairies too. Now we might talk about the Midwest and the prairies as this wonderful agricultural resource that we can use, but there are prairies before and after corn grows or whatever. One cannot know or see the mountains by the measurements of human thought. If they did not take the flowing of the human world as the standard of comparison, who would doubt the flowing of the mountains? Or the non-flowing of the mountains? It's only because we think like smart monkeys that we imagine that mountains don't walk. So, again, you might have trouble believing this, and people who have been sitting here for a couple of days or so, maybe it's it's starting to sink in. And maybe you just, it's obvious to you that, of course mountains walk, but there are people who don't believe that, believe it or not, who think that's nonsense or irrational.

[23:40]

That's because they think the way that humans don't think. And we can open up how it is that we are present and how it is that we are related to mountains and waters and rivers and prairies and lakes. It is not just that there is water in the world. So as he talks a lot about water and how, you know, again, I read part of that, just a bit of that, but how, well, I'll read a little bit more. Dragons and fish see water as palaces. It must be like people seeing palaces. They cannot recognize or see them as flowing anymore. If a bystander should tell them, your palaces are just flowing water, the dragons and fish would be surprised and doubtful, just as we are when we now hear it is said that mountains are flowing. Yet they might maintain that there is such an explanation of the balustrade stairs and pillars of the palaces and pavilions that they see in the water.

[24:43]

If you do not learn to penetrate freely beyond these bounds, you have not been liberated from body and mind of ordinary people. You have not thoroughly investigated the lands and landscape of Buddhists and Zen habits. So this is something for us to study, not just in one weekend, but how is it that the mountains walk? How is it that the Great Lakes are totally still? How is it that there are ripples and waves in the mountains? So, it is not just that there is water in the world. There are worlds in the realm of water. This is not so only in water. There are also worlds of sentient beings in clouds. There are worlds of sentient beings in wind. There are worlds of sentient beings in fire. There are worlds of sentient beings in earth. That one might be pretty obvious, all the little critters, microscopic and larger, who are in a square foot of cubic soil.

[25:58]

There are worlds of sentient beings in Earth. There are worlds of sentient beings in phenomena. There are worlds of sentient beings in a single blade of grass. And there are worlds of sentient beings in a single staff. Where there are worlds of sentient beings, there must be the world of Buddhists and Zen addicts. You should meditate on this principle very thoroughly. So, one example I like to give, we don't know how dolphins do Zazen. We don't know what it's like for them to be liberated. So I've talked about this before, but they have a much bigger brain than we do. They're not burdened by opposable thumbs where they have to build buildings and write books. They can just freely manifest. So we don't know their psychology. Wherever there are worlds of sentient beings, there must be the world of Buddhas and Zen Adams.

[27:09]

And of course, here when he says sentient beings, he also means prairies and lakes and mountains and rivers. So awakening is a natural thing. It's very simple. It's not something that you can obtain, like you could go to the store and get a six pack of enlightenment. Here, this situation. How do we just actualize the immediate presence of all of this as the kind of limited beings we are? So mountains, maybe you're limited too. Maybe mountains can only think and see the way mountains can think and see. But they appreciate us. And we can appreciate that. So the conclusion of this essay is quite wonderful.

[28:13]

I'm going to read a different translation. A little bit before that, water is the true dragon's palace. For us, it's just water. Well, just water. You couldn't live without it. For the dragons, it's their true palace. It's not flowing downward for them. To consider water as only flowing is to slander water with the word flowing. This would be the same as insisting that water does not flow. How could we limit it to one or the other? Water is only the true suchness of water. Water is water's complete virtue. It's not flowing. When you investigate the flowing of a handful of water and the non-flowing of it, Full mastery of all things is immediately present. This is our subset. The water is flowing around through us, and it's not flowing.

[29:13]

How do we settle into that? There are mountains hidden in treasures. So I imagine a a bowl full of jewels, crystalline jewels, and you can see the little mountains. There are mountains hidden in treasures. There are mountains hidden in swamps. There are mountains hidden in the sky. Maybe some of you saw that if you went to see Avatar. There are mountains hidden in the sky. There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness. This is complete understanding. An ancient Buddha said, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. These words do not mean that mountains are mountains. They mean mountains are mountains. So this is a famous old saying, done up into the version of it, if there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

[30:19]

The longer version is, Before I started practicing, mountains were mountains, waters, water was water. After I'd been practicing for a while, mountains are not, waters are not water. After I'd been practicing for 20 or 30 years or so, I saw that mountains are mountains, water is water. So that's the original quote. How do we see the mountains in their non-mountainous and more fully in their true mountains? How do we see ourselves as non-selves? How do we see that we've each constructed a story about the person sitting on your cushion or chair? And that you're not who you think you are.

[31:22]

and don't believe everything you think. And yet, each of you is just a person sitting in a Kushner chair, right now. How can we take on this personhood without holding on to some idea of self? This is very challenging. This is a lifelong process. This is a lifetime's work. And we do it in the context of the other work in our life. It's not that this practice is some special thing that only happens on mountaintops or only happens in sand dunes. It's how do you do it with your life, with the prairies and lakes of your own life and your own situation and your own skills and your own interests and your own families and relationships. So, therefore, investigate mountains thoroughly.

[32:35]

When you investigate mountains thoroughly, this is the work of the mountains. Such mountains and waters of themselves become wise persons and sages. So in our practice, we are doing the work of prairies and lakes. We're also doing the work of Buddha. How do we do Buddha's work? How do we take care of this situation? In that context, I want to bring up something else, which is that not just that this is some idea that we can study and say, oh, groovy, yeah, mountains are mountains. Oh, wow, yeah, mountains are constantly walking. Oh, yeah, water looks like a palace to fishies and dragons. Well, that's all true. But when we study this, we also see that we are expressions of the prairies and lakes. That's where we come from. We are particular monkey-like, smart monkey-like extensions of prairies and lakes, totally connected.

[33:43]

How could it be otherwise? So I want to add, and I'm just going to talk about this briefly now, but I'll have more to say during this coming year. You know, the mountains and water that we arise from are also our responsibility. So sangha is about taking care of each other as best we can, working together, harmonizing. We do this. And each person here now and each person here through this weekend has been supporting the other people to just sit like mountains or like water sometimes. Sometimes we may feel like we're melting. And then take another breath, please. But also, the mountains and waters need our support. We are in the Sangha of mountains and waters and prairies and lakes.

[34:48]

And it's not, and because we can, you know, because we're smart monkeys and we can actually kind of get it, oh yeah, mountains are constantly walking. You might actually, you know, really understand that. Or you might think it's just some strange Zen puzzle, but either way you can, you know, you've heard it now. Furong Daokai said it, He Hedogen said it, I'm saying it again. But we shouldn't take for granted the mountains and water. So right now, in our time, there is happening mountaintop removal so that people can get coal. So I don't know if this is happening down in Georgia. I know it's happening in the Appalachians. And it's happening in southern Illinois, I believe. People are trying to get coal by cutting off the top of mountains and just scraping away. I used to go camping in West Virginia. Beautiful, beautiful area. But even back then, this was a long time ago, you're driving along this beautiful wooded area and you come to this tiny town, not bigger than maybe this block on Irving Park Road, and everything is black.

[36:05]

So this was a long time ago. This was, gosh, 40 years ago. Anyway, but now it's even worse. They're cutting away the tops of mountains. So the mountains are in danger in some places. And then the water, well, they're starting to plan seriously for fracking in Illinois. Defracking is a process by which they shoot, anyway I can talk about it some other time, but it's a way of extracting gas from deep under the ground that poisons the water. So my friend Diane Benaj and her temple, her Zen temple in northeastern Pennsylvania, is near places where if you turn on the faucet you can light it and it goes on fire. The water has been poisoned for the sake of getting this gas. So I want to say a little bit about climate change in terms of the mountains and waters. Just a little bit.

[37:11]

And our responsibility to that. And I just saw this morning Actually, an article written, published yesterday by James Hansen, who's a NASA scientist, one of the leading scientists on climate change, and he talks, again, just really briefly, while talking about Hurricane Sandy. Of course, hurricanes are not caused by climate change, but they become very much exacerbated. their extreme climate anomalies, just a little bit, and I'm not saying all this to bum you out, because there's something we can do, okay? So I'll just say that at the beginning, and I'll come back to that. So this is, you know, he's one of the leading scientists in all of this, and science is very clear, there's no dispute, there's no debate, there's no question about it. Our analysis showed that extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent, covering only 0.1 to 0.2% of the globe in any given summer during the base period of study from 1951 to 1980.

[38:14]

However, during the past decade, as the average global temperature rose, such extremes have covered 10% of the land. So we have extreme doubts, expanding wildfire seasons, extreme droughts in Texas and Oklahoma, wildfires throughout the American West. Also, more extreme sea surface temperatures, which helps develop, make hurricanes. The latent heat in atmospheric water vapor is the fuel that powers tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. I don't think we have hurricanes in Illinois, but we have tornadoes. Those may be increased too. He gives a lot of scientific context for this. This is directly related to the mountains and water walking. The chance of getting a late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming are extremely small. In that sense, you can blame Sandy on global warming. Sandy was the strongest recorded storm measured by barometric pressure to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, eclipsing the hurricane of 1938.

[39:20]

But what he says is that we can fix this. So there are lots of ways that we can address this and make a difference as a species and as individuals. He talks about, socially, to have a price on carbon that right now We don't, you know, there's not the actual market working in terms of fossil fuel companies because the cost, the increase in consumer cost, the cost of Hurricane Sandy so far is estimated at $50 billion and rising, just in terms of the economy, let alone all the other costs. How do we get to a sustainable future? And again, I just want to say a little bit about this, because we are the mountains and waters, and the mountains and waters are walking. And we are also responsible as a part of the mountains and waters for taking care of them, the prairies and lakes.

[40:23]

So Wednesday night I heard a talk by Bill McKibben, whose book Earth I've talked about before. And I recommend you go to 350.org. 350 is the amount of carbon dioxide per million. There's all these numbers, and I don't want to go into too much detail. But he explains in a very clear map that even the most conservative nations and organizations agree that if we have a rise of two degrees Celsius that terrible things will happen. Already we have terrible things. Already we're at 1.5 in terms of the amount that's risen. But one of the things that Bill McKibben says that we actually have something we can do about is he talked about the fossil fuel companies.

[41:28]

and how their business plan in terms of the amount of fuel they have and which they plan to use will drive this, you know, five times higher than the worst scenario that any government, even ours, is worth considering. One other fact is just, he has a map here which shows that between 1979 and 2007, and it's worse since 2007, half of the polar ice cap has melted. And there's a lot that's happening. It's not just part of some cycle, some geological cycle. It's stuff that hasn't been like this for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years. So I don't want to embarrass anyone by asking if anybody still smokes cigarettes. But some of you may remember the tobacco companies. who went to Congress and promised that there was no danger from nicotine and so forth.

[42:36]

And now, you know, somehow something changed, you know, because we found out that they knew that actually they were poisoning people. Well, the fossil fuel industry is the same. Just my own story of smoking. So anybody who still smokes, I sympathize. Although, you know, usually you can smell when someone smokes. I don't think anybody here smokes. It's okay, you don't have to, I appreciate the power of addiction. And we're all addicted to fossil fuels. But when I was 17, and one of my first great accomplishments in my life was when I actually learned how to be able to smoke a cigarette. I tried several times, and I couldn't keep the smoke down. It was difficult. And then I actually got it, and I could smoke cigarettes. And that was so cool. That thing was cool, to smoke cigarettes. All the Hollywood stars and all the glamorous people smoked cigarettes. So I smoked a pack and a half a day for about eight years.

[43:39]

And then I went and started sitting sauce in. So some of you have heard this story before. But anyway, a few months after I started, and I was going in the evenings to this Zendo I was going to in the Upper West Side of New York. And one evening, I came out of the Zendo, and I'd gotten there early. And I'd been there a few hours. And that was as long as I'd been without a cigarette in. I couldn't remember. And I'd been following my breath and inhaling and exhaling. And I didn't have an ashtray by my side that time. And I came out of the Zenda and I thought, I don't want to do that anymore. And I didn't. And I wasn't sure that I actually really quit till the next night when I went out to dinner with my now ex-wife and her family. After dinner, everybody lit up the cigarette, which is what I would love to do, but I didn't.

[44:40]

And I haven't smoked since. It's not easy to stop our habits. And, you know, maybe mountains and rivers and prairies have habits too, and, you know, they struggle with them. I don't know. I don't know what the addictions of mountains would be. Maybe they want more and more carbon dioxide to breathe. I don't know. Anyway, so just in terms of things that actually can happen, again, 350.org, Bill McKibben, and many other people are working on. One part of it is divesting, getting people to divest from fossil fuel companies. So this is how apartheid ended in South Africa. All around the world, and particularly in this country, colleges, pension plans, you know, many, many people were pressured, it took a lot to divest from any company that did business with South Africa.

[45:43]

So his idea is to divest from fossil fuels. And he's not saying, you know, we've got to Do it cold turkey like I did. But to get companies or large institutions, we don't have any investments here at Engine Dragon in fossil fuel or anything else. We just live on your donations. But this actual campaign of divestment to stop investing in more fossil fuel stuff, and then over five years to cut it out completely. So this is actually happening in places around the country already. And the point is, if you study it, that the fossil fuel company business plan is suicide for our species and damaging to the mountains and waters. I want to wrap this up, but there's a flyer out front from the Chicago area, peace action that you can take, with political actions you can take. Talking about fracking in Illinois, talking about the Keystone Pipeline, which is extremely dangerous to our environment.

[46:52]

to our breathing, to our water, to our environment. And it's up for reconsideration in Congress and by the President now. And also how we can slow climate change. So there's a page of things that we can each do. Practice eco-driving. Work for Illinois to reduce the speed limit from 65 to 50 miles an hour. Turn your home thermostat down. Plant a veggie garden for your front or back yard. So some of us are already doing that kind of thing. So there are things that we can do individually that will make a little difference, that will help. But really, it's not going to fix this problem. problem until we just divest from the fossil fuel industry, and that means, of course, investing in alternatives. So, okay, end of speech. I think it's important in terms of appreciating mountains and waters to appreciate that they're a danger now, and we are part of that, and there are things we can do.

[47:58]

So, this is Sachin, and for those of you who are here for the day, I could have been here for three days or here for today. We're going to have a show song ceremony this afternoon where everybody can go around and everybody asks a question openly. So there'll be time for not our usual discussion, but for questions and answers. But there's other people who are here for the morning. It's Sunday morning. So I do want to open this. We're going to go a little bit late, and I'll let the Doan know how we're going to adjust. If anybody has questions or comments about the Green Mountains walking or anything else, please feel free. Just responses or comments from the prairies and lakes. Yes, Roy? It just now occurred to me that if anybody

[49:01]

does have stock in any fossil fuel companies that you want to inspect us, feel free to donate them to Engine Drive. Roy is on our fundraising committee. Thank you, Roy. Thank you, Roy. Any other comments or questions or responses? Please feel free. Yes, Jeremy. You keep saying that we're from the prairies and lakes, but it would challenge a lot of people in this room to actually be able to name a plant from the prairie. I don't really think we are out of the prairie and the lakes so much anymore. I almost feel like, to the extent of it, we're rewriting Song of the Grasshopper.

[50:02]

We're rewriting the city. Song of the Concrete Height. Song of the Continued Bluegrass. Something along those lines. I feel like that's shying away from the fact that we're not so much from the prairies and lakes. lack of recognition of what's actually happening. Good, yeah, very good point. And so we could talk about the sutra of the skyscrapers and boulevards. Yeah, because this is a natural phenomenon. We think of nature and natural as something that only happens, you know, out past the suburbs. But there's nature in the loop, you know? I mean, we are biological beings and You know, beavers create dams. Are those unnatural? I don't think so. You know, we create skyscrapers and boulevards.

[51:02]

So yeah, let's talk, we can talk about the, we do have a Great Lake here, and we should appreciate that, and I'm sure you all do, those of you who live here. So yeah, Sutra, the skyscrapers, and Great Lake. But yeah, how do we appreciate the nature that's here? And part of what needs to happen in terms of the new way of energizing ourselves is urban vegetable gardens. And that's happening. So yeah, thank you very much. I don't know if this is what you meant, but this is what I heard and what you just said. That when we say that we're from the prairies and lakes, when we really are, I thought that what you were saying was it keeps us from seeing that. It made me think about factory farming and what we think of as a farm that we grew up believing was a farm or heard in storybooks or visited when we were kids is so much not a farm now.

[52:20]

And a farm is something very different. I guess I just wanted to bring awareness to the fact that farms are not what we think they are. Right. How do we support ourselves means how do we eat? So there's a lot that we can do individually in terms of being smart consumers and smart investors. Just being aware. Just being aware is our basic practice. Yes, thank you. Another comment or two, if anyone has any. I'm responding to Jeremy's comment. You know, that was the car and road zone, that's two.

[53:52]

Right. So there's not any separation. Good, thank you. Yeah, so, you know, prairies and lakes are here in the sense that that's what this city grew out of, and also livestock and, you know, anyway. Yeah, this, our The practice of Zazen is how we occupy our space, how we find our roots. And so we have to look at the skyscrapers and the prairies. And what was here in Chicago before, what we see right now. Because the mountains and the skyscrapers are constantly flowing. And yeah, I've lived three years at Tassajara and those mountains are always with me. I'll never forget the line of the mountains as I come out of the east side of the Zendo to Sahara. Next life, if I happen to go there, I'll recognize it somehow.

[54:56]

Last comment. Yes, sir. Oh, I'll give it to somebody else then. OK, somebody else. Marcus. Well, when I'm in my power group, we're laying on the whole human race that we're destroying the planet, destroying our home. But in a sense, I mean, we're here because of the natural phenomena. We arose out of evolution, we're very smart, and we created the combustion engine and no one at that point had any idea what it would do to the Earth. So I guess the challenge is maybe looking at it optimistically, can we use our intelligence now and saying, oh, you know, these are a virus, and we're destroying the Earth. It's only at this point that we can save the Earth. Yeah, I totally agree.

[55:59]

Yes, it's very important. It's not, this isn't about guilt tripping human beings. You know, here's where we are. This is not about, you know, and yes, yes, there are things we can do. And we have the ability, we have the ability to respond, and we have the responsibility. That doesn't mean that there's not suffering involved in the change. When mountains walk, some of the rocks get jarred and tossed around. So it's not easy, but of course, yeah, we can figure out how to take care of this. I was able to actually stop smoking.

[56:41]

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