Good morning, everyone. So it's the 14th day of November. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear autumn day in the Bay Area. Can you hear me OK? Yes? OK. Just trying to think what's What's immediately on my mind is we are still in the aftermath of the elections and some of the news is very encouraging and some of it remains concerning and some of it is as yet unsettled. And I think that for the most part, I just want to stay with that and watch how my feelings unfold.

[01:17]

For this period, post-election, And for a variety of other reasons, I feel that all of my emotions are very close to the surface. Um, it's very easy to arrive at tears. Uh, it's very easy to, uh, fall into anxiety. And so I rely on our practice to sustain me through just literally day by day. I should say also that I'm really concerned about the pandemic. You know, I've been hearing from a number of different, uh, relatively reliable sources that, this upsurge in COVID-19 may, in fact, not even peak until February.

[02:34]

And that means more months of this kind of isolation. And in fact, it means even a more careful attention to to social distancing, to contact, and it's hard, it's hard to sustain. None of us have ever experienced this in our life. And it grieves me, and I'm also, it grieves me for all of the people who are out of work, for the burden that's being carried by our health and safety workers. Hearing from quite a number, an increasing number of Buddhist centers that are having to close their doors because they can't afford rent.

[03:51]

And this concerns me. not just for the Dharma, but for, really for our whole world. So that's very much on my mind. In the last two days, we have, it seems that we have settled on a date for a mountain seat ceremony that would install me as Abbott of Berkeley Zen Center. And that will be, it's set now for December 28th. And I think the announcements are going to go out. And honestly, I found it a little shocking to see the draft invitation and to realize that this was going to be certainly a very large step for myself and for Berkeley Zen Center and really not knowing what that's going to be in the midst of what continues to unfold here in our world.

[05:16]

So I think I want to talk about that a little bit, not about Mountain Sea or about about what the future is because I don't exactly know, but how I, and how I think we can hold, hold what we've been given and how we can go forward. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to, to co-present an evening at San Francisco Zen Center in January with a woman named Ayo Yotunde, who is an African-American teacher, who has a new book coming out in December that's called Black and Buddhist.

[06:20]

It's a really wonderful book. And Ayo is somebody that I've worked with at the Thupia Chaplaincy Training Program. And so we know each other pretty well. And as we were trying to figure out what we were going to talk about, what might be useful, she told me about an image that was new to me. That is the image, some of you may know of this image that comes out of West Africa, out of the Akan tradition. It's called a Sankofa bird. And it's a mythical figure that comes from the Akan tradition.

[07:21]

in what is now Ghana, but it's a, it was a region and a polity that has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the Sankofa is, Sankofa translates roughly into two sentences, it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot. And so the image of the Sankofa bird, sometimes it's quite stylized and sometimes it's pretty literal. I'm going to show you a couple. I have to save this, sorry.

[08:24]

There it is. So here's one version of a highly stylized version, and I'm going to share the screen. Can you see that? So what you have, it's beautiful. It's like an inverted heart in this image. And you have a bird that is flying forward. And usually it's flying forward, but you can kind of see, I think this part kind of is emblematic of a bird's head. which is looking back.

[09:30]

So that's one image. Let me give you another, which is, oops, okay. Here we go. You can see that, right? Yes. So here you have the bird is moving forward and it's looking back and it is depositing an egg. And the way I think about it is that the egg is represents both the past and the present.

[10:41]

That an egg contains the genetic information, all the genetic information of the past of its species. And it also represents the potentiality of the present and future. Uh, I also, One thing I like about this particular version of the image is that it's really resonant with the Enso, with the Zen circle. It's circular and like many versions of the Zen circle, there's a gap between the two ends. There's a space there. And that space in the Enso also represents potentiality. it represents the fact that things are not complete, that there's always room for them to change.

[11:45]

And so we have the information, we have the tradition, we have the past, and carrying it forward, there's always the potentiality for it to change. So talking with Ayo, about this, she said, in some of the images of the Sankofa, the bird is depicted as having one eye turned towards the future and one eye turned towards the past. And that seems to me to be very much what we are we're sitting with in our tradition and we're sitting with today in our world. We have this wonderful tradition, this Soto Zen tradition and the larger Buddhist tradition that we inherited from our teacher, Sojin Roshi, from

[13:03]

his teacher Suzuki Roshi, and then from this whole array of ancestors, women and men, going back theoretically to Shakyamuni Buddha. So that is, that's our tradition, that's our past. And I honor it and I love it and I feel about our Zen tradition as I feel about, and I've spoken to this before, as I feel about the musical traditions that I have learned over the last almost 60 years. They are deep and beautiful and expressive and sustaining. At the same time, we need to be aware that all is not positive in the realm of tradition.

[14:19]

That tradition can be, while it's inclusive of the immediate community that observes it, it can be exclusive of those who don't. Tradition can be conservative. It's often conservative. It can be oppressive. And, you know, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that, say, the oppression of women is traditional. Or to say that white supremacy in this country is traditional. That it infuses those things and others infuse all of our relationships in a really negative way. And so we have to examine this notion of tradition very carefully.

[15:22]

That applies to all the elements and institutions of our life, but it also applies to it applies to our practice itself. We have this idea sometimes that the practice was somehow carved on tablets that were discovered by Dogen and presented to us and that we have to preserve them. I think it's important to remember that Even with all the writing that we have from Dogen Zenji, we don't really have a very good idea of what it was like to practice in medieval Japan. And when we purport to say that we're doing Dogen's practice, I would suggest

[16:34]

that's an idealization, or that's something that we need to really look at carefully and see, are we doing that really because we love the practice that we've gotten, and often that's the case, or are we doing it because we're laying claim to some kind of identity? And that's a really important question. So I think if we look at Buddhism and we look at Zen, just as again, you know, I think about the musical traditions. When I took up playing American vernacular music, I listened to all of the old recordings. I read everything. I listened to everything. I played with a lot of people. And then I had the great fortune to be able to play with quite a number of the older musicians, people who had made many of those recordings and people to whom the tradition had been handed down, not by recordings, but by warm hand to warm hand.

[17:56]

And they transmitted this to us as best they could. What I found that was interesting is that we have these recordings, we have these writings, we have these things that lock what we call the tradition in time. But for those people, these musicians and these practitioners, they were experimentalists. They were listening to everything, they were trying things, It's very interesting, often in the history of field recording, these adventurous people often from the North or from outside the culture would go down and they would find these old musicians and they would get them to play the old songs, which is fantastic.

[19:05]

but left on their own, these old musicians were playing everything that was on the jukebox. They liked everything. They weren't making these distinctions about what was traditional and what was old tradition, it was just all music. They played it, they absorbed it, and it was others coming in and trying to name and pin down the tradition that that gave the image of this so-called old-time music that we have. And I think to some extent, we experienced that in Zen. If we look at Suzuki Roshi, he wasn't afraid to experiment. His whole adventure to the US was an enormous and completely creative experiment. When we look at what Sojin has created here in Berkeley, we think it's traditional.

[20:16]

And what I can see is it adheres to many of the so-called traditional forms. But in a lot of very, very subtle ways, Sojin Roshi has adapted those forms literally to fit the space of our Zendo and the shape of our lives and practice. And so that then becomes our idea of traditional. So I'm asking to be careful about this idea of traditional. And I would suggest, I keep coming back and I've been talking about this a lot, asking what is the essence of the past that we can rely on? And I return again and again to case 14 in the Blue Cliff Record, which is a dialogue with Master Yunmin.

[21:29]

And a monk asked Yunmin, what is the teaching of a Buddha's whole lifetime? Yunmin said an appropriate response. This is a beautiful, very concise, very pithy response in and of itself. But what does it mean at Berkley Zen Center now? What does it mean in the time of pandemic? What does it mean in each of our lives? what is an appropriate response. It's not always so clear. And we may have different, each of us may have different ideas of what's appropriate. And we may not agree. What I think of to me as

[22:36]

The spirit of that appropriate is actually to have this disagreement, to have these feelings and still recognize the connection that we have with each other. That if it's not about connection, If it's not about turning towards each other, then it's not really about an appropriate practice. How do we love each other even where we disagree? And how do we find a way forward? So how do we, like the Sankofa bird, How do we look back and see what are the principles that we want to carry forward into the present and presumably into the future?

[23:51]

I don't know the answer to that. And I don't know the answer, I feel for me, There's some things that I feel strong about, but even those things, I prefer to check them out with many of you. And that's what I hope to do in the future. Because more than at any time, I think, Since the founding of Berkeley Zen Center, we are in a place where we're having both to improvise on the present and we're having to rely on our training and offer it to people as well as we can without coming face to face.

[25:03]

But being, this is as close as we get here on Zoom right now for the most part. It's remarkable when we cross paths with each other. And it's also very natural. But we don't know how it's going to be going forward. And yet, I think that we're all committed to the preservation of the truth that we've learned from Suzuki Roshi and Sojin Roshi and the things that have surfaced in our own lives. So I really like, as I said, I really, I love this image of the, of the Sankofa bird and it's, resonance with, it's resonance with the ENSO, with the fact that it's always building on the past, but it's being completely creative and open towards the potentialities of the future.

[26:25]

So I think maybe I'm going to stop there. and see what thoughts or what questions you might have. You know, how do you see what we've been doing? How do you see it? How do you want it to go forward in the next, maybe the next year? And these are things that I want to know, not just today, but I want to know going forward. And I feel I have the responsibility to respond. I have the responsibility. So I'll leave it open and let Blake call on people as you raise your digital or real hands. Is that okay? Good. As Hozon Sensei just said, please raise your digital hand.

[27:34]

You can also type a question. Precede the question with a question mark and I'll try to get to it. And please be direct and succinct in your questioning. Let me ask a question first. So Blake, is there a buzz on my account here? There is. Okay, let me, let me try this. Thank you very much. And I will, Peter, you're first up. Is this any better? Perfect. Thank you very much. Sorry, I didn't see that. I didn't see that until just now. It waned in the middle of your talk, but then it came back and now it's great. So let's continue. Peter, I invite you to unmute yourself. Yes. Thank you, that was inspiring words. It occurs to me that one of the things that really caught my attention was we need to look back, we need to figure out how to look back.

[28:42]

And something about the image of the Sankofa bird or the Zen circle, where there's a kind of gap between going forward and looking back, and that there is no there's no way to go forward without stepping into the unknown. And so doing that while maintaining connection with each other seems like it's really, really important. And especially in our given circumstances where we don't have the normal pathways for creating connection. We've got some different ones and let's figure out how to use them. Well, thank you. I think that this experience of the unknown is, I'm sure that many of us have had this experience. As we're sitting Zazen, we come to a space or spaciousness where, for lack of better terms, our sense of self seems to dissolve.

[29:53]

It begins to dissolve. And often the reflexive thing is to clutch for what we know, right? Yes. I just remember, it was so helpful to me, because then it was, Kenagiri Roshi, during the session, was describing that experience, And what he said was, just fall back into the arms of Buddha. And even as I say it now, it's really, it's deeply emotional to me that the unknown is not, the unknown can be safe if you trust it. I mean, perhaps it's not always safe, but it's maybe less dangerous than we think, if we really trust it and just let ourselves fall back into the arms of Buddha.

[31:07]

So that's that openness. That's the space, the gap in the end zone. I hope to meet you there. I hope so. Pose on Nathan Britain rights. Could you discuss the terms form and emptiness with regard to your talk today? Emptiness is potentiality. Emptiness encompasses everything. And so it allows for. things to arise that are fresh and creative. Form is what we work with. Form is our body. Form is our world. And emptiness does not manifest, can't manifest in any way except in the context of form.

[32:11]

So think about an egg. An egg is has the emptiness of potentiality, but it also, you don't know what's going to arise from that egg, whether it's a chicken's egg or a human egg, you don't have any sense of who that is as they evolve and develop, but it contains all the necessary information. It contains the potentiality and it contains the elements of form. So, That's maybe a start. Thank you, Nathan. Nick Robinson, I invite you to unmute yourself. Hi, Alan. Hi, Nick. Good to see you. Good to see you. I really appreciated your remarks, especially at the beginning of your talk when you were very open with us about your own emotions and emotions of fear, of grief, of confusion of emotions, which I think many of us are feeling.

[33:24]

And it seems to me like that's something that is not foregrounded in at least the written part of our tradition very much, that the Zen teaching as it's been passed down to us and as we study it, it tends to emphasize conceptual struggles or ways out of conceptual struggles more so than emotions or feelings and I wonder, actually, is that... I'd just ask you if you would comment on that. Yeah, I've heard that. You know, I think that I've heard that a lot. I just had never thought about it that way. I just, I really think that even for Suzuki Roshi, what we've gotten from Suzuki Roshi and Sojin Roshi, and I think from the living Soto tradition.

[34:32]

I think the living tradition is really somewhat different than the written tradition, or we gather certain things. This is what I was saying about traditional music, and you know about traditional music, that it gets categorized and put into a box and conceptualized, whereas the living music and the living Zen is breathing, expanding, contracting, it's of the moment. And all of our living teachers are very clear that Everything one experience is the manifestation of Dharma. And so not to push anything away, but actually to include it. And that's, I think, that's the living tradition.

[35:35]

You know, the written tradition, the problem I have with the written tradition is that It does often appear idealistic and conceptual, but that's not how I feel it. Thank you. So yeah, thank you. Mary Duryea, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Thank you. Thank you for this rich, complexity of tradition. And my question really has kind of two sides to it. One is, what are the practical on-the-ground ways that you, models that you know about or can suggest for how we live the tradition with one another, how we rely on the dharma that is, you know, the ground under our feet

[36:44]

and not replicate the inequities and inequalities and so forth of the past. That's one side. And the other side is, what do you need from us as you go through the transition that is unfolding? Well, I think as to the first, from the very beginning, the moment I walked in here, I, there were people that I looked to and respected and quickly came to admire. And I just watched them. And what I, you know, one thing that that's really a strong memory for me is that is that it was a couple, it was at least a month or two before I met Sojin, who was in Japan doing his Dharma transmission.

[37:54]

So it wasn't like I had this idealization around him as the teacher. It was just the ordinary people who are here at Berkeley Zen Center and, you know, I don't want to embarrass them because some of them are still here. And I really, I just felt like there was another way to live. And I wanted to live like that. And then when we studied the lineage, the reason I wanted to become a priest was I wanted to be in that family. And so that's always been a motivation to me. As for what I might need from the sangha, it's hard to say. I guess I just, I would love the trust that

[39:10]

you can always try to talk to me. And I'll say, try to talk to me. And I wanna promise that I'll always be able to listen. But even if I'm not listening at that moment, if you try to talk to me, I'm not gonna put you out of mind. I'm not gonna forget it. I'm gonna go back and think about it. And I will return to you. If I don't get it in that moment, I will get back to you. That's my promise. And so what I need is a kind of mutual openness. And I don't know how to put it. I don't know more clearly than that. It seems pretty clear. Thank you. Andrea Henderson, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Good morning. Thank you. Your talk is really inspiring and I'm glad that you brought in the Adinkra symbols, particularly Sankofa.

[40:22]

And I like the comparison you made with the insto and the opening, but when you showed the image of the bird, I also saw a baby. And I've seen that image a lot, but I've never saw that within it. And I've been listening to quite a few Dharma talks, and a lot of teachers are talking about this is a time of rebirth, that the earth is rebirthing itself, and we are moving into a new world, and the old world is dying away. And, you know, you talked about trust. And I know for myself, I am really struggling with a lot of grief. I think that this year I've felt more grief than I have ever in my life. And, you know, now is a time where I'm getting invited to a lot of things. And just understanding that this pandemic is something, and this practice is something that I need to follow my intuition and trust it.

[41:26]

So I guess my question is, you know, how can I be like this Sankofa bird and, you know, remember, you know, and then move forward, but in the midst of grief and these strong emotions that you talked about early on in your talk, I'm feeling a lot of that too. And spending a lot of time. Um, I live with my family, but I've spent a lot of time, you know, um, knowing, you know, discerning when to say yes to something and when to say no. So this weekend I got invited to. to a retreat in Mount Shasta, but I had to really sit with the fact that no, it's not the best time for me to travel right now, even with all of these measures that they had with social distancing. The honest truth is that I still need to continue to do what I've been doing for the last eight months, but it's not easy, so. Thank you, Adria. I think we do have to keep, I'm very wary about going places myself, but

[42:27]

You know, I have medical problems, but it's a very volatile time. I think the most important thing to me is not to be alone, is to be connected in whatever way we can. To be talking to people, to be Zooming with them, to be taking carefully, socially distanced walks, et cetera, that is, it's important to sustain ourselves and not to be isolated. So there, each of us is carrying our grief, our particular grief, and we can sustain each other rather than feeling like we're carrying it as a single-handed burden. I think that's really, To me, that's uppermost. I'm so grateful to be living here with Laurie, to have good friends in the sangha, to have good friends in a number of different realms, and to be in constant contact with them, and not to feel, not to think that I have to be a certain way, but to allow

[43:49]

allow the tears to come when the grief is arising and that those tears are cleansing. They're not corrosive. But it is a really hard time. It's a really hard time and for a variety of reasons. And so we need each other. So thank you. I was going to read Sandeep L's question, but since she's raised her hand, I invite Sandeep to unmute herself and ask a question. Hi, Hasan. Hi, Sandeep. I have a question, and I would love a specific response. So are there any actions at BCC that are going toward cultivating a more diverse sangha and also having teachers of color Is there any momentum to honor the fact that we're all on stolen Kwajan Ohlone land?

[44:56]

I would like to, I want to say yes. And I'm thinking about, there's certain things I'm thinking about after the new year in terms of bringing some people in as speakers and presenters or teachers. And there's been an ongoing and I think we're trying to find our way towards really engaging with questions of diversity And to me, as I said, it's not just a talk, it's a whole other endeavor. I think that there are two aspects of this. One aspect is study and investigation, and that means

[46:07]

both engagement with people of color in the sangha around what they think is important. It also means study for the people of European-American backgrounds on what unseen bias we carry within ourselves And the third element, which flows from those two, is developing diversity of leadership and of structures. It's a question of policies, you know, that changes which have happened in this country have, basically unfolded from laws and policies. And that's, you know, if we do this wonderful investigation and we maintain the same leadership structures that look as they do now, then what's the point?

[47:20]

So that's in a long-term, fashion, that's what I'm seeing. And it's, I mean, I think it's something that we need to do together. And you're a part of that. Is that specific enough? Yeah, thank you. I think what's also in the grip of my consciousness right now, for the first time, is really the fact that we're on stolen land. And I've been finding my way through that as well. So I started paying a land tax And so maybe that helps me reconcile or feel a little bit less guilty. But I think that's part of looking back and honoring where the ground we stand on. It's honoring that history. I agree. And I think we need to study it more as well. Summer before last, when I drove my daughter to Chicago, it just was kind of staggering.

[48:25]

It's the whole country. is native land and every place along the way has native names and those continue. It was kind of a beautiful and heartbreaking awareness. So we need to feel that here, I agree. Thank you. Deb Self and Mandy, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Who's on, thank you. And I want, sorry for the dog barking in the background. I also really want to thank Andrea Henderson and Sandy for their comments and say that mine are kind of dovetailing with yours.

[49:25]

and responding, Hosan, to what we want going forward for the sangha. I just want to speak from what I'm realizing I need. For me, I really have been, this has been a time of reckoning for me, and I've been studying my own bias, studying racism and structures, and okay, but recently I started studying my own genealogy more deeply. And in the last week, what I've discovered is, uh, is horrifying. And the, the emotions I'm having are things that I realized I have, uh, pushed away. I was raised in a very new South kind of culture. Like let's just eliminate racism and move forward. And, uh, what I'm realizing is I have, um, my family has a lot of blood on its hands.

[50:29]

That's Cherokee blood. It's African blood. Um, I'm sure it's the blood of many white women who died in childbirth as well. Um, and I, what I want for this sangha is I want a place to sit with those feelings and to take also to be you know, a blameless baby, you know, falling back into the unknown and letting my identity dissolve and having a space that doesn't depend on colonizing. other identities and turning to people of color to be, to sit in reckoning with me. I want this sangha to be very diverse. I want it to be reflective of our culture in the Bay Area.

[51:31]

And at the same time, I want to limit my expectations for that people of color should, I want them to feel welcome, but I don't want them to feel like the onus is on them. And what I crave is some kind of a structure, a study where we all reckon with the last, as far as we can get back in our history with our families and a place to sit with the reality of the culture and the stealing and the murder instead of just being in the present. So I would like to just acknowledge that that's what I'm going through, and that's what I would like the whole sangha to go through. Not just like, how do I feel right now?

[52:33]

What are my biases? But what are our histories, collectively, of peace and reconciliation, or reconciliation and reparation process? And I'm gonna be turning to you because like James Baldwin said in his Esquire article, you shouldn't be asking me these questions. So I need to ask other white people for a mirror and accountability. Thank you. I hear all that. I go back to, I think there's something so alive about the Sankofa bird image, the translation from the Akan languages, it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot. So it is not just present moment, wonderful moment.

[53:38]

It's not that that's not true. But the present moment, and this is also gets to the question of the relative and the absolute or form and emptiness. The present moment contains what we forgot. It also contains what we never knew, but affects us nonetheless. So this Sankofa image was totally new to me. I can't tell you what I was new, then start looking around, you see, it's everywhere, you know, but I didn't know it. And so there's, it's not just about us sharing our practice, which is all well and good. It's also about learning the, great breadth of human experience and vision that is contained in the whole world of cultures and being able to learn from them and incorporate them without colonizing them.

[55:00]

It's very easy to colonize, so we do that quite automatically, but can we let it change us, not not can we buy those images. So maybe let's leave that there for now, but thank you. So I wanna take just these next three and then that'll be it, okay? I see three. Great. That's great. So Joel Fain, please unmute yourself Hi, Sojin, wonderful, wonderful. No, I'm Hosan. Well, I've done that with Sojin calling him Suzuki Roshi. So it's a great compliment. Thank you, I take it as a compliment. Okay, sorry about that. So wonderful, wonderful talk. Really helpful.

[56:04]

I'm just struck by sort of the tension Well, like the bird image is so wonderful. Like it seems to me like our ancestors, like Dogen, like Suzuki Roshi were like so into changing every, you know, really so much of the tradition. And that's why that tradition has been so alive. And that's true artistically as well. Um, all these people that, or so easily made into pedestals or something, we're all so actively changing everything and so open to all sorts of new stuff. And so I was getting to this place where, thinking like of the Sando Kai, where, you know, like, you know, in the dark there is light, but don't see it as light. So in the past, there was tremendous innovation and looking towards the future.

[57:09]

And in the present, while we move and have to move and will move towards the future, the past is still manifest, or something like that. What's the question? I don't know what the question is. Basically, the thing is, can you comment on that issue? Does that make sense to you? Total dynamic working. This is what Dogen's core principles that we think of in one sense is stillness, but really in our lives is total dynamic working. And so we try and don't lock things down into stillness. Don't put it into a category that has to be expressed a certain way, but recognizing that everything is turning and working and is creative.

[58:13]

The universe is creative. And so if you cling to the creative principle, look not clink over if you look for it in every aspect of your life, then you can stay fresh. And I think to me, that's the heart of Zen. Yes, yes, that's beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Susan Moon, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Hi, Alan. Thanks for the talk. I love the simplicity of the focus of the so clear and the The Senkofa bird, the music, the stuff about music is great. And the conversation about diversity has been fantastic. Thank you all for that, especially Sandeep for calling us to account so well. But I want to quickly go back to a different thing that came up for me so strongly at the beginning of your talk.

[59:17]

about how long the shutdown may continue and how, what is our appropriate, how do we connect? How do we connect? And this, just as I was sitting here in the Saturday morning talk on Zoom, this huge, huge grief came up over me all of a sudden, thinking, wait, I should be standing in the courtyard in the sun, bumping into people, seeing somebody over somebody's shoulder I haven't seen for a while, going to get some almonds off the table, looking over the book table. And that, you know, that we don't have that. And we have a tradition that has so much sense of place too. I just, I appreciate your acknowledgement of the grief. And also I just want to ask, I mean, it's really intense as I think about it. So specifically, you know, that place that I love, that place. which is on stolen land too. And we have made it a beautiful place in many ways. What do we do with that grief?

[60:20]

And how do we acknowledge it without, I don't know, just where do we go with it? If it weren't for that place, and if it weren't for our practice, the generosity of Suzuki Roshi, the generosity of vision of Sojin Roshi and all who came before, we would, you and I would not be having this conversation now. And so I experienced gratitude, you know, because we have had this, because we put in our years here, we're able to sustain our relationships and our connection, even if it's not taking the form that we really wanted to take. And I was deeply moved. I guess it was two weeks ago, there was a gardening day here and a couple of people showed up who had been coming since the, you know, since the pandemic.

[61:33]

And it turns out they had never been here. Oh, really? And so I think a couple of people, Ross and a couple of people, gave them a tour and showed them around. It's like, this place is here, we will return to it. We're not losing, unlike a lot of places, which is greater grief to me, like Tygan's place in Chicago, gone. quite a number of, I think Joan Amaral's place is gone. We're not about to lose this place. And so we will be able to return to it, but right now we return to our relationships and we are forming new relationships even in this virtual world. And I deeply appreciate and feel really connected to a lot of the new people who've come. So we're grateful.

[62:36]

Yeah, great. Turn the grief into gratitude. And yeah, to be to be with each other with a sense of place. That's a different kind of place somehow. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. So last one is Randy. Or Charlie, whichever. Yes. Oh, Thank you, Hosan. And thank you. I'm thanking you now for Ghosh Ananda's book. And you started your talk talking about anxiety and political uncertainty. And that made me think of the chapter of his book entitled, Who is the Enemy? And I would just I won't read it or explain it, but I would just refer you to that chapter. It would be on page 34 of his 45 page book.

[63:39]

Okay. I have to look for, I'll look for it again. But yeah, I mean, I don't, I do not have a question. I just wanted to say about goes Ananda. So I spoke about him a couple of weeks ago. He was, uh, the, highest level monk in Cambodia left after the Khmer Rouge really murdered almost all the monastics. One thing he did is he led a Dharma Yatra, Dharma walk across Cambodia. He led that for about 10 years. And early in the walks, this the fighting was still going on and they got caught in crossfire and actually two people two Japanese monks were killed and at another time some friends of mine were captured by the Khmer Rouge on these Dharma walks and when they were captured uh Ghosnanda went to their camp and

[64:50]

They were so respectful of him. They released these people into his care. He did not see them. He did not treat them as enemies. They did not feel like they were treated as enemies. And so he was able to accomplish something that saved lives. So that's a very high bar for us to reach for. But it's all there in our practice. It's all there in the potential of our practice. Well, I'm going to take it back. I'm just going to read a portion of it, which will reinforce a lot of our thinking. The wholesome minded must be included. The unwholesome minded must be included because they are the ones who need loving kindness the most.

[65:59]

In many of them, the seeds of goodness have died because of warmth was lacking in their growth. It perished from coldness in a world without compassion. Thank you, Charlie, and thank you everyone. Have a good weekend.

[66:25]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ