Sitting here and I just love Berkeley Zen Center. I've been, as Lori says, it feels like I've been here practically forever. It's my home temple and the thread that just has been running through my life for many years now. So the fact that it's so many years kind of brings me to my topic today, which is aging. But first I want to say happy International Women's Day. Yay! And hurray for our women ancestors and gratitude for the fact that we get to say their names in our service. As you know, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince whose father wanted to protect him from all forms of suffering and he wanted his son to have only a very joyful, happy life.

[01:13]

So he didn't let any kind of suffering, as far as he could help it, come into the palace grounds, but when Shakyamuni was a young man He was allowed by his father, I guess, to go out for a carriage ride one day. Perhaps it was to ready him for finding out more about his kingdom. But anyway, he was allowed to go out outside the palace walls and he saw an old person and a sick person and a dead person. And he was quite upset by what he saw and he said to his or maybe the carriage driver will, what's the matter with these people? He'd never seen such a thing before. And one does wonder, how did the king manage to keep such sites out of the view of Shakyamuni for twenty-nine years, but this is the nature of spiritual parables. Anyway, so I imagine the carriage driver or the companion saying to Shakyamuni, well,

[02:21]

maybe of the old person who was the first one he saw. He said, well, he's been around for a really long time, and he's bent with age, and he has osteoarthritis in his knees, and it's really bad, and it hurts, and he can't remember very much. He probably doesn't even remember the name of his own village at this point, and his digestion probably isn't working very well, and so on and so forth. And this is what happens, and this happens to everyone if they stick around long enough. So, I used to wonder why old age was included in those three, old age, sickness and death, but I don't really, I'm beginning not to wonder anymore. And I do find myself moving in this direction. But I also just want to say that even those of you who are definitely not old yet, my hope is that this is still a topic of interest to all of us because if you're not old yourself you know somebody who is and you're definitely moving in that direction whether you like it or not.

[03:33]

Many of the issues that we face about getting old and the losses and the lettings go are things that apply to all kinds of other aspects of our lives. So I hope this, my subject is of interest to people who don't yet call themselves old. But inside every young person there's an old person struggling to get out. So anyway, when Shakyamuni went out that day, he met what were called the four heavenly messengers. And the fourth one, after the old person, the sick person and the dead person, was a monk who was walking along with his begging bowl and Shakyamuni had never seen a monk before either. And his father protected him from that as well because he didn't want Shakyamuni to become a monk as had been prophesied, he wanted him to stay and become king. So Shakyamuni didn't know that there were such people who spent their lives following a spiritual path and living a life of letting go of worldly things.

[04:48]

So they're called the four heavenly messengers because the four of them brought the message of the transitoriness of our life and the possibility of investigating deeply what is most important beyond all this change and this impermanence. So, what is the heavenly messenger of old age telling me? What have I learned? I've been thinking about that. Old age or aging includes different kinds of losses and in general I would say the different losses are, there's the initially maybe and most superficially the cosmetic one in a culture which values youth so much and when your body starts to look different and it's not really the way the magazines tell you you should look, so there's that.

[05:53]

But then, more deeply, there's real physical changes, physical discomfort, pain, and increasing frailty, loss of physical strength, all those physical losses, in my case, mostly happening in the knees, which puts me in a chair. I figure today I am modeling the fact that a person can continue to be a very sincere Zen practitioner in a chair. So don't be afraid to get up into a chair when the time comes. It's still good, or it's still hard. And then there are the mental losses, which go with age, which I am also noticing, and we all hear each other as we get older complaining to each other about losing memory and so on.

[06:56]

And those are, also a lot of that is unknown, and we move into new territory without knowing exactly what the losses are going to be. Then there is the loss of family and friends through death. The older we get, the more people we know who die. And then, these are sort of broad categories that I just made up, but there would be different ways of describing it, but lastly I would say is the loss of a kind of power in the society, a sense of power and the feeling of becoming marginalized or a little bit translucent or almost invisible, the feeling that you're not so important anymore. And that's a feeling that really doesn't need to come from the inside, it kind of comes from the outside but again it's a pretty socially determined thing in this world.

[08:00]

And today in particular I want to focus on that last one because I want to talk about some of what I've experienced in connection with my retirement from my job last summer which kind of connects with the idea of losing power in the world. And I was editor of Turning Wheel for many years for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship And it was a wonderful job, I loved it and I was very fortunate to have a job that suited my interests and abilities so well and I was really grateful for that and it did a great deal for me. I retired because I wanted to, I chose to retire before I was completely burned out on all productive abilities. I wanted to still have time in my life to do more writing and more Dharma practice and visiting my new granddaughter in Texas, and I wanted to study Spanish, and I wanted to do more photography, and I wanted to learn how to play the mandolin, and I had a whole list of things I was going to do.

[09:14]

Well, I haven't done all of them, but I'm doing a lot of them. Anyway, I wanted to move into the next piece of my life while I still had some creative energy. And I also want to acknowledge that I was very fortunate to be able to do that because of my mother's recent death, I had inherited some money and I also own my own home and I can rent out rooms in my house and I continue to do some teaching, so I could afford to give up my job, which many people aren't able to do as early as they would like, so I just want to express my gratitude for that as well. So when I left, I was looking forward to it and I don't regret it at all, but I have found that it was a more difficult transition than I expected it to be, interestingly so.

[10:17]

When I packed up my belongings at work last And in June, I'd been there for 17 years, and I went through all the files and old correspondence files and articles for possible use in the future and all kinds of things, going back for years and years and years. And just about everything went into the recycling bin, and I was kind of stunned to think, my God, why was I keeping all this stuff at all? I never looked at it anyway, and it's just going into the recycling. And I recycled my business cards that said I was the editor of Turning Wheel. And I came home with a box, just a little cardboard box that contained some paper clips and a little picture of the Dalai Lama and a mug and I thought, hmm, is this it? And it was kind of, it reminded me of what I had done six months before of moving, after my mother's death, moving out of her apartment and packing up all her things and recycling her things and getting rid of things.

[11:25]

And of course, leaving my desk at work was a much smaller move, but still, it reminded me of the other one and it was a kind of, death and a kind of shedding of the skin. When I moved out of my mother's apartment and sorted through all her things, And then, again, when I moved out of my office at work, I thought, I went home and I thought, I should really pretend I died at home and go through all my stuff at home and get rid of all this stuff. If only I could approach it with the attitude that I don't really need any of this, you can't take it with you, and let's just pretend I died and I'll clean up here. But I haven't been able to do that yet. It's still, it's an ambition I have. Anyway. I described this process of packing up because it was a manifestation of sort of the more metaphorical fact of just stepping through into a new time and shedding a skin.

[12:39]

And this is what our lives are constantly doing. Even if we don't retire, we're constantly shedding a skin from yesterday and and having a new skin today. So sometimes it's more obvious than at other times. When I did leave my job, some of the losses that went with that were the loss of structure in my life. didn't have anybody to tell me what to do first when I got up in the morning and I had to organize my own days and regulate my life myself. There was the loss of the community that I was a part of every day at work, which was challenging often, but it was there and it was a community of people I was working with and was a part of. there was also the loss of focus and sense of purpose.

[13:42]

If I ever wanted to reassure myself, I thought, well, I have this excuse for walking around on the planet, I'm doing this job. And of course we don't need an excuse for walking around on the planet, we're here, but it brought me up against that question. What is my excuse for walking around on the planet? And then probably most deeply was the loss of the identity that I had in that role, which that was the surprise. I didn't really realize how attached I was to it until I didn't have it anymore. So I think it was good for me to let go of that. when I'm meeting a stranger, I sit down next to somebody on the bus and they say, well, what do you do? And I used to be able to say, well, I edit a Buddhist magazine, would you like my card? And now I'm not sure what to say.

[14:46]

I mean, not that I'm always sitting next to somebody on the bus who's asking me that, but that question is one that you would like to be able to have some response to instead of just sort of blubbering confusion. So, hmm, well, what do I do? So that's an opportunity to just keep asking myself that question. Yeah, well, who am I? Who am I? And this is where the Dharma comes in, really. This is the teaching of impermanence and the teaching that our roles change and who we are changes. I want to read you on that score from Shakespeare. This is a wonderful speech, which you are probably familiar with, from As You Like It by J. Quees, and he says, all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

[15:48]

They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. his acts being seven ages. At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. And then the lover sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier full of strange oaths and bearded like the leopard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard a formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances, and so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.

[16:57]

Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. So one of the things I really love about that speech is that he describes these seven ages, but he's not saying, oh, youth was so wonderful, and now the poor old people have this terrible time to be in. But he sees all seven stages. They're all kind of negatively described. The infant is mewling and puking. The schoolboy is whining. The lover is going like a furnace. You know, they're all fools. We're all, at each stage, we're just a complete fool if we attach to that role. because it just changes, and it's just the costume we're wearing at that point on the stage of our life, and there's something else underneath it. But jayquiz isn't really talking about that part, but we are in our Zen practice asking about that part. But we're also wanting to really be able to acknowledge that these roles change and that there is no fixed self.

[18:04]

That's what Buddhism teaches us, no fixed self. It's comforting in a weird way, that speech. A couple of weeks ago, Greg Denny gave the Dharma Talk and one of the things he said really has been sticking with me and I keep thinking about it. Are you here, Greg? He said, every loss is a gate. and he was talking about other kinds of losses, but I've really been thinking how true that is, that every loss is a gate, and what are we walking through? That as we lose something, we step through a gate into a space we haven't been able to be in before, and to discover a whole new place. And where are we? What have I stepped through to? So, if we're stuck on a role or an identity, we don't have the opportunity to keep stepping through the gates.

[19:15]

And even if we don't retire from a job, if you're keeping your job, a job that you've had for many years, that can be wonderful, but even then, you can't keep doing it the same way that you always did it each time. It has to be alive, it has to be a changing, moving thing. So, in order to really be alive as human beings, it's required of us that we keep on shedding what's holding us back and letting go of what we're grasping to that isn't alive anymore and stepping through to the next place. Sometimes when the losses are extremely painful, of course, it's not a gate we want to go through. But still it is a gate and there's something else there that we haven't been able to see before. I've been thinking about children and how in childhood we don't have these kinds of identities that adults have.

[20:27]

Children are not defined by a job that they do. they're just going about the business of being alive and investigating what it means to be alive. But even so, we ask children, what are you going to be when you grow up? Which is kind of a telling question. We don't even say, what would you like to do when you grow up? We say, what are you going to be? And maybe people don't say it anymore, but they used to anyway. What are you going to be when you grow up? As if that's going to If it's a fireman, that's going to define them totally. But I think children know better than adults. They don't necessarily get sucked into that. It might be a fireman one day and it might be, I don't know, a gardener the next day or whatever. It can change. And we would do well not to be asking children or each other that question with the same kind of urgency that we can get into asking. And when I was a child, I really, I was a tomboy and I used to, I've always had a lot of curiosity and I spent a lot of time.

[21:43]

climbing trees and doing science experiments and making maps of the neighborhood. And I had a weather station in my bedroom where I had a balloon stretched over an empty glass milk bottle with a little straw attached to it and it measured the baronimetric pressure by going up and down on a piece of cardboard as the skin of the balloon swelled up or went down according to the air pressure, things like that. Anyway, I was thinking about that and thinking, you know, that was a long time ago, I haven't been doing anything like that anymore, but now I'm kind of again in a period of life where I can approach the world around me with a similar kind of curiosity and just be present with it because I don't have the same kind of responsibilities that I had, but not only because of that, also because I don't have the same abilities that I had. And so I have more chance to just really appreciate the smell of the plum blossoms and the photography that I've been doing.

[22:53]

I'm taking a class in photography right now at Berkeley City College. and I'm working on a series of pictures of shadows on curtains inside my house which seems like such an internal thing, they're not grand landscapes or anything but they're the most amazing shadows that vines on the outside of the window cast on the curtains inside. So it's just noticing little things like that that seem appropriate to the stage that I'm in right now and I'm appreciating the chance to go back to a kind of childish curiosity and joy in the world around me that's not planning for some long-term future thing. I wanted to, let's see, how are we doing here? I wanted to tell you an excerpt from a Yeats poem, which I think of often about aging. And he really wrote a lot about aging and kind of raged against being an old man.

[23:56]

And then he came around to just really waking up to it in a way, I think, in his poetry. And this is just one short quote from his poem, Sailing to Byzantium. He wrote, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. So yes, our tattered, yeah, yeah. An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless a soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. So it's as if our body is the dress of our mortal dress and it's completely tattered, it's getting more and more tattered. But if we sing for the tatters, we sing for our impermanence, we celebrate these tatters, we engage with it and we say, yeah, okay, I'm in it, this is happening.

[24:58]

I'm not gonna turn away from it. That's what keeps the old man from being a paltry thing. when the old man or the old woman can celebrate her state. One of the teachings of getting older is very consistent with Zen teaching, which is doing one thing at a time. And I feel as though my Zen training has always encouraged me to just take things one at a time, and in our Zen practice are good about that, we take things one at a time. But we live in a world where multitasking is increasingly the order of the day, and as I get older, my brain is becoming more and more Zen, and I really find it harder and harder to do anything. Sometimes I even find it hard to do the one thing at a time, but anyway, certainly not two.

[26:02]

So there are teachings in our practice that really are helpful to just this slowing down and taking things quietly. And also because it takes longer to do things, you can't do as many things at once, and there isn't as much time ahead of you to do them in. So if you do the math, you're not going to get as much done. And so therefore, you might as well just do what really seems the most important thing to do. And at every time in our lives, of course, it would be good if we could not take up and get engaged with those things which really hook us in but aren't really deeply important to fulfilling ourselves and being our full selves. But it's harder when you're younger. That's one of the disadvantages of being young.

[27:04]

When you're older, it's a little easier to let go of the extra things because you simply can't do them all. So there are really things to be grateful for about getting older. I wanted to tell you a quick, well, No, I'm not going to take out the word quick. That's my old habit. I'll tell you a koan. It's case 94 from the Book of Serenity. Dongshan is unwell. Dongshan is the Chinese name for Tozan Ryokai in our lineage, one of our great teachers. When Dongshan was unwell, a monk asked, you are ill, teacher, but is there anyone who is not ill? Dongshan said, there is. The monk said, does the one who is not ill look after you? Dongshan said, I have the opportunity to look after him. The monk said, how is it when you look after him? Dongshan said, then I don't see that he has any illness.

[28:06]

So I take this in different ways. Dangshan reputedly died shortly after this dialogue. So he was ill and he was old. And his student was saying, well, is there anyone who isn't ill? Meaning, I think, well, everybody, there's nobody who isn't ill, is there? And Dangshan said, yes, there is. And so, who did he mean? The student said, does the one who is not ill look after you? Well, if there is somebody who's not ill, that person must be taking care of you because you are ill. And so you're lucky that there's somebody who's not ill who can take care of you. Maybe he was saying that. Or maybe he was saying, well, who could that be but Buddha or the universe or God or whatever you want to call it? Maybe that's what's taking care of you. And Dongshan said, I have the opportunity to look after him.

[29:11]

Well that's a surprise, he turned it upside down. So this I kind of take to mean that even though I'm ill and old, I do have the opportunity to take care of whatever is whole in the universe. I'm still here, I can still take care of that which is not ill in myself, in the world around me, in the whole universe. I can take care of what is whole, what is complete, what is beyond illness and old age. And it also reminds me of the dialogue about the one who is not busy, and when Yun Yan says, even though he's sweeping, that you should know there is one who is not busy when he's told he's too busy, meaning that he has maybe inside of himself he has somebody who's not busy. And here I think Dong Shan is maybe saying that inside of himself, as well as outside of himself, there is one who is not ill.

[30:19]

So anyway, then the monk said, well, how is it when you look after him, the one who is not ill? And Dongshan said, then I don't see that he has any illness. And I take that to be, again, his way of saying, well, when I'm really taking care of that which is not ill, and that in me which is not ill, that in you which is not ill, when I'm connecting to that interconnectedness of the universe, then I see that there is no illness. So one of the challenges of aging is to see how it is that we contribute. How does our contribution change? What we can do changes, but how can we keep on making a contribution to our world, which we want to do right to the end? And we can take different roles, like more mentoring and teaching and guiding and things like that, storytelling.

[31:28]

But we want to keep on finding ways to be making a contribution. And they can be really different. They can look very different. I was at a session at San Francisco Zen Center recently, and I talked with Blanche Hartman And I wanted to ask her, well, how is it for you? She's in her 80s and I wanted to know what. what does it mean to her to be an indisputably old person practicing still very faithfully and how is that for her to be old and how does she deal with the difficulties of aging? And what help could she give me?" And she said she feels that she can model being an old person practicing and that that is a real contribution. It certainly is. I think it's very important to people in the sangha that Blanche and Lou, who is over 90, are both there practicing and continuing. And Blanche said to me that she always remembers something Suzuki Roshi said to her, which was,

[32:36]

in every moment, make your best effort, and that that little saying can take you right up to the end of your life, and that she's continuing to do that. And so is Lu, who is following the schedule, who goes to zazen and the zendo, and he walks very, very, very, very slowly, but he walks into the zendo. And that's not maybe at some point he won't be able to walk into the Zendo, then he'll cross that bridge, he'll go through that gate when he comes to that gate. But right now, they're both really modeling people who are making their best effort in every moment, even though they are very old and somewhat frail. And I'm going to end by speaking about my grandmother, who I loved really dearly as a child. When I was a child, I didn't know that old was bad and young was good.

[33:39]

Children don't know that. I didn't know that my grandmother, or I didn't think that she was any less precious a person because she walked with a cane and forgot things. I used to climb into bed with her in the morning when I was visiting her and she wore this sort of black sleep mask that made her look like the Lone Ranger that I thought was really weird. And she'd take off her sleep mask and hang it on the bedpost and open her arms up and say, come into my bed, my number one grandchild. And I'd climb into bed beside her and I remember how the skin of her upper arms just sort of hung down very pendulously and it was all soft and cool and it was so wonderful, I just loved the way it felt. And so I think now, you know, what a wonderful thing to be able to see the qualities of age just for its own beauty and to, you know, hope that

[34:41]

If my granddaughter ever sees my floppy upper arms, maybe she'll think that too. Who knows? So I'll stop there, and I very much hope we can have some discussion and conversation, questions, whatever. Yes. The student asks the teacher, how is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall? And the teacher answers, body exposed to the golden wind. That's a great one about aging. Do you want to say something about what it means to you, the body exposed to the golden wind? Well, I think it speaks to what you were saying about the gate, you know, the leaves and the branches that we think are so important and we think are protecting us, but not necessarily.

[35:57]

You know, we use them as a shield in our images and all that, and perhaps it's like following bodies exposed. And you can see the bones of the tree, too, in a way. I mean, in the winter, the outlines of the trees against the sky where there are deciduous trees are so beautiful you didn't know that that was the shape of the limbs or whatever. Yes? I really appreciate you talking about aging. Just because starting to recognize the things like at one point I suddenly realized when I talk about And it just is so startling, or when, you know, a few years ago I was just getting headaches whenever I'd read and didn't know what was going on. And then someone said, maybe you need reading glasses. And it had never occurred to me that that was the problem.

[37:00]

And that is, you know, I need more sleep. And it's sort of like, oh no, what's wrong with me? I need more sleep. And it's just everything that's happening. And it's really, I mean, so far I'm finding it pretty interesting, but it is. Every day there's some kind of loss, and I think that this practice has made it probably a lot more manageable, and it's kind of interesting. Well, it also engenders compassion when you realize that you're not forgetting things and telling the same story over again on purpose to annoy your children. And when I was younger and my mother was doing these things and I thought, oh God, she told me that already!

[38:08]

Or when my stepfather was very deaf and you really, when you're beginning to When your kids are really young and naive, you can just kind of feel like, well, if they would just listen a little bit harder, they'd hear. And there's some feeling like, well, other people get old, but I'm just not going to do it because I'm going to take good care of my body, and I'm going to eat the diet that they tell me to eat, and I'm going to just do everything right. And so it's just not going to happen to me. So your experience with the glasses is kind of like that, that we have to admit, yeah, it is happening to us, too. And maybe it's not my fault. Maybe concentrating harder isn't going to help me read this thing. So, yes. then, and they'll get something which, from the standpoint of a doctor, is kind of minor, you know, like their vision gets a little blurred or something like that, and they fall apart.

[39:23]

Because they haven't had any previous experience of dealing with some kind of impairment or It just really struck me how people who've had to deal with stuff generally do much better as they get older. Well, that's very encouraging. We're all practicing. I like that. Linda? Well, that was a great talk and I had an impulse to jump up and kiss you on your wrinkled cheek. You can do that afterwards. Okay. This morning as I was getting dressed, and the radio was on as usual, and I was hearing about that 22-year-old student body president, North Carolina, who got shot and nobody knows why, but anyway, she just did.

[40:26]

and some other dead person I was hearing about on the radio. And it just was shooting across my thoughts that whatever I get out of this Zen ideas about transitoryness, The idea of complete death doesn't usually get admitted. I thought, if I really believed that I could be dead the next minute like Eve Carson, I'm not acting like I believe that. What would I care about? Still, it sounds like a very elementary question. Why would I care about anything? Everything I care about is really still driven by achieving something in the future. Help me. I agree, you know, that that is very closely related to aging, but aging is not the same as dying.

[41:35]

So, thinking about our death, which we can do at any age because we could die at any age, also is a way to really try to get it that this moment is all we have. I don't know what to tell you. I have a sign over my desk that says, I printed it out from my computer and I stuck it on the wall and it says, don't think for a minute, you're not going to die, and it really encourages me. I feel good when I look at it because I think, oh, so that's going to remind me to not sweat the small stuff. But maybe not even the big stuff. If you're really thinking about it, I don't know. It's a big practice, yeah. Yes? You were talking earlier about the gap between, I guess the disconnect and how

[42:36]

And I was wondering how we can bridge that gap between young people and old people because there's lots of wisdom that I think is lost in our culture because there's such a divide between where young people get their knowledge and learn about the world. Recently in my life, in my activist circles, there's been increasingly more older people involved in different activist things that we're doing. And that's been really helpful. But how can we, young people and old people, how can we bridge that gap in our culture? Well, I think that's a great question, which we can all be thinking about in our communities, and I think sanghas and communities that we work in are great places to do that, and it makes me feel good to hear what you're saying about your activist group. What kind of group is that, or what kind of activism is it?

[43:46]

Currently, I work at the Oak Grove, the Oak Grove Trees. Oh, right, right. Well, there's some wonderful old people there, too. Yeah, and I think we need each other, and this sangha is a great place. I mean, wherever we can foster dialogue between young people and old people, it's great. And young people can learn from old people and from their experience, but old people can learn hugely from young people as well. I mean, we really do need each other. Just keep on doing it and keep on asking that question and, you know, if you're young don't be afraid to engage an old person in conversation and vice versa. You know, don't think that the old person isn't going to want to talk to you because you're young and they're not going to be interested and don't think that the young person is going to just not care about you because you're too old. Just don't think that. Go ahead and talk to each other. Time to stop, yeah. Is it time to stop? Well, let's talk outside some more. Okay, thank you all.

[44:45]

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