As most of you know, I've been trying to align myself with some of our Zen grandfathers during this practice period. But I wanted to talk about something else today. I want to talk about a grandmother, actually. This grandmother's name was Harriet Tubman, Daiyosho. the patron saint of our neighborhood, if you hadn't noticed, underground train conductor Bodhisattva. And today's a good day for one reason, to be talking about her, because it's one of the days we can celebrate Juneteenth, which is the kind of mysterious no day when we celebrate the end of slavery in this country.

[01:09]

So Harriet Tubman was born around 1820. She was among the people who had been forced into slavery. And she was a person who always had freedom on her mind from when she was very young. She had been able to stay with her mother and father, which a lot of people hadn't been able to do. And her mother, of course, loved her very much and dreamed that she would be good with her hands, quiet and cooperative, so that she could have some of the easier kinds of work to do that were available instead of having to work in the fields. Just another mother's dream that was doomed to be unrealized.

[02:14]

So when she, I guess, you know, got old enough, six, eight, something, have tasks. She was assigned several, a couple of these situations in the house where she had to be good with her hands and she wasn't so good at it and I kind of picture like a bull in a china shop in terms of her personal power. It just didn't work for her and so she eventually got, you know, kicked out of the house into the field and she actually liked that a lot better. She liked being outdoors and she was a physically strong person so she just got stronger. And also outdoors people actually talked about the possibility of freedom, they talked about running away, there was more

[03:23]

more conversation about escaping slavery. So this continued for a while. One thing that was hard was that when people tried to escape, the only people you really knew about were the people who failed, so the people who failed, either were killed, were tortured, or were sent to the South, or all three, further to the South. So she was in Maryland, not so far from Pennsylvania, which is where people were headed. but you never knew, so you had no idea what freedom was like for an escaped slave. You only knew what it was like if you tried to escape and failed.

[04:25]

So, you know, high stakes. And one day when she was around, well, I picture her around 12, which is my daughter's age, around the age of coming of age, she had a big thing happen which was that she observed, she was out in the fields and she observed another slave running away and was in a position to try to prevent the overseer from catching him and I don't quite get how it worked, but anyway, she kept the overseer in a little building, tried to keep him there so that he couldn't go and chase this escaped slave. He threw something at the slave, at the other person who was trying to escape, but it hit her on the head.

[05:30]

It was like a rock or something. And she went into a coma. As she became unconscious and was assumed that she was going to die, her mother tenderly nursed her for some weeks or months, I'm not sure which. When she came out of that, she was perceived differently by everyone, including herself. So she was seeing her courage was demonstrated and she had new respect from the other people there. and she also had, from that time on, she had tapped into some kind of inner intuitive sense of something and she wanted to become free, she wanted to escape and she was always intent upon that for a long time, many, many years.

[06:35]

And she, but she continued to go about She at one point prayed that the owner would die and then he did and she freaked out and felt bad. And she got married to a freed black man and The new owner was a little bit more like, let the slaves keep some of the money they made or something. It was a little, maybe a little more tolerable. And she wanted to escape with her husband, but he felt that their situation was too good to, it wasn't worth changing it. So she both tried to make her situation livable and always thought about escape and always waited for her moment. And finally her moment came one night. There would always be rumors that this and that family slave, whatever, was going to be sold.

[07:46]

So it was very scary all the time. And I think there was a rumor that she was going to be sold. And also her husband told her that if she tried to escape, he would tell on her so she couldn't trust him anymore. So one night she just knew that this was the night and she gathered her stuff together and another thing that had happened was that a Quaker woman had approached her at some point when she was in the field and said that she was the first stop on the Underground Railroad, somehow conveyed that, that she was the place if Harriet ever wanted to escape she would go there. She knew that, she gathered her resources and took off and went to this person's house and then just from there, each person, each stop on the Underground Railroad knew the next person and so she just went from there and finally reached, I think Philadelphia, but anyway, Pennsylvania and went on to

[08:59]

Canada which is where at that point people were going and sort of started to try to settle down and then it dawned on her soon after she got there that if she were to go back and kind of escort people she knew the whole route and she had a lot of confidence, a lot of self-confidence and it would be a lot easier for people to escape because she would be able to tell them that it really was okay. And so she went back, I think two or three times a year for about eight or nine years, I don't know the exact number, but first for her family, she went for her family members, she went for people she knew, and then she gradually went for people that she heard about. So I think there was something in the neighborhood of like 50 or 60 people, if anybody knows more accurately than that, that she helped to escape.

[10:07]

And she had an incredible intuitive sense about what she could get away with and who would be a good person to survive the journey and all the various things. She learned more, she had an incredible sense of it and she kept learning more. And she became a much, you know, FBI's most wanted, of course, I don't know if there was an FBI then, but somebody's most wanted. And at some point there was $40,000, this was back in the mid-1800s, $40,000 reward for her capture. So at that point her friends and allies convinced her to stop making these trips. And she went on to do other amazing things. In the Civil War she was a spy for a while and a nurse, so she went on, continued to live an amazing life. And I wanted to bring this up as a way of talking about our Bodhisattva practice and see the similarities and the differences.

[11:19]

I guess the main thing that struck me first was just this where as Bodhisattvas there's this phrase or this way we understand what we're doing which is that we don't go on to full enlightenment ourselves but we help others do that. And so what does that mean? I think that there's a lot about the way Harriet did things that we can look at One thing that comes to mind is, well, when was she free? Was she free when she first knew that there was the possibility of escaping? Was she free when she first took that step, packed up her stuff and left and started on her journey? Was she free when she got to Philadelphia? Was she free when she got to Toronto? Was she free, really only free when she was able to go back and help other people become free?

[12:35]

So, and for us, similarly, are we free when we first just hear the Third Noble Truth that there is a way out of suffering? And I guess, in my metaphor, we're enslaved by our false view of self So are we free when we first hear that there's a way? Are we free when we first get a taste? Are we free when we somehow fully realize the Buddha's teaching? Are we free when we're able to help others? I'm not saying any one of these is the truth, I'm just bringing this up. And the other two things that this makes me think of I call connectedness and sufficiency. So I think that one of the things that made her choose to go back was her connectedness.

[13:41]

She had a really strong sense of connectedness with her family and the other slaves in general. And that was what made her keep going back. And similar to the Buddha, she had to turn a little bit away from her connectedness to free herself. She had to leave behind the people who she might never see again and to run away. And just like the Buddha had to turn away from his family, and ultimately from his co-meditators and teachers and go on his own. And then he came back, once he became fully enlightened, he came back to teach. And so I think that connectedness is something, it's a good factor of

[14:47]

for our culture maybe especially, it's a good factor to cultivate our connectedness because we really are way more connected than we think we are. At least we're more connected than I think we are. You may not have the same problems I do. You know, we're not going to feel full while there's other people who are hungry. We're not going to really feel the value of our life while some people are being treated as if their life has no value. So we can't escape from our connection with each other. And the question is, how do we honor that? How do we, what can we do So another thing I think that Harriet's story illustrates is I wonder if some of us might feel when we hear this phrase that we work for other people's enlightenment before our own.

[16:03]

Is that like staying on the plantation and helping everybody else escape? And it's really clear from her story why that is not a good idea. Because you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know what you were helping people do. So I think of connectedness. And the other thing I think about is sufficiency. So the way I picture it, it was like when she got to Toronto or I'm sorry, I can't remember where it was. I think it might have been Toronto. That was like free enough. She was free enough. there. She didn't feel like she had to sort of like settle down and live out their freedom. She could employ her freedom another way. And I think that sufficiency is a good thing for us to cultivate too.

[17:08]

Of course, she also had to turn away from sufficiency to escape in the first place. She had to say, this isn't enough. I'm not, this isn't enough. My comfortable life, so-called, I mean, not by our standards, but in some sense, is not enough. I want to be free. So even though we have to turn away from our connectedness and our sense of sufficiency, these are really important things for us to cultivate, I think, especially in our culture, the way we're raised and the way human life is. I don't know how much to blame on the way we're raised and how much to blame on just human condition. One of the ways sufficiency is talked about in Buddhism is we have the four requisites.

[18:31]

The four requisites are food, clothing, shelter and medicine and those are four things that we need to be able to practice. So it's okay to work towards getting those four things. We need those, we need to have food to eat. If we don't have these things, we will not be able to... it'll be much harder to settle down and find practice. So... To me, that's a kind of way to think about enoughness. It's like, is it enough so you can practice? Not enough so that you can ease your existential pain. Not enough so that you can be completely happy. Just enough so you can practice. I thought of an example of this, but it seems sort of controversial or something, but I couldn't think of another one, so I'm gonna bring it up anyway.

[19:40]

I think that one thing that we often, we all have, at least again in our culture, we come into adulthood with a tremendous need to be seen, to feel seen, a feeling like we have not been seen. And when we, for most of us, if we find some kind of a teacher in the context of our practice, part of what that is is that we feel seen. Someone sees our Buddha nature and is beckoning us towards it. And that can really help us settle into a life of practice, to feel that you're seen. So that's, I think that that can, I wouldn't, I don't know if I go so far as to say it's a requisite, I'm not trying to rewrite the Buddhist words, but I think it's a really helpful thing, and it's an okay thing to try to find.

[20:42]

But then I think sometimes, once we do that, we feel seen, and so we're able to practice, and then we start to notice that our teacher, well, wait a minute, he doesn't actually see us all the time in all ways. And then that sort of pain creeps back in, that pain of not being seen kind of creeps back in and we think, are we really seen or not? And I think this is just an example of the important thing is, are you able to practice? Are you seen enough so that you can practice? Not so that you're seen all the time in all ways. So, oops. Sorry, Alan. Alan encouraged me to try not to use the word so. in my talks.

[21:52]

Helen is a very auditory person. He doesn't understand that what he's doing when he gives a talk is a completely different thing than what I'm doing. What I'm doing when I'm giving a talk is like what he's doing when he's dancing. And how often have we seen that? Well, I've come once again to the end of what I thought of to say. What would you like to do now? Meryl? Then Catherine. I think that was sojourner truth. But she was the one who said something about it. I looked for this quote. I couldn't find it. Something about I think. No one can tell me I can't be free or die or something like that.

[23:08]

Wasn't she. Does anybody remember that Harriet Tubman. Something like, the only thing I know is it's up to me whether I die or be free. It's not up to anybody else, something like that. Okay, I still have a question. Yes. I knew I was going to get in trouble. I thought that was the harmless practice. Yes. I'm already in trouble. So I'm thinking a lot about liberation. The practice period is focused on factors of enlightenment. And I guess I'm not sure I've got it all, but I think I'm challenging a little bit your notion of good enough. And I'm a little concerned that we don't see that we should go on and that actual liberation is possible. When you mentioned Harriet Tubman, you said, was she free when?

[24:15]

Was she free when? Well, I would ask, was she ever free in the context of what we're going to practice? And was her struggle on some kind of hierarchy where she wasn't seeing what we see as a goal? Is there a hierarchy of consciousness, of liberation? That's one question. Now, I'd like to fast forward to today. This last week, we had a lot of events in Burma, Myanmar, which is under a kind of slavery. It has been for the last 40 years. And there's been a week of repression, or actually a couple of weeks of repression. And Myanmar has some fabulous meditation teachers and probably the most thoroughly Buddhist country in the world. And yet, we see this form of slavery.

[25:18]

So, you know, I guess I would want to put, you know, talking about a fabulous historical figure like Harriet Tubman, we also are faced with kind of, in our awareness, in our consciousness, our aspirations, you know, what is possible And what should we be striving for? And should we be satisfied with... You talked about prerequisites, but in fact the Buddha was... eliminated a lot of comforts, even within the Middle Way. I mean, it was an ascetic practice, but it was also just having one meal a day, which was, you know, the Theravada practice. Which was enough, from his point of view. Which was enough. practice, to be able to practice. So, shouldn't we be questioning what our requisites are? I mean, they live in forests. I'm just raising this because I don't want to, you know, in my thought, I don't want to personally forget that liberation is possible in the way that we understand it through this teaching, which seems to me different than the kind of liberation

[26:39]

Well I was using I use it as a metaphor and I don't yeah I mean I don't know whether it's different or not but I'm sorry I won't answer your question but it reminded me of something my own quibble with my own argument which is it seems like for me and for other people I talked to that there isn't this time lag exactly like somehow the thing that frees us simultaneously if you can find the thing to do that frees you it simultaneously frees the other person. So if you're in a relationship with someone you're caught in some kind of tangle in that relationship which hardly ever happens. If you can find the thing to do where you are freeing your own self it often is the thing that liberates the other person. So that's my own quibble with my own metaphor. And also my other quibble with my own metaphor similarly is that I think that we don't exactly try to free other people.

[27:56]

We really, as Sogen has said to me and I think a number of us several times, keep just working on ourself. in this way, but with some kind of thought about the thing that frees ourself and the other at the same time. So, Catherine, you still want to weigh in here? Yeah, it's interesting. I found some way to respond to what you just brought up and the question that I had for you, but maybe it's going to end up being connected. My question was when you went past When you introduce connectedness as an idea, and I thought it was very important to talk about how for both connectedness and sufficiency, there comes a moment when you need to be willing to release your dependency on those, or the sense that you have to have them, your desire for those.

[28:58]

And then in the end, those are the things that give your life meaning and that make it possible for you to go on When I said sufficiency, what I mean is let's try to realize that we don't need that much. I was trying to say we don't need that much to practice. Yeah, I'm hearing that. The notion that the very fact that there are those four requisites already says that while I'm telling you as a Buddhist not to desire, that doesn't mean you're not supposed to try to get the punjabi. So we have permission to work for those very... And to know that others need that too. So when you're looking at requisites, that's different from just unleashing your desire for everything you could possibly want. Right. So what I'm hearing with sufficiency is staying clear about what's requisite without indulging

[30:03]

untrammeled desire. And that notion of enoughness is to say, do I have enough to practice? Then I can stop just reaching for the next thing. Right. So I thought your analogy... Right. Thank you. Yeah. You fleshed it out a little for me. Thank you. So that's sufficiency. Now I want to go back to when you were talking about connectedness. And you mentioned that you had a problem. You sort of referred to maybe you don't have a problem with connectedness like I do. and I wanted to hear more about that. Well, just my particular bent is to withdraw as a way to protect myself and deny my connectedness too much. Lie to myself about... lie to myself about the fact that I have a lot of connectedness. Alan? Well, you began this talk by saying you had... speaking about various then-grandfathers, and you want to talk about a grandmother.

[31:07]

And I'd like to ask, what's the feminine principle that you're trying to bring out in this talk? I'm not sure I need one and I'm not sure that I can say one, but I did have a segue I was going to try out on you, which I can do now. I was afraid I was just going to be introducing too many elements if I started with this little segue. Would you like to hear it, the segue? Okay. Close your eyes and picture a dilapidated old house. The yard's totally overgrown with weeds and brambles. It's like a breasted automobile buried, halfway buried over on the side. It's a wide porch.

[32:11]

Sunny day, summer afternoon. Insects buzzing. Sitting on the porch, two old grandfathers snoring away. And where's grandma? Cooking in the kitchen. Exactly. And what's she cooking? Blackberry pie. Is that enough on the feminine principle? Doug? Harriet actually saved her family. How will you save your family? Maybe by trying to see them? What if they don't look back?

[33:19]

Just another mother whose dream was unfulfilled. Paul and then Anne. Didn't you say that Harriet Tubman is a sort of a patriarch of this neighborhood, did you say? Well, excuse me. the biggest building in our area is named the Harriet Tubman Terrace. Wake up guys, wake up. And Anne. I really appreciated your talk, Gloria. I think it was wonderful as usual. And your talk about connectedness, maybe that's where the, I don't know if that's where the hidden feminine principle comes in, I don't know, maybe, maybe not.

[34:29]

But I think one of the things I appreciate about you is your strong, your groundedness in your connection to your family. And when we talk about connection and where we find connection and whether we are connected. Of course we are connected. Buddhist teaching says that everything is interconnected and we think of Indra's net. We're all connected, but we forget that. And we forget the ways in which what we do have an effect on society and vice versa. And for me, not having children, I think if when you have children you're connected to a future generation and that's a really, really important thing.

[35:32]

And one of the real failings I see with our society right now is our general lack of connection in regard for future generations in a way. A generation that was really, whose parents really sacrificed for them It's just kind of written off young people. The only people who really care, other than parents and their own children, the only people who care in our society about young people are marketers. And they really care. Well, a lot of people care, but I mean... For people who are not connected in that way as parents, I think it's really important to find some way of connecting. And particularly now when the schools are just collapsing because of lack of funding. And kids are not, the teachers, I think, really do care.

[36:36]

That's what I was thinking of. But they're not getting the support. They're not getting community support. And that's one way that people who don't have children, I think, can reestablish that connection if you have the kind of time where you're flexible or you're retired to re-establish those ties and that's a way that we can go back and help out the people who they don't need saving in that sense but they certainly need somebody who's lived through it to come back and help and explain what they need for learning and reinforce them. It's a really, I mean, for me, that's been probably the most satisfying thing I do, but I think it's a really important, you know. Well, and it's a particular form of insanity when you think, well, who is going to be taking care of you? You know, who's going to be, well, anyway, we're going to look for details, but let's see, Lois and then Jerry and then Melina.

[37:46]

It's a wonderful talk. I really feel very stirred by some of the aspects. I wanted to just say a word about the blackberry pie. And in the context of the last few comments, what is the purpose of feminine connection here? When you make a blackberry pie or sew a dress or a shirt, I don't feel, as a woman, that There really was ever any purpose apart from the real doing of this. This was generated from, you don't make a blackberry pie for any real reason. It's gratuitous. Everybody eats it and smears it on their face and it's wonderful. It seems to me that the feminine idea is a kind of faithful belief that you can do this and everything will be well. as a consequence, that you will bake and cook and love and plant and all good will come.

[38:55]

And the thing that has always troubled me is if I do this without orchestrating the rest of my life, my desire to study or my desire to learn ancient languages or whatever, I won't have enough time. So I have to charge into this natural overflow of faith and belief and trust with a kind of mental idea, plan, arrange, have purpose, have goal. And it seems to me that somewhere in this talk, this idea of Harriet Tubman wanting to be free is that, I'm not excluding men from this, but this feminine principle of You just go forward. You open your arms. You're like the fool in the tarot. You just go on. But you can't just do that, it seems, in our world because of other needs and other goals that you yourself have.

[39:59]

So I'm not sure where the end of this statement is, but I have a very strong feeling of the need to practice is the need to somehow balance the two parts of ourselves. of ourselves, you know, the teacher doesn't see us so much, do we see ourselves? You know, so I feel very troubled and illuminated, you know, to work on this some more, you know, to really trust this instinctual strong need to sing, to dance, but also to study and be silent. So, yeah. Jerry? Thank you, Laura. You obviously touched a really passionate chord in a lot of people, including me. When I was listening to some of this, I thought of that Mary Oliver poem, The Journey, and there was a line from it that I can't remember. And it had something to do with, you know, though the voices outside are calling, you know, hold off.

[41:04]

You know, you had to go forth and you had to journey in your way and become yourself. So that really links to this one point I wanted to discuss, which was that when you talked about sufficiency and the need for a teacher to see you, I guess I feel like the end is when you don't need a teacher to see you, that there's this okay place of self-realization, Okay, I'm okay. Where then you can go forth and it really doesn't matter what the voices are saying. And it really doesn't matter what your teacher is saying. Right, but you don't get there by trying to get your teacher to see you more and more until... No, no. So you just, you get enough being seen from the outside so that you can get to the place you're talking about.

[42:09]

Melina? Good morning. Good morning. I'm just a visitor, so I apologize if I didn't say anything. I hope it's not inappropriate. I was surprised and interested to see the topic this morning with humanitarian and slavery. I was wondering, do you see a dichotomy or any tension between issues of connectedness and seeing? What occurs to me to be of I think I'm probably the only person of African-American descent in the room, and one of the few minorities in the room. Do you see any tension? Do you see any issues? And then the second little part of that is that I've been reading up and trying to study Buddhism on my own, and I've noticed that there's a separate group called the Buddhists of Color that's always sort of struck me as ironic on a number of levels.

[43:11]

So that's my comment. Yeah, I think there's a connection. I mean, it's one of the things that's happening in this room, what you described, that it's mostly people with white skin privilege. What was the other, say the other part again, the second part? Oh, the separate Sangha, right. I think it's a koan for us. Do you, have you done enough about Zen literature to know what that means? I've been reading about 10 years. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. I can see why there, I can see why, just for example as a woman, I can see why I might want to have a time when I was just practicing with women, when I wasn't kind of dealing with that other side of things, the sort of oppression side.

[44:39]

So I can, from that point of view I can see the benefit of having a sangha for people of color so that they could sort of... Go ahead. Is there a sense of comfort for people of the same color to practice today? Is that the flip side of it? For the white people, you mean? Well, for us, it's more like we don't even know. Isn't it? Excuse me. Maybe we shouldn't get into this. I don't know. But we don't even see what we're doing that's making it continue this way. We can't see what that is. Yeah. We're trying to. I mean, I know it looks really lame, but I mean, believe it or not, it looks lame until you've tried it. You know, I mean, maybe you think you'd do so much, you know, a lot better and maybe you would, especially if you know what you know from both sides.

[45:48]

But it just, we can't figure it out. We're trying. We're taking suggestions. Paul and then Ross. You didn't quite say that we've tried for years to get more racial and cultural diversity here, and it doesn't happen. But I don't want it to sound like, what more do they want? It's like we've tried, but we don't even know what our problem is. I guess it's a cultural thing. I've never heard of the colored song. The rainbow. I would like it more. I would like it if there was a lot more people of all different races. It would be a lot better for everybody's place to practice if we had that here. Yeah, I think what I... Oh, sorry.

[47:01]

What I hear you saying, though, is while that might be a desirable, what Paul is saying, a desirable end, and which I think many of us would agree to, there's something stuck in our thinking the culture of this community, the culture of many Buddhist communities, the culture of this country, that makes it uncomfortable in different ways, from different sides. And there's some way that we are still, as yet, have to grapple That's why I say it's a koan. Sojin, sorry Ross, you're just getting bumped here. Bum, bum, bum. Well, I've studied this problem for a long time and my understanding is that it's everybody's problem.

[48:12]

It's not just our problem or your problem or color problem or white problem. It's everybody's problem. And until we all get into that position, to put ourselves in that place, it's not going to happen. So people of color, so to speak, quote unquote, have to come forth and be part of the saga and take the problems that come with that. If you don't do that, nothing will happen. It's not the white problem or the, you know, it's everybody has to come forth and not shy away and not say oh you guys you know it's as soon as you start blaming another side you've lost yourself and the game is over you have to stop blaming everybody has to stop blaming everybody has to stop criticizing and just be open that's the only solution this has been going on for

[49:20]

50 years with no solution. The only solution is to put yourself on the walking and take what comes from that and work your way through it. If you're not here, how can there be any solution? How can there be... But how do we put ourselves on the line? How did the people with the privilege put ourselves on the line? By being here. Everybody just has to be present and then work out the problem, whatever these problems are. The problem's not going to come up as something to deal with unless everybody's simply present. I think it's a big koan. Wait, let's let Ross have his piece here. Yes. Thank you for bringing this up, Malina. Thank you for bringing this up. I had a quick inventory on the community here, and I was thinking about problems that I've had with people here that are of my skin color.

[50:34]

And I started thinking, well, that is my perception when I feel involved in and when you when I did we did the visualization with the two grandfathers on the porch and you ask the question the thought where the grandmother was the thought that arose in my mind was she died she's dead and these are two widowers or whatever but again it's just our perception of where are these people and then when I got to on the upper time. You are seen on upper time or lower time or priest or low person or brown rover. It's like, you know, it comes back to think what someone said is collectively our problem.

[51:39]

I think because we're very communicative people, we have the privilege of education to be able to talk about our ideas. We wind up sharing those ideas, and we have to talk about something. So these are very important issues that come up, and it's a continuous dialogue. Should we have people who haven't said anything? Did you, Bill? Did you? No? I'm trying to put it together. I'm trying to remember what it was like the first time that I came to a service and it seems to me that what I brought was my background and my feelings and my thoughts and I came in and I did my sitting and I did the sitting and I thought well The feeling doesn't seem to have any place here. This is sort of a denial of feelings.

[52:43]

You don't move, you don't. And my thoughts, you know, I did a little bit of reading and every time somebody had a thought that I thought was pretty clever, he got smacked or the master would hit him with the fan or something like that. So this was very exotic terrain for me. And then they lit incense on an altar. And at San Francisco Zen Center, they had these statues of not very friendly-looking... Guardians, right? And Ed Brown, the first talking, came in. And Ed Brown looked very serious. I'd never seen him before. He looked very stern and sober. And I'm already saying, these people are kind of crazy.

[53:44]

I feel very uncomfortable. I'm kind of struggling. I'll do the rest I can. But what happened was, sorry to make this such a long story, but Ed Brown, for those who know him, Ed Brown came in and was very stern and looked around. And in his eyes there's something about the way he looks at you, but he looked all around at everybody and he said, I'm sorry I'm late, but somebody took my parking space. These people are crazy. This is the leader of this. And then he looked around in this fashion where the lecturers, you know, they look in the face of everybody before they talk and he looked around again at everybody in this sort of accusing way and he said, somebody take my parking place.

[54:45]

I just wanted to crawl through the door and get out of there. And finally he broke into just this uproarious laughter. He just almost fell off his cushion as he laughed. And everybody laughed with him. At that moment I said, there's something here that's interesting. I don't know what the day is going on, but there's something, right? I was ready to be lit in some fashion that day, and I'm thinking about Tubman and that it is everybody's problem, but not thinking of superior and inferior or anything like that, but if there's a path, how do we show people that it's a path worth going down? It seems to me for someone regardless of any cultural differences, walking in the door. This is a very exotic practice to make, to see.

[55:53]

You're talking about connectedness, to see connectedness with. And the thing that I kept thinking about was Tubman went back into the community. You know, she went back to show, here I am, it's doable, so on and so forth. And you really do want to be like me. That's a bad way to say it, but there is something that I've found that is worth exploring and investing in. So I also don't know quite how to end this, but I think partly those who are prepared to lead need to, without relieving others of their responsibility, We need to show that there's a possibility of connectedness. Show there's a possibility of a path to move down that people really want to and will benefit from. I don't know how to wrap it up. Is it time?

[56:53]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ