It always seems to me that there are two ways that you change the landscape of your mind. One is by traveling. That always seems to change the interior landscape for me. And I go just someplace, whether it's around the world or a little bit different, maybe across the bay. And the other case, of course, is staying in the same place. And I'd like to tell a travel story, a scene that we're beginning, a scene that we have been trying at least to stay in the same place, in the same moment. We were on a train going through the hills to Jerusalem, which is a place that I love very much. And I was sort of being reflective as we drove through the beautiful countryside and thinking about all the struggle and conflict and pillage and also how important it is to in a holy place to at least three faiths and even the conflict of how the old buildings are built where the stone

[01:25]

The landscape itself has been mined and quarried to make the buildings. I was also thinking about places like, there's some places that seem like if something didn't happen, something of great religious meaning didn't happen there, somebody would invent it. And Assisi is a place like that, and I think Jerusalem is a place like that too. And who knows, maybe Berkeley is too. Anyways, I was thinking these lofty thoughts. This woman, couple in front of me turned around and said, Jerusalem is the most fun sunny city I've ever been in. I mean, it's more fun than the Big Apple and it's more fun than Miami and I just can't wait to get there and have some fun. Well, for quite a few moments I was feeling very self-righteous and thinking, well, the beauty of that place comes from the struggle and the belief and the faith and it's more important

[02:42]

So my question is, are you guys having fun yet? We're starting to. One of the problems I have, especially during session, or even when I sit zazen for a brief time, is that I find that in my efforts to bring more effort, and to sit more, to sit in what I consider a better way, I call up the well-meaning mother in me, the one that easily turns into the mean stepmother. You know, it's the mother that says, sit up straight. Now that you're sitting up straight, relax your shoulders. Don't fidget. Pay attention to what you're doing. And then when you get all done and you're just totally like a... She says, relax.

[03:49]

So, I found that while I knew in one state that, you know, I'm looking for emptiness, somehow couldn't drive out the mean mother without, you know, getting into just that thing where you have a continuous mirror image where main mother is sort of making the object out of you and you make an object out of the main mother. So instead I started collecting scraps of pieces of teachings that I had received over the time. And just recently instead of keeping them separate little scraps in my mind that I would bring up when I needed encouragement I sewed them together in a nine patch in my mind. And if you're not familiar with a nine patch, it's the first thing in traditional American quilt making that a mother teaches her daughter to do.

[04:57]

It's just a square with nine patches. You can look at it as nine by nine, three squares going this way. Or you can look at it as going around in a circle with a center piece. Or you can tie that in. Anyway, I sewed these things into a nine patch. And it's not a very big quilt. It sort of fits a doll buggy. And it's very raggedy. There's places where the batting is falling out in my mind. And it isn't quilted carefully. It's just tied together. But it seems to be a help for me. I have to say that some of the pieces in it are bright and new, that I replaced some of them sometime. And some of them are very old, some of them have been there since before I started.

[05:58]

No, the first piece I'd like to share with you is something that Mel told me a long time ago. And he said, and you probably may not remember this, he said to me, you have to remember this is not a performance. And to me that's been a big help and it's been hard for me to remember that. I think it must have been 20 years ago that he said that. But especially in sort of the role of feeling like I want to encourage everyone's practice. I sometimes forget that and think of it as some kind of performance. But it's comforting because I'm not very good at performances. One of the patches in my cloak came from Kadagiri Roshi, who I guess was Kadagiri Sensei then.

[07:13]

And I remember this lecture very clearly, partly because I couldn't understand it. Not just the content, but I couldn't get all the words, and I had to listen very, very carefully. And then afterwards, I asked people, what is this thing, a bug, he's talking about? And I found that what he was talking about were birds. And then it all makes sense. Well, the first part of it was about watching your breathing. And he talked about baby birds, the eggs in the nest. And he said, you may never be awakened or you may never be enlightened. And it's like a bird that takes care of their eggs. They may never hatch, but if she doesn't take care of them, then for sure they won't hatch."

[08:16]

And he said, you have to follow your breath that way, taking care of it all the time, and hopefully someday something will hatch. And that's when I helped him. The other part of that lecture that I remember was about mudra. And it was also about birds. You said if a baby bird falls out of a nest, and you pick it up, and you hold it, and you hold breath, you have to hold it with a lot of strength, but with infinite tenderness and care at the same time. And that's been a help when it gets like this. came from Norman when he was giving the class on the Flower Garland Sutra.

[09:30]

There was a time, well, part of it came from Norman. There was a time, maybe it still is in places, where a practice of Buddhism was to make a lot of images of the Buddha, and probably the one that is most popular in the world now person who did this was Inka who did many, many, I believe thousands of wood sculptures in his lifetime. Some of them were quite finished and big and large in all the image of Buddha. Some were just a twig with maybe a few cuts out of it to represent the chin or the place where the arms come. And at that time, around that time, there was also the practice of making many wood printing the same thing over and over on paper, and each one of those was an image of Buddha in the form of worship. And then often that stationary was used, or paper was used, to write sutras on, so that sometimes the images were completely obscured by the sutra, but still it was the offering.

[10:44]

And what Norman mentioned when was that when we sit, we are the iconographic representation of the Buddha. And I find it a comfort to believe that, even when my mind is wandering, when I'm inventing ways to run away, when I'm falling asleep and just wake up, And if we tie that to Dogen's essay in Shogogenzo, on being time, then when we sit, even one period of zazen, we're making a new move or images of Buddha in every second, in every moment.

[11:49]

And I believe the moments are divided into 60-somethings. Anyway, I find that a very nice patch, and a fairly new patch in my nine-patch quilt. Mel read some of Beantime yesterday. And this is my favorite, right now, my favorite translation. It's by Thomas Currie. And I'd like to read just one line. I know every time somebody's going to read Shobo Genso and I like sort of think, oh no. But I promise it's only a very short part. Because it is the principle of being such that there are myriad forms, a hundred grasses on the whole earth, You should learn that each single blade of grass, each single form, is on the whole earth.

[12:56]

I find that very comforting and very encouraging. That sometimes, even for a fraction of a moment, I can remember that like a blade of grass, we are all sitting on the whole earth. I'd like to ask Nell to tell truth about two of my patches because I think he tells them better than I do. They're both from Cincinnati. When he's in sleep, it's like a frog sitting on a rock, just very still.

[14:11]

You don't know if he's awake or asleep, but just very still. He likes it. Obviously. One of them is I really enjoy gambling. A gambling friend of mine who's Japanese told me that the Japanese characters for the word frog, that a frog is a good luck symbol for gamblers.

[15:25]

The reason is the characters also mean come back. You know, you put the money out and come back. But I sort of translated that frog also so that I can think of the frog when I wander. I can say to myself, come back. So that's sort of a green little sticky patch. There's another patch that was made by two people, so it's sort of not a square, it's really two triangles patched together. And one is a Tibetan monk whose name I don't know, but he seems to work with the Dalai Lama. And I guess it's the same as having fun. He said, well, this is a very serious practice, life and death practice. If we can't laugh at ourself in it, we may not survive it.

[16:31]

And along with that is Yvonne's comment on the practice of a half smile, a Buddhist smile that is a half smile. Sometimes when I'm grinding my teeth or clenching them, instead of saying, stop grinding it, Suzuki Roshi used to talk about horror. Put some strength here. He said, put some strength. This is where you should put some strength. He says this is called grace pegs. When you think about, when you're having a difficult time,

[17:35]

There's always something very comforting about rice paddies. Some nice warm feel right here. dealing with some other problem, this is always the warm, comforting place to come to stay in. This is where, this is our refuge, right here. And you suffer.

[18:58]

And these days, I saw that. But all of you have been a great comfort to me. And when I can stop and remember that you sit for all sentient beings, and that it's like the pebble that drops in the water, and somehow the first song, the first circle as it goes out to all sentient beings, And if I remember that, it seems to be great encouraging to me.

[20:05]

The way in which we support each other is great encouragement. I hope these eight patches can be encouraging because the last one, I don't know, it's my oldest teaching and I heard this before, I started singing Zazen, or maybe before I even knew about Zazen. And it's from a book that was never written, called Zen and the Art of Price-Fighting by Joey Lewis. And the whole text is, you can run, but you can't hide. We have lots of time. that goes with the sangha part.

[21:31]

One of the things that I really appreciated is the effort everyone's been making during this session. Whether it's people who've never taught, sat session before, or whether it's people who have sat many times and have to learn. But the effort of mat and I've been trying to be as patient and as tender and loving and let as much love suffuse the dead fly and the garbage I bring in on my feet that I brush away as I give to the mat itself.

[22:33]

Could you possibly expound how over the years you have been working on this, and what that means to you? Maybe what the problem is. I'm interested in it because it sounds like self-consciousness is something that is part of your consciousness. with my posture. And, you know, you read Kapler, Roshi, and one of the first things in, you know, well, in a month or two months or whatever, you're going to find that posture, or maybe it's a year or two years, you know, 20-some years later, about 15 minutes after I found it, or 40 minutes after I found it, it's gone.

[24:01]

And I guess at the time when I was first struggling with it and Noah was trying to help me with it, I was looking at it from the outside and feeling, well, if I moved, it was going to ruin everybody's Zazen. It would destroy the Zazen feeling in the Zendong. It hasn't gone away completely, but I've been able to work at it by trying to work from the inside out and to honor my effort rather than the results. I'm also extremely clumsy. I bump into people. I almost knocked Noah's bicycle over today. I mean, when I started sitting jobs and I weighed 110 pounds, I was still clumsy then.

[25:10]

And I still think of myself somehow as being a much smaller person, you know. So, and that's just one thing I, I try not, you know, to honor the effort in that. There's amazing grace and sometimes there's amazing lack of grace. Does that answer you in any way? Does it help in any way? I won't be here for a shuso ceremony, I'll be out in the country, but this will be okay. I ask for you... Could you send a wire? Well, I hope it's a difficult question, but it's probably only difficult for me. You spoke about the birds, about the comfort of the bird.

[26:12]

Yesterday, we had a ladder up on the side of the house, community house. And apparently, the folks who put up the ladder, when they took it down, didn't notice. And they knocked down two eggs, which I guess were rotten. With one stone? With one fire. Birds seem to be... Going back to the Jerusalem thing, one of the other things that makes that place so wonderful to me are the birds.

[27:41]

It's probably the same thing that makes it a piece of land that has been fought over so much. It's a rather narrow strip between oceans and seas, but while people have been pillaging and killing each other and fighting, over for so long. It's also the land bridge and the migratory points for the birds, many of the migratory birds of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Three continents touch there. The birds fly over. I've been lucky enough once to see the migrations of the storks that were coming back from Africa, going home to deliver all the babies. But, you know, I asked the same question not long ago. You know, I believe Mel was lecturing.

[28:43]

And during the break, and one day sitting, I'd seen a hummingbird caught in a spider's web out there. And it was a spider web that I had And there's always that question of how to intervene. When I tried to free the hummingbird, the hummingbird just got more scared and went away with part of the web in its wings. And somehow we keep remembering that we smash eggs with ladders, with stones.

[30:03]

There are a lot of the birds flying around yet. And maybe like this. So often not. And it seems often to be true. Isn't there life and death in every moment, and in the clumsiness?

[31:42]

And if we can find the awesomeness in that. I'm not saying that I can, but isn't that what we're looking for? Isn't that clumsiness part of the whole works? I haven't discovered that. I haven't realized it, but I believe it. Maybe that's where faith comes. No? Seriously? I wonder, since one of the things you've been saying is to honor your effort, honor our efforts.

[32:45]

There are many forms of encouragement. What happens to me, which is that I can't, I just can't even make the effort sometimes. I'm sitting there, and since I just grew up, the dog that I have on this leash that's mine, or whatever, it's out of control, I just can't even try anymore. And that's a throwing the towel, in effect, to the pain or the discomfort or the daydream or the fear or whatever it is. And then I really give myself a hard time about that, too, because I'm not even trying. The least I could do is try. And sometimes I just can't try. Sounds like you've got a bad case of the mean mother. I don't know, I think... Isn't that giving up part of the effort?

[34:10]

that there's always this point in Seshim where we try harder and harder and harder. And somehow it's the I that's trying, you know, and we keep telling ourselves what to do. And then someplace it gets to the point where we have to give up. And part of what we give up, I think, is the little self. And that giving up, I think, is part of it sometimes. I think that's the same as the flower garland patch in the I Am Class representation of Buddha.

[35:19]

yesterday and even more today, completely exhausted. Well, I know for the last six weeks, I've been running from performance to performance and saying, oh, when this is done, when Square Dance performances goes over, then things will be easy.

[37:00]

When the camping trip is over, then things will be easy. Then when When this talk or that talk is over, then it'll be easy. When school is over, then it'll be easy. And when school was over, my room was filthy, and I was there till the very last minute, practically, before I packed up my orioke and my rapeseed. And it seems to me like, at least the way I build my life, one performance is only ready for the next. And nothing ever really seems to be over. But on the other hand, that business of being exhausted, I thought about that yesterday when Mel gave his talk, you know, about the moment of awakening, of waking up in a moment. And during the last period of Zazen, I fell asleep over and over and over again. I just catch myself, a thousand little dreams coming back, and I just

[38:08]

I comforted myself with the idea that if you're exhausted and you fall asleep, you have more chances to wake up. I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant, but I offered it.

[38:21]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ