Well, it's a nice day to sit. Been waiting for the rain. Yesterday, Wendy Johnson gave a talk here. Wendy is the head gardener at Green Gulch. And she talked about what an important season this is, this fallow. time, she called it. Of course in California things aren't fallow for long but the leaves are dropping and the light is briefer and it is our, it's our dark time. And she talked about the fallow field The time when what's going on is not visible, but very active.

[01:15]

And we've just been through the November, the cluster of November 1st holidays and ceremonies. Sagaki and All Saints and All Souls Day. And in some cultures, this time is the beginning of the year, the time when the membrane between the seen and the unseen is particularly thin. So it's a nice time to sit. And Wendy talked about grass. the pervasiveness of grass and how now, this time of year, the seeds are working and just readying themselves to arise.

[02:21]

And so today I want to continue with that theme in a somewhat different way. I wanted to talk about desire and development. We live moment by moment in the world of desire. as seeds are to the ground so we are to desire that just moment by moment desire comes up in the very small ways of wishing to change our position wanting to feel better and the big ways the ways that shape our lives, the ways that shape the way we work, and the ways that shape the way we live.

[03:34]

So, we're always working with desire, and our desires are what link us to the world, to each other. And we can say that there are two different kinds of desires that are not unrelated, but they affect us differently. There is the desire when we want something. when the division of subject and object, that there's something outside of us that we want, that we need. And then there's the deeper desire that doesn't have a subject and an object.

[04:43]

There's the desire of the seed to grow. We have a natural desire to open ourselves up. And to talk about this a little more, I would like to retell the story of the red shoes, which is probably a story most of us have read sometimes. Once upon a time there was a girl whose mother had died. Now how many stories and Victorian novels and situations begin with a girl whose mother has died? Interesting. Her mother had died and her father apparently wasn't around very much, so it was up to her to take care of herself.

[05:50]

And she didn't have much money, but she did the best she could and made her own clothes and made particularly a pair of red shoes of which she was quite fond. She just sewn them together with the cloth that was around, but she liked them. And one day she was walking down the road and a rather well-to-do old woman passed by in a carriage and noticed her and felt sorry to see such a poor child walking along and talked to the pastor of the church and said that she would really like to adopt this girl and the pastor thought that was a good idea. So she did. So she invited the child to come and live in her house. And of course she was able to offer the child a great deal more in the way of material security than the child had had.

[06:56]

And so she threw out all the old clothes the child came with and threw out the shoes and gave her a new wardrobe and taught her the right ways of living in the world. And then the time came for the girl to be confirmed in the church. I guess that's 12 or 13. And so the old lady took the girl out and bought her outfit for her confirmation. The old lady was very hard, was almost blind and didn't see very well. And when they went into the store, the girl saw a pair of red shoes that were the most beautiful shoes she'd ever seen. And she picked them out and she bought them. And the old lady didn't see that they were red.

[08:01]

She just didn't notice. So the time of confirmation came And just as they were going to church, it was a wet day, and the courtyard was muddy. And as they walked across the courtyard, the old lady and the girl got their feet a little wet. And there was a man standing, leaning against the side of the church. He was a soldier, kind of tight, and his arm was in a sling. and he had a long red beard. And when the old lady and the child came up, he said, let me wipe your shoes. So he wiped the old lady's shoes, and then he wiped the girl's shoes, and he tapped them on the bottom and he said, good shoes for dancing. So they went into the church, and

[09:05]

there was the ceremony, the confirmation ceremony and the girl found she couldn't think about anything but the red shoes and she couldn't keep her mind on what the pastor was saying and she couldn't keep her mind on the hymns and all she could think about was the red shoes so they went home And the people in the congregation had noticed the red shoes. They're not the kind of shoes you're supposed to wear in a confirmation. And so they told the old lady, and the old lady was horrified. And the red shoes were put up on a high shelf. But it was all that the girl could think about. So the next Sunday, she got them down. And the old lady couldn't see, and she wore them to church. And as they came out of church, heads were kind of shaking all around.

[10:14]

The soldier was there and he looked at her again and he said, good dancing shoes. And all of a sudden, the shoes on the girl's feet began to dance and she began to dance off. And the coachman jumped out of the coach and he caught her and he put her back into the coach And the old lady scolded and scolded her. And the shoes were put up on the high shelf. But the old lady began to get sick that next week. And as she got sicker, there was also a dance, a community dance that was announced. So the girl thought to herself, well, this is my chance at last to wear these red shoes and go to the dance. And so she did. She put on the red shoes and she went to the dance. And she danced the way nobody had ever danced before.

[11:17]

And she amazed everybody. And herself. And it was all she had dreamed about. Until the shoes began to dance more wildly. And they stopped dancing in the way that you dance with partners. And they just began to leap around. And she was embarrassed and she didn't know what to do, so she danced out. She danced out of the party. She danced out into the night. And she danced all night. She found she couldn't stop dancing. And she would try to take the shoes off, but they wouldn't come off. She tried to scrape them off, to peel them off against trees, but they wouldn't come up. And she danced all night, and finally the dawn broke and the day began, and she danced in the direction that she thought home was.

[12:18]

Because maybe something would happen if she danced in the direction of home. And as she got to see her house, She could see that a coffin was leaving the house and people with it, that the old lady had died. And they were taking the coffin to the grave. And there was nothing for her to do except keep dancing. And she danced, and she danced, and she was exhausted. And finally, she found herself in front of the house, the little hut that the executioner of the town lived in. She came and she tapped at the door and the executioner opened the door and he looked at her and he said, my axe is already trembling. And she said, please, I can't stand it anymore. Will you cut my feet off? Will you cut the shoes off?

[13:20]

So he came out and cut off her feet. And she sat on the ground, and she watched the red shoes with her feet in them dance away up over the hill. And he said, now you have nothing. You are a cripple, and all you can do is serve other people. So there are different versions of this story and there's a kind of pious version in which she serves other people and goes up to heaven in a rainbow. But the real ending of the story seems to be this moment when the shoes dance off. this moment in our life I think we've all felt when heart's desire just seems to go and it seems as if life could be nothing but flat when the most important part seems to be vanishing

[14:48]

So, it's business about the mother. It's as if all of us, in a certain way, have a good mother and have a wounded mother. When you hold a baby, you hold a little baby, particularly when you feed a baby, and you just look down and the baby is just looking up and you have just full, totally trusting eye contact. That's the kind of unspoken bond, the language that goes on between the natural mother and the natural child. The mother just wanting the best, the baby and the baby just drinking that in.

[16:14]

And then we have the wounded mother. Anne Sexton wrote a poem called Red Shoes and part of it goes, I stand in the ring in the dead city and tie on the red shoes They are not mine. They are my mother's, her mother's before. Handed down like an heirloom, but hidden like shameful letters. The house and the street where they belong are hidden, and all the women, too, are hidden. So we have this wounded mother and we have the good mother, the natural mother. And this girl is suffering from a very serious wound.

[17:23]

And she's misplaced. And she doesn't understand her suffering. So she falls into desire. she falls into this passionate desire for the red shoes, the way we do when we've lost our ground. And without her ground, her real ground beneath her, she goes to this ceremony, to this confirmation, the time in her life in our lives when we are who we are and we meet society. We enter the social world. And she can't meet it wholly. She meets it in a kind of counterfeit way.

[18:34]

The way we are when We live together, but we are living, really, with a secret. I think most of us, at some point, have lived our lives amongst others, but with a secret. And we know that, in a certain way, our life is not fully our life. and we fall into some kind of compromised life overly defended life or partial life and then

[19:37]

With this sensation that, with this secret kind of obsession and this discomfort that we have because we're not wholly ourselves and wholly with others, there's this restlessness that happens. The shoes that won't stop dancing, that there's no way of settling down. We have to hunt and hunt and hunt. And then we find ourselves in addiction. That old story. But the addiction is somehow just carrying us. And that we've given up the story of our lives. And we're in the grasp of desire gone crazy. And then finally there is that relinquishment of heart's desire, kind of settling in for, with the dancing away of the shoes, the life of blocked development, where development is arrested and one just goes on.

[21:10]

in a very limited way. It's kind of half-life. So this story, Red Shoe's story, heightens the drama or a situation And of course it's a drama that's not only a kind of life story drama, but a moment-to-moment drama. That as we sit here, in a longish sitting, we find ourselves falling off into desire and coming back to our own ground, repeatedly, over and over and over. So after this talk, we're going to chant the four vows, one of which says, delusions are numberless, I vow to end them.

[22:28]

And sometimes we say delusions, and sometimes we say desires. Desires are numberless, I vow to end them. That's pretty strong. And actually, none of us want to live without desires. That would be like being squeezed to death. That would be like the seed in the ground that got no water. So our practice is how to meet our desires, how to allow our desires. How to allow our desires to really see them, to really allow them to arise, to know what they are, and to let them go as everything in fact goes.

[23:38]

And if we allow our desires in this way to arise, to be there, to leave, the desires, in fact, take care of themselves. Our trouble is, our trouble comes when we've given up something important. When the girl put on the red shoes, she met the devil and he waits. So when we put on, when we are not really paying attention to the ground of our desires, when we reach out for some kind of image and grasp it, there's the devil and there's our craving and our suffering and our lesson.

[24:43]

And if we don't learn the lesson the first time we're taught it again and if we don't learn it then we are taught it again and again and perhaps life after life. So how how we live with these desires, how we live with what is really coming up, who we really are, not who we wish we were, not what we want to have, but what is really coming our way. That's our practice. And when we sit, and very patiently allow what comes up to come up and to go and continually return to the ground of our practice, this fallow ground.

[25:53]

If something comes up for us, a kind of devotional quality arises. Somewhere I read recently, devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. And I would like to close by reading the November issue of Joko Beck's little newsletter that comes out once a month. What time is this lecture over? Eleven. Okay. And then we can have some talk. So, Joko's newsletter is called Primary Purpose.

[26:58]

What is your primary purpose in life? rather pretentious words, and yet, until this matter is clear, we wander like a ship without a rudder. And any answer we may offer, such as, my work, my family, my close relationship, is it, and yet it is not it. Some vague or not so vague sense of this unsolved puzzle drives us in our practice. Because we know we need to settle this matter not with an intellectual answer but with an answer of our whole being. So all of our projects such as finding or maintaining relationship or finding and expanding our chosen work are secondary to this primary question. Why? Because clarity and wisdom must inform all our activities for them to bloom at all. and clarity and wisdom are born of the questions, Who am I?

[28:03]

What is my life? All of our lives, consciously or unconsciously, we ask these questions. We ask and we ask. And either we understand how to ask, how to practice, or we don't. To this we might add, if we practice, do we at last get an answer? Do we finally know who we are? and thus know our purpose? At some practice point we see the error of wanting an answer. The desire for an answer is itself seen to be a blockage. And so we just patiently practice day after day, year after year. There is an old Tibetan saying, and God said, when you see my face Your questions will cease. What is meant by this saying?

[29:06]

This, I think, as we slowly comprehend through practice what it means to experience our life directly, we also comprehend the futility of all our analyses, theories and questions. The question, who am I, solves itself as it fades away. As it fades, as we live life instead of questioning it, our primary purpose is obvious. If this is still unclear, we just continue in our practice. Slowly, our questions disappear. Replaced by what? Peace, confidence, unwavering purpose. So if any of you have responses, comments, questions.

[30:11]

I never did hear the story of the Red Shoes before and the image at the end is pretty unsettling. It reminds me of a little bit of alchemy I've read about where In order for the beast, let's say the lion, to transform, if he's in the container and the fire's set underneath, part of what happens is his paws get cut off and there's just tremendous rage. And it just seems to be a necessary part to submit to this horror, to undergo a transformation. And I'm not even begun to grapple with that and it seems like step number one. But you talked about when that happens and the heart's desire is let go of. And this is what I'm not so clear about. You said something about then the heart's desire has gone away and there's a flatness or a life half-lived.

[31:14]

Then what? I mean, then what maybe is practice, but could you say a little bit more about, you know, great desire that feels like our heart's desire and this horror in letting it go and then what? Well, I think what you said about the alchemy is that's the way one meets that dilemma wholeheartedly. The way one doesn't meet it is to just wave goodbye to the heart's desire. And I think many of us, and we all do that, we all make that compromise sometime. And we all know people, many of us know our mothers who have made deep compromise in that way and it's very painful to see that kind of blockage that some people live with and that we do have experience usually in our lives of living with.

[32:30]

And there is that turning where You see it going. You see the most precious thing leaving. And the only thing to do is just to wholly give up. Wholly, wholly give up. Notice this, the nadir of the fallow time. Just allow oneself to be destroyed. And then, see what comes. So that's a very dramatic way of talking about it. But this process, in some degree, I think, is always going on. I actually feel the... my understanding of it is that the adaption or the taking on of the image

[33:38]

is a response to the feeling of heart's desire. It's replacement. So the cessation of it, the shoes dancing off, is not the low point, really. The low point is earlier when you take on the image. It could even be the image of practice. I mean, I'm not saying that's good practice, It could be any image. It doesn't need to be red shoes. Red shoes are glaring. But it seemed to me that the cessation, the letting the shoes run off, even in your story version, it was wonderful to me because it did not... I didn't feel her pain at that point. I mean, it felt like some imposition of it. I mean, it felt like the release then. rather than the low point. The low point was more unconscious when she took on the image.

[34:43]

That's true. And when you take on the image, well, there has to be suffering sometimes. Yeah. I think there's suffering all the time. And for some people, for all of us, the suffering can be acute at different times. Somehow, the story doesn't seem to even point to any... Well, I don't think so.

[36:05]

I think that it was her. Maybe I didn't tell it. Well, who knows? There are versions and versions of this story. I read three quite different versions, so I'm telling the one that struck me. And the other two did have this tacked-on ending, which didn't which got her out of the trouble. The stumps of her legs healed and she did become a servant and she was such a very good girl that she did go to heaven. But to me, when one is in the grip of addiction, one has lost one's ground. That's true. Well, how do you get it back after that?

[37:12]

Certainly, it's not the end of the story. But I think there's a very, very painful moment But we have to face, wherever we face it, in the process of that story. And it's really what Karen's question was, too. Yours is the same. Because when you see it in terms of feet dancing off, it's horrible. Maybe somebody else can speak to Donna's question. Yes. To me, the whole story that you told was a prelude to when the feet were cut off. And to me, the beginning of the story starts when the feet are cut off. And I just wanted to say that a version of the story that I read tells Okay, we go Susan.

[38:24]

Yeah. Well, I just have to say I really dislike the story entirely. I'm sure that it has its, you know, psychological value, but Victorians really didn't like little kids very much in the first place. And the whole story just feels really punitive to me that this poor little girl, without guidance, would reach and end up having their feet cut off. And it's like, to me, little girls shouldn't reach for red shoes. They can end up in stumps and being servants. I just really dislike it. It just feels very punitive. I'm sure if I had a more elevated view of practice, And, you know, this one really hit home, I guess, because it was the little girl, and I can relate to that, and the red, wearing the red shoes, and like, dress up like the princess and all that, and dancing around, and it's just not

[39:56]

And it is painful. And I was left, you know, I found the story really difficult to listen to, that there was a sense of, there's nothing else, you know, that you confront the worst, you do the worst, you cut off your feet, and you don't know that there's anything else beyond that, at that point. And that's what's really going on. That's right, that's right. Margaret? You know, I definitely see all the different points here, and they all sort of hit home in a certain way, but there was something that just caught me, and I know it's some of my stuff, that this girl, you know, had the no guidance, and that she had been taking care of herself, and that one of the things she'd done to take care of herself was to make this fine pair of red shoes. And somehow the red seems like passion to me, and that what Susan said about the passion, and that, you know, she was just trying to reclaim her childhood in some way, where she'd taken care of herself with these shoes that had freezed her, you know, and that same issue of injustice, and that, that was one thing that hit me.

[41:33]

I know, you know, you hope for something more hopeful, but it's just like, very unsettling, the stumps. And just because she was just doing her... She was doing the best she could. Ruth? The thing about the story I like is that everybody brings something to it. And for me, the image is execution of desire. that in executing the desires, cutting off the feet, it cut off also the means by which to restore the original desire. That addiction somehow masks an original desire. And if you cut off those feet, you cut off

[42:37]

that the way back is also through the feet to me. Well, I think, I don't know. I think there's always a way back. I think the ground is never lost. And I think that there is some very very powerful aspect about development that wants to continue no matter what. Well, the part that I think really got me is, I also didn't like the story, It gives us good energy for sitting.

[44:00]

Mary? Yeah, I like what Judy said. I see it as a dilemma about learning to deal with your desires so that they don't carry you away and get out of control and become like an addiction so that you couldn't stop dancing, but at the same time to be able to allow yourself dancing in your life. deal with desire in our lives, which is what sitting down is doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, it repeatedly comes up, and we repeatedly let it go in a day like this, and we do get that detachment from it, it's still there.

[45:13]

But it does come and go, and it does come and go, and so we begin to gain confidence in our ability just to allow it that that freedom. And when we allow that freedom, it doesn't entrance us. Okay, one more. Yes? and it's a metaphor. Thank you. Beings are numberless.

[46:16]

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