And I'm celebrating 12 years of practice. I'd like to thank everybody here today, especially those who typically don't show up on Monday mornings due to their responsibilities at work or home. There's a lot of support here. And I've derived a lot of benefit from that support, especially the last two years, which have been both the most difficult time in my life and also the most rewarding. And it's really great to be here and hear the very familiar sounds of sweet bells this morning during Sojin's prostrations to open a zendo and also hearing his wedding band knock against his teaching stick during his prostrations.

[01:15]

In light of the last two years, the teaching and the the wedding band probably could be spun out into a metaphor of life. For those of you who don't know, I was married for five or six years, and divorced, and this has really been a really incredible time for me. Fundamentally, the greatest teaching during that time has been a very deep, intimate experience of the Three Marks of Existence, which I talked about at a Beginners' Session a year or two ago, when I was asked to give a talk. Of course, the Three Marks of Existence are suffering, impermanence,

[02:25]

and that there's no self or no inherent self or no fixed self. And though we all have ideas about those three aspects of life or marks of existence, it isn't until one has a sort of a rug pulled out from under one and really left to examine for themselves what is my life about, that one could see that those three marks are really quite true, and trying to gloss over or think that they're not just leads to more suffering. And I'm very happy to say that the last week or so, my dear ex, Andrea, and I have begun talking again, which I never thought I'd be able to do. I don't know about her, but it's been a very wonderful time, very sweet and very tearful and painful, but not only with Andrew and me, but I think we all know when we have difficulties in our life, it's very easy to back off and

[03:47]

try to walk away from it, but it's always there. And one of the things I've been fortunate enough to have happen is to be able to work through some of that pain and suffering. And while it's not over, it's never over. It changes. And It's very familiar, our relationship and how we are with one another, and it's a little different. One of the rewards of practice for me has been to stick to practice and to see all these changes that arise. It hasn't been so easy. I felt like bolting once or twice over the last couple of years. But I'm still here somehow or another. Well, for those of you who didn't hear my story some nine years ago when I came out here, I'm going to go over some of the highlights of my life.

[05:01]

I was born in a small town in Virginia, Fredericksburg, Virginia, which is about an hour south of Washington. a fairly conservative town. It was prominently in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War and all that sort of stuff. So there's a very different feeling on the East Coast, a kind of old worldliness, which is different than the West Coast for sure. And I grew up with very supportive, loving parents. Jewish parents from Brooklyn, New York and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My father was a veterinarian and my mother was a housekeeper and used to watch soap operas and eat chocolate bars on her bed in the afternoons. It was a fairly privileged life in lots of ways. We were just middle class. the very heartwarming and heart-wrenching stories that one hears on Monday mornings of people's lives and unfortunate circumstances that arise.

[06:11]

I didn't really have a lot of major crises in my life growing up. I was fairly quiet and introspective and all the stuff that you can imagine. And I've come to see that My parents, for me, represented, for lack of a better word, wisdom and compassion. My dad had a lot of compassion and feeling about suffering. Being a veterinarian, he was very tied into people and their animals. In the early days of veterinary medicine, having a dog or cat was a real luxury, so most of the work he did was farm work, large livestock, cattle. And I used to go with him on these farm calls and help him as a child, help the father in a very small capacity, but significant capacity.

[07:14]

And just the way he handled people and dealt with them, and these people really being out of sorts, not so much the farmers, but people coming in with their dogs and cats who really like it was their baby that was dying or whatever, so he would have to care for them. in very warm ways and I didn't really see that so clearly as I have come to realize later in life as most children when they grow up and they get past all the anger and stuff about their parents. So, this isn't to say that my dad lacked any wisdom, but he was pretty sharp and clear and gave me some good advice over the years. But the compassionate side really kind of was there. My mother was and is very sharp and clear about things.

[08:18]

She's very opinionated, like myself. She's sort of the classic New Yorker, no bullshit, this is how I see it, and tough shit if you don't like my opinion on it. And of course, it's a stereotype. My apologies to those New Yorkers here. But when you get past all of that, all the layers of the persona that she carried and that New Yorkers in general carry, you see the sincere warmth that they have. It's just that they're just right on the on target with things. So I used to watch my parents at the dinner table argue a lot, because this was wisdom and compassion kind of going back and forth. And it was sometimes augmented or heightened a little bit by martinis, which were their drink of choice.

[09:21]

But nevertheless, it was It was a slot table. It was just my brother and sister had gone off to college or prep school or something like that. I was the last of three children. But I used to watch this. It was kind of a form of entertainment. I didn't really get upset so much about it, but it was really two people kind of going at it, which people have assured me is very typical Jewish family banter. You know, Woody Allen sort of plays up on that a lot in his movies. But in any case, that was sort of the feeling of the health. General support, a lot of energy, and me wondering what was going on here. So, growing up in a, not a religious home, but a culturally flavored home, if you will.

[10:22]

It was very nice, and at the same time, it was different than most of the homes in my hometown, which was not a Jewish community. It was a small Jewish community there, but not so prominent. All my contemporaries were non-Jewish, so I always felt a little bit different my New York, Philadelphia parents versus the Virginia or southern non-Jewish families. It was a difference. I remember during Passover, I would bring matzo and hard-boiled eggs to school and my kids would be eating bread and ham sandwiches and things like that. I didn't think so much of it, but again, just in thinking, Why am I the way I am and how did all this evolve seems to have been flavored by these sort of subtle influences. I've seen myself a little bit different. At 13 I was bar mitzvahed and in the Jewish tradition you're just bar mitzvahed when you're 13 whether you

[11:40]

like it or not. I remember protesting, telling my dad I didn't want to go to Hebrew lessons anymore because I was just, I just didn't like it. And he said, you just do it. He observed once about the three children that my brother would say all the time, I'll do it dad. Okay. Okay, mom. Yeah, I'll do it. And he would do something else. That was just his way. My sister would protest all the reasons why she shouldn't do something that I thought were impressing upon her. But she would do it anyway, but not until she had her say. She became a paralegal secretary. And I would not give much of a fight or discussion about things they wanted me to do, and I would just pretty much do what they asked me to do. So at 13 Oath Bar Mitzvahed and looking back at the dates and what was going on, it would appear as if the chronology is right. That was, it was in 69, 70, end of the year.

[12:46]

That was Sojid's 40th year here. And he was the head student, I believe, at Tasselhar during that time. And this is my 40th year. I had an idea of what it would be like being 40 when I was much younger or being a Shuso. It's kind of like a dream. It's really hard to know. It feels very wonderful and it's nothing like I thought it would be. Anyway, I did this Bar Mitzvah thing. Then I got into photography in high school and became a photographer for the local newspaper. Afternoons and Saturdays I would help in the darkroom and started taking pictures. This came up in therapy when Andrew and I were doing couples therapy with Steve Weintraub. that it seems to me that the photography thing, I started becoming more of an observer, and I was kind of hiding behind this camera, if you will, and looking very closely at things and recording them, but I wasn't so engaged with things in a very active way.

[14:03]

It was a passive way of observing, and no one can spend hours with a therapist figuring out the whys and wherefores of how my life has come and how much of an influence that was, but for me, because you have to be very neat and orderly in a dark room and you're alone a lot, taking pictures and developing films and caring for the space around it, that that probably had some place in how I am now, which is everything is neat and orderly and in place and all that. I don't shoot pictures anymore. I got very disenchanted with the business of photography when I was in New York later on. And I sold all my cameras and had a small crisis of what am I going to do with my life? Which is a little after the time I went to college. I went to school in Syracuse, New York and studied photography, which was just a high school hobby, sliding right into what am I going to do with my life? Well, I'll be a photographer. And this was my orientation to

[15:04]

people from the Northeast, people from the cities, and I'm still close with a couple of my friends from those days. It was a real eye-opening experience for me, being upstate New York in very cold weather, snow, and a whole different wardrobe than one has out here in California. And I was exposed to the things that kids typically are exposed to in college. And it was quite rich. It was quite a rich time for me. I wasn't so much into school. It was just enough just to kind of get by. But somehow or another, I got through it. And then I came out to California. for about 10 months looking to be a photographer's assistant. There weren't any jobs for those sorts of things in San Francisco. It's a small photography world.

[16:08]

And everybody said, go to New York, go to New York. So I went to New York. And I got a job pretty quickly. And I worked in New York and commuted on the subway and read a lot of books on the subway. It was about an hour and a half commute each way. It was a very nice time for a while. Then, as I said, I got very disillusioned with all the advertising. And it was all about creating beautiful images, but to sell things that people oftentimes really didn't need in their life. And I said, this doesn't feel right to me. And after a while, I gave it up and I sold my cameras and thought, well, now what am I going to do? So I thought, well, maybe being a school teacher would be a good thing. And you have summers off, you know, a short day and all that. But I wasn't so gung-ho to do it. But I went back to school, to grad school, City College on 138th and Convent, and finished up

[17:11]

That, barely, because during that time I discovered a Zen community in New York where Tetsukin, Glass, and Roshi is the teacher. The neighborhood I was living in at the time, there wasn't much happening except this cafe that they ran. It was a small little cafe. It used to be the Zendo upstairs or next door, before my time, but it was a livelihood. It was kind of like the Tassara Cafe in San Francisco. So I used to hang out there and I was lonely and I was looking for a relationship and there was an attractive woman over the counter there and I used to stuff my face with sugar and coffee and try to make time with her and nothing ever happened between she and myself but that's one of the, I mean if it was just If it wasn't such an attractive person behind the counter, perhaps I would have stopped going there. The food was good.

[18:18]

I continued going there and then there was a rabbi who was was a head student at Grace and at the temple there, and he was talking about Jewish mysticism and Zen and the parallels and all that, and I grew up in a Jewish home, but as I said, it wasn't terribly religious. But he was talking about things that sounded pretty interesting, and he encouraged people to come back to the seminary, to the temple there, and attend classes and learn about meditation. So I did that, because I wasn't so excited about this teaching thing, and I was exploring it. So I heard him talk, and a month later I got Zazen instruction and did a weekend retreat. That was in February of 84. And it was... It was really nice, it felt really good, and there was a lot of pain in my legs the last few hours of Zazen, but I finally got a taste of Samadhi, this really sort of settledness, and I didn't want to leave, and I kept my legs crossed, and I was like rocking my legs like this, because I figured if I uncrossed my legs, the Samadhi would go away.

[19:36]

So I just like ended the session kind of going like this. but there was this oreo key saying which was just really a wonderful way of eating food and just really the whole thing just took off and There's a supporting livelihood of a bakery at the bakery and I worked at this bakery 12 14 hour days very hard work and I was there for two and a half years, and I really had a very good foundation in traditional practice there. And they started going away from traditional practice and there wasn't so much sitting going on. There was a lot of work at the bakery. There wasn't a lot of emphasis on posture and breathing and all. And I started getting worn down. I wound up getting laid up in bed for about six weeks with mononucleosis. And I started thinking that

[20:38]

I'm not getting what I need and I spoke with Tetz again and I talked with a friend of mine there at the time about, well I want to practice, I want to continue sitting but where is there to go? It seems obvious that the direction the temple is going now is not where I want to go. So they both said, you should check out Mel Weitzman in Berkeley. And I'd been to California years prior to visit my sister. And I'd been to Pete's, actually, on one of those visits where I work. And I said, well, OK, that seems like a good idea. I'll go to California and see Mel Weitzman. So I wrote a letter. And I drove cross-country with my dad. And I knew that he would start wondering about what his son is doing. We would have this long conversation, which I couldn't get away from because he was drunk. So it was probably around Arkansas or something.

[21:41]

But he wasn't terribly concerned about He's very practical. He wasn't trying to be concerned that I was kind of going off the deep end to join a cult or anything. His biggest concern was not knowing what was going to be happening. I didn't have a job set up and what if it doesn't work out, where are you going to go and all that. But he let me find myself and I am deeply grateful to have found a place to practice. it could have turned out much differently. So I came out here in 1987 and I started practicing. It took a while to kind of get ungeared from New York because the style there is very different than here. But it seems after a while that this is my home.

[22:42]

And I saw my teacher at a book reading a few weeks ago and it's just very clear that that was a different time in my life and I still have a lot of respect for him and what he's doing and all that but it's not what I'm doing now. So this feels really great and I'm just about out of time, and I work at Pete's, as you know. We're serving coffee and tea, and I'll be having teas with people, and I look forward to doing that during this practice period. One of the things I said earlier was that I thought that I wanted to be in a relationship and that some time ago I said that was the reason I came to practice and our surgeon saying he just couldn't believe that someone would come to practice because they want to be in relationships which is this bigger picture of relationship with himself or with to be more engaged in the world and all that and there's something to be said for it.

[24:01]

But after I got what I wanted, which was a dear, loving wife, Andrea asked me, well, now that you got what you wanted, why are you still here? Why are you still practicing? And I didn't really know the answer to that. And I hope during these, I mean, I have a sense of why I'm here. And I hope that during these seven weeks, it will unfold more. And it's in some ways I feel this is the only show in town, the last stop on the train, all these things that you've heard before from other people. And as a friend says, you know, it's like preaching to the converted. You know, you all know the benefits of sitting. I don't need to say any more. So thank you again for everything.

[25:06]

It seems like there's five minutes for a question or two. Charlie. Well, just a comment. I have a neighbor who went to law school because he wanted a relationship. And he got a relationship. And he graduated from law school. But he never practiced law. So you're not alone. Thanks for your talk this morning. What's your Buddhist name? My Buddhist name is Seishi Tetsudo, which means pure determination to penetrate the way. What kind of relationship do you have with your family, your parents and your siblings?

[26:13]

Are they supportive of what you're doing? Well, they're supportive of what I'm doing in that They've seen, they were out here for our wedding and they see that it's not a cult. There's some really wonderful people here and the place is nice. My parents, I think, feel that I could be doing, career-wise, I could be doing a lot more and offering the world a lot more. I mean, their whole orientation is more professional career. And it's hard to say, well, I'm still helping people, I'm still doing all this stuff. But to them, I'm just a clerk at a coffee store, which is what I am, I'm a clerk at a coffee store. And I feel a little bad about that. I've always had this thing of wanting to please them. And I've done what I wanted to do, and I haven't pleased them, and they've been upset.

[27:18]

After 12 years, I think they've come to accept, well, this is it, you know? Yeah, this is it. And I'm still a good guy. And they, I think, have respect for what I'm doing. I only see them about twice a year or so. I saw them a lot more when I was back east. But it's kind of hard to schedule all that. It's sad too, they're in their mid-70s and getting older and I can, you know, it's hard at times seeing their changes that they're going through. I'm so close with my brother and sister. My sister has a little bit more understanding of what I'm doing than my brother. My brother, I think, feels more tied to the Jewish tradition, Jewish roots, so he's not actually practicing that. religion, but I think he feels he shouldn't abandon it. And as a young kid, he gave my parents a lot of concern because he was running out doing all these different things.

[28:30]

And now, as it turns out, one minute, he's doing a very traditional conservative thing, and I'm kind of doing this thing out there. It changes. Peter? I worked at a photo stock house selling pictures over the phone to calendar companies and what not. I'm not much of a sales person, peace kind of sells itself, but I had to drum up business so I worked there a month before getting fired. But I called up this outfit, and I said, hello, this is Ross Bung from Freelance Photographers Guild. Are you interested in pictures today? And this guy with this really, like, hard-ass voice says, well, we're a skin magazine, and we need pictures of, you know, you can imagine, the photographs you needed. And I said, well, thank you very much, and hung up. And I took his card, and I wanted to throw it away, because I felt like this is, this isn't wholesome, this isn't good.

[29:33]

But I didn't, and I just put it in the back of the file box. But it wasn't my kind of job. So the bakery, we got a $50 a month stipend in health benefits and food and board, our room and board. Well, now would be the time because there's no more hands and it's about seven. So thanks again, everyone. And I look forward to seven weeks of sincere practice. And obviously from this morning's turnout, people have an intention to do it. So let's do it.

[30:18]

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