I vow to taste the truth of the Tataka's words. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for inviting me to do this. I'm almost completely terrified. It's really amazing. I've been working on this garden book for five years. Not always as wholeheartedly as I should have. Should, should, should, should, should have. But it's never not in my mind. And it's often not in my hands. So what I'd like to do is to offer you a harvest of some of the work I've been doing in secret, working secretly like an idiot and a fool.

[01:03]

I've been very fortunate. The writing that I've been able to do has been supported by the kindness of our wider sangha around Green Gulch. The book began actually in Gary and Trish's little cabin out at Muir Beach overlooking the ocean. For a long time I wrote in Martha and Lee's little hut, again overlooking the ocean, with the trees coming down all around and all of that extraordinary life right there. And I've worked mostly on my own kitchen table early in the morning, sometimes getting up before the Han and working on the book a little bit, knowing I have to take my daughter to school and do all the things that are a huge part of my life. Natalie Goldberg said to me years ago, the mistake that women writers make is that they think they can seclude themselves from the world and have an ideal writing retreat, when in fact her experience is that women writers

[02:06]

write right in the middle of their lives. She reminded me that Gone with the Wind was written on the kitchen table, a wonderful book that is setting afire the minds and hearts of young children right now called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was written on little scraps of paper by a single mom in cafes in northern Scotland. She sent those scraps of paper in to a publisher and they said, this is wonderful, we'll support you to finish this book. And she continued to do it in the cafes. So this garden book has been written everywhere, a little bit of everything, sections in the greenhouse, sections sitting by Redwood Creek. In the last period of time I've been working, I've had the honor of working on Suzuki Roshi's writing table down at Yvonne Rand's wonderful place at the end of this valley. There's a little other meditation world down there. She has a small zendo, and Suzuki Roshi left her his writing table. It's a low black lacquer table.

[03:08]

So I tuck up underneath there, in the winter covered with Tibetan rugs, and try to evoke and call up the garden. Poets have been a help. One or two things, says Mary Oliver. One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees, and through the stiff flowers of lightning, some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. But to lift the hoof, for that you need an idea. And I have so many ideas that come welling up from 25 years of experience of working and practicing in this farm, and being invited, for those of you who are new, to my particular story, just from being invited more than five years ago

[04:10]

to write a book about the principles of farming at Zen Center, what's really mattered. So I began, you know, and I've been working hard. Tonight, I'll read to you from work that's brand new, work I did this morning, and I'll read to you from work I did a few years ago, about the principles of gardening. I have the wonderful experience of working with an editor who's a Zen priest. She's a student of Kadagiri Roshi's, a good old Dharma friend of mine. I see her once every three weeks. I make the pilgrimage to Sebastopol and lock myself in with Jisho. We spend one hour looking around her tiny Zen temple that's there on her property and talking about the plantings, how to aerate her compost pile better,

[05:11]

how to keep the bulldog off of the lilies. I think essential matters like that, and then we sit down together and she turns on the clock and we grind away at the book. So she's very much in my mind and heart tonight, and I think she'd be happy I'm reading, because I haven't shared my writing with the community for, I think, almost two years. In fact, I think that's why I'm so nervous, because I don't read it out loud, except to myself. I kind of will read to see what's there. And when Liz lived here before going to Tassajara, she was very kind. She helped me with every tricycle piece for a number of seasons, talking with me and putting the ideas through Liz really helped. So I'm going to read the newest tricycle piece that went in about three days ago, so you'll get to hear that. It's been a hard year. I've been very much altered by the death of my parents

[06:12]

and by a number of changes with my root teacher, with Thich Nhat Hanh, and a number of changes in my own life and psyche and body. But I'm learning from everything that happens, and I'm grateful for that opportunity. And I'm grateful for your support, even though I'm not with you in the Zendo. I am awake and working during that time, and for many, many months I was sitting at home with an altar I have at home to my parents. So it's been quite a year, and it's evolving, and a rich tapestry spread out in front, just like the garden. Now, I want to say something about time, but maybe I'll wait and just stop talking about it and put it out. Oh, I have so many helping things here. These are all out of order. Arlene must have dropped these books. It's Arlene's fault. Okay.

[07:14]

Yeah, this is good. From Poet EQ, Poet and Zen Teacher EQ. Okay. So, an invocation to begin. Stare at it until your eyes drop out, says Zen Master EQ. This desk, this wall, this unreal page. Norman said to me, In the morning, warm up. Just start to write. Write what's there. And have a good time, and don't obey any rules, and don't punctuate it, and let it be a mess. And when you're warmed up, you can get to the work. So this is a warm-up from this morning. Hold on, entering the garden. Some mornings I don't arrive in the garden until very late. I'm stopped by the gossamer trap line. And this won't be in the book. This is just a warm-up. It'll be in the fire tomorrow. I don't keep them. I'm stopped by the gossamer trap lines of the wolf spider, thrown out from the green-eyed cave of Madame Hardy's Rose, across to the back of the border,

[08:17]

to where the sternly upright ewe hedge stands. If I try and duck under the web, I'll be arrested, caught on my hands and knees again by the legions of weedy willow herb that I reach out to pull up from the base of the black dragon lilies. I've already dropped out of sight, so I ask myself, how low can you go? And then I drop down another notch to breathe in the warm, humid animal wind blowing out of the underworld burrows of that pocket gopher who's been gnawing at the cinnamon-colored roots of the angelica plants for days. Other mornings I push on through the beneficent kernel, leaving a trail of trampled carnage in my wake. We have fourteen boxes of baby lettuce to crop today and pack for greens before the sun hits the kitchen garden, and I'm a little late in moving the oscillator from the speckled cranberry beans over to the Florence fennel transplants.

[09:19]

My mind pulls me along, careening. I'm self-important and august. Through all the pale green silk strands stretched across the loom of the garden. Ping! They snap free, and I march, unrepentant, through my own collateral damage, into the heart of the tangle. That's a fancy way of saying, sometimes I don't get anywhere at all because I'm paying attention, and other times I couldn't give a shit about any of it, I'm just going to plow it all down and get on with what I have to do. It's always good to have Emma here, because it's good to have people that don't believe in books and don't believe in the written word, and don't believe in spinning, spinning the stories.

[10:22]

So you're my ballast, thank you for sitting in the back there. Knitting. Knitting, yeah, to keep stable. I think what I'd like to do is to read you from some old work. When the invitation came to write the garden book, Tony Burbank, who's the editor from Bantam Press, who solicited the book and came to Green Gulch and spent, she came to Green Gulch and spent a week here. She wanted to see if there was a book in this place, a book that would describe gardening, and she and I met and we talked, and we talked a lot, we made a very strong connection with each other, and we spent a number of hours together, and she worked in the garden with me,

[11:24]

and built compost with Leon, and got very dirty, her clean, elegant, long, white hands got all mucked up with the mess around here, and then she went and spent three days at Tassajara to get to Nozen Center to see, should we do this, should we endeavor in this? It's an unusual situation to have an editor invite you to write a book. And after the meeting, she spoke with Michael Katz, who's the agent for the garden book, and said it really isn't a book about how to garden, per se, nor is it a book about the Green Gulch garden only, but it's instead a book about the principles of gardening at a Zen place, and let's have that come through. So it's a book about the principles. So knowing that, Ajisho gave me the assignment of writing about what principles motivate me as a gardener, and I'd like to read them to you, and there's seven, and I hope they're succinct, and I hope they're clear, and if they're not, I hope you'll ask me about it,

[12:24]

or tell me. It's called Into the Tangle. Seven basic principles of gardening. When I was a brand-new gardener, I planted my first bed of sweet corn at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. I was working by myself in the upper garden, wrapped with concentration. Dry, shriveled kernels of bantam sweet corn filled my fist. I stretched a string line the full length of a 65-foot row where I was planting the corn, and just under this line, I scratched out a two-inch deep furrow with my favorite hoe. The string showed me where to plant, and it kept me straight. Every two inches or so, I dropped a kernel of corn into the furrow. I wasn't sure that I would have enough seed, so I left the furrow uncovered until the entire line was planted. I was working on my hands and knees. Head down and deep under the spell of the ancient ritual of planting, I imagined green blades of corn rising up out of the black skirt of the ground.

[13:26]

I was so focused on the seeding that I didn't notice anything else that was happening in the garden that day. Finally, the line was sown, and I looked up from my supplicant's crouch. A rotund stellar blue jay was at the bottom of my corn furrow, hopping fearlessly down the line, gobbling up each of my carefully sown kernels of sweet corn. She paused for a moment, fixed me with her bright eye, and continued to feast, and my life as a gardener cracked open and took root. I nearly killed her. I'm experimenting with using the feminine, yeah, the feminine gender for my enemies. It's been very interesting. I think I told you that last time, two years ago when I read it. I'm still trying to do it. What I realized that summer day was fundamental. Gardening is about awareness and relationship, consequential relationship. It's also about taking a stand and standing by your principles. At the same time, it's about giving up control and your stands and learning from your mistakes. This hasn't been an easy lesson for me.

[14:29]

When I recovered from my stunned shock in the Tassajara corn furrow, I leapt to my feet, bellowing war cries at the retreating backside of my fat corn-fed jay. Muttering under my breath, I redistributed the remaining corn seed in the row and stamped close the furrow. But today, 25 years later, I'm still pursuing blue jays, and they're still pursuing me. Sure are. Like the one in the greenhouse that ate corn last year. The Hopi corn. Gardening is a lifetime's work, all about picking and choosing and about following your passion. I have some very basic principles that inform how I garden. They come out of my love for gardening and out of my deep love for Green Gulch Farm, the home place where I live and work and where the taproots of my life are anchored. Today, I count seven principles. Tomorrow, they may change a bit because they are alive, and I'm alive. Like the garden, my principles do not always behave in a predictable, orderly way. They come out of a wild and rangy rootstock from the bottom of time. I want to say, before I go any further,

[15:32]

that when I began writing the book, one of the first and strongest things Michael Katz said to me is, I hope that you will not wee us to death. We do not want to be weed by the generic Zen center. You have to make it personal. Please make it personal. Use the first person pronoun. Don't be afraid to say, I garden like this, even though you know it includes Suki, Liz, Emma, Peter, you know, Snip and Jerry. All those beings are included, but use, take a stance, and don't wee us to death. So you'll hear, this may seem a little egotistical, and of course it is, but there is an awareness in the words that I stand for all beings. Use that letter. So, my first principle is to learn gardening from the wilderness outside the garden gate. As I work, I want to keep the links alive between wild land and the cultivated row. I receive my clearest gardening instruction

[16:32]

from listening to the voice of the watershed that surrounds our garden. I know that January is the time to prune our Japanese elephant heart plum in the garden, but just when in January is always linked to the unfurling of the first white blossoms on the wild plum tree in the canyon outside the meditation hall. There's very little true wilderness remaining in the modern world, and yet, when Thoreau writes that in wildness is the preservation of the world, he reminds me that wildness at least persists. It endures in our acculturated cities as well as on the fringe of urban farmland. It persists in patches, in sumps, in wallows, in weedy tangles everywhere on earth. A few summers ago, Peter and I were driving in West Berkeley through an industrial neighborhood not far from the San Francisco Bay. We passed an abandoned garden that had gone to seed. Fascinated, we screeched to a halt and pressed up against the sagging fence that bordered that forgotten plot. Old carrot plants towered above us,

[17:34]

eight feet high, raining down torrents of seed onto the sidewalk. Tattered gourmet lettuces stood as lone sentries near the overgrown entrance to the garden, the whole place hummed with the whine of pollen-collecting insects working that abandoned paradise. In honor of wildness, inside and outside of the gate, every spring, I leave a random corner of our garden untended and in a neglected tangle. We let it go. Throughout the growing season, we pass by this fallow spit of wilderness. But in early autumn, when I'm bent over with our domesticated harvest of slim, white-stockinged leeks and red mustard, I look across the ordered rows of the garden to that far tangle of seedy cow parsnip and skunkweed, and my own true wild roots stir back to life. My second principle of gardening is to know the soil where I work in every way. Even though I pretend to be cultivating crops

[18:36]

of Italian radicchio and long-stemmed bouquets of James Rocket, what I'm really doing is getting to know the heavy, bottomland soil of the gulch. Our soil is made up of the work of countless invisible organisms digesting the land and running it through their intestines. Soil is species, and everything. Soil is everything, gardens. As Darwin said, the earthworm is the intestines of the earth. Remembering as I work that there are more microorganisms in one cup of fertile green gulch soil than there are human beings on planet Earth, I have a renewed humility about my own scale and context in the great life of the garden. I know our soil by digging. We work hard at Zen Center, double-digging our garden, just as Alan Chadwick taught us 30 years ago. Often people marvel that we go to such lengths to cultivate our land here at Zen Center. Couldn't we use simpler, less labor-intensive methods to grow these crops? Wouldn't it be more Zen not to work so hard? Maybe. But for me, the fact that we dig the soil so deeply

[19:37]

and thoroughly and move all those feces around is my life and my Zen practice. When we first began to double-dig at Green Gulch, I could get the blade of my digging spade only about four inches into the ground. That's how heavy our old sea-bottom soil was. I remember crying by myself in frustration as I tried to dig our stiff clay soil. I heard the quail cooing under the cypress hedge where they took their dust baths. No one noticed me. I had blisters on the pads of my fingers and all along the palm of my right hand from digging, but I kept on digging. I went down into the soil inch by inch. I was hooked in spite of myself. My third principle of gardening is to feed the soil and to work to build fertile land, not just to grow crops. An old Japanese proverb says a poor farmer grows weeds, a mediocre farmer grows crops, and a good farmer grows soil. At Green Gulch, we grow soil

[20:38]

by planting a green mantle of cover crops to build soil fertility year-round. We also cultivate deep-rooted crops like burdock and American sweet clover, which break up hard pan and consolidate minerals and nitrogen in their roots, and we build soil by making compost piles and celebrating decay. Life and to death and to life is our motto for the work happening in every compost pile and we make, excuse me, in every compost pile that we make out of raw garbage and layered straw. This work is so fundamental to how we garden at Zen Center that we often joke that even though we don't proselytize about Zen, we sure do about compost. My fourth gardening principle is to protect and encourage biodiversity in crops. This principle comes out of a bottomless love for plants and out of a passion for preserving biodiversity in the plant kingdom. Kingdom, because there are no kings in the long lineage of plants. So why should we say kingdom? Let's try kingdom. We're only participants.

[21:38]

Perseverance of biodiversity depends on growing a wide range of plants from seed and on supporting small seed companies that make a special effort to protect old-fashioned varieties. Eighty percent of all the vegetable varieties that are available, that were available in the United States in 1902, 80 percent have now disappeared. They're gone. This is because of a huge centralization of the seed trade in the hands of very few multinational corporations. Even though I gnash my teeth over the erosion of genetic diversity, I also remember that agriculture is 15,000 years old and commercial seed merchants only appeared about 300 years ago. They're an endangered species. This gives me fresh hope and encourages me to be a seed saver myself, despite our foggy, cold climate. In our less than half acre flower garden, we grow more than 70 species of flowers and herbs. In the vegetable rows of our kitchen garden, we grow crops

[22:40]

for Green's Restaurant and for our own kitchen. We plant 16 distinct varieties of modern and heritage lettuces, as well as many other vegetable crops. Most of our flowers and vegetables are raised from seed gathered from all over the world. We share our seed stock with all interested gardeners, and we have no secret pet varieties of plants. When the principle of protecting and encouraging biodiversity is central to your gardening philosophy, you quickly observe that this principle also provides for protecting and encouraging the named and unnamed insects and small mammals that serve as pollinators and beneficials in every diverse garden. There are some 70,000 species of cataloged insects buzzing around in our time. Of these numbers, only about 400 are pestiferous, and of these 400, only about 100 are serious agricultural pests.

[23:41]

The other thousands all have a primary place in the garden. These first four principles are about what to do in the garden. They're fundamental practical principles. Learn from the wild, know your soil inside out, build fertility, and preserve biodiversity in the garden. I learned these principles by working in the garden shoulder to shoulder with many people and with two strong gardening teachers who were practical dreamers. Alan Chadwick and Harry Roberts labored with a steady vision of worldly paradise always in front of their hands. They passed this vision on to me, and my life as a gardener has been marked like the red roots of rhubarb chard in winter soil by my association with my teachers and by working the earth of our modern garden of Eden with love and attention. The word principle comes from the Latin for first taker or first beginning. A principle, then,

[24:44]

is a basic truth, law, or assumption. Principles are essential. Principles stand at the front, at the beginning of all good work. The word principle has an interesting cognate, prow, as in the front hull of a sailing ship. I like this image since principles do push headfirst into uncharted waters, into the deep. Since the waters around the boat are always moving, principles must be alive, fit for change and surprise, and ready to respond and relate always to the world. The last three gardening principles are about how to be in the garden. Like my first four principles, these next guidelines are deeply practical. They're gathered around a fierce love of plants and of the natural world, around celebration of the intricate unfolding of dinosaur kale leaves, around the smell of young ginger in the rain. These principles are old, old and new at once, garden economically and ecologically,

[25:44]

work in mindfulness and engage with the world outside the garden gate. If you ask me to repeat these principles tomorrow, I may say them a little differently, but they remain the hull of my ship. Work wholeheartedly, pay attention to what's under your feet, and share the bounty of the garden. Wholehearted work and ecological gardening is the fifth principle. This may sound lofty, huge, but it's not. The principle is second nature to most gardeners. It means work with care and protect the elements of your garden, the soil, the treasure of clean water, the good fresh air. To economy and ecology in the garden depend on a loving relationship with your home place, even if you're only privileged to garden in your spot for one short season. The prefix eco which is the prefix for economy and ecology comes from the Greek oikos for household or home, home economics and depends on knowing and protecting the ecology of your place

[26:45]

and on getting to know yourself and your place inside out through wholehearted work. And now I have to preach just a little bit or continue to preach a little bit. Gardening is economical at its core and ecological when we remember not to take more from the land than we give back. This admonition harkens back to the second and third principles know and protect your soil build fertility in the garden. Ecological and economical gardening is organic gardening. Knowing full well the harm that comes from applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the earth I am determined to study and teach ecological gardening which is practiced organically. I don't want to wear you out. Wholehearted love of the economy and ecology of your home place is infectious. It spreads. To be wholehearted means to be undivided from your place to dwell in love and dependence

[27:46]

on your particular spot of earth and to know your dwelling place in every way. When this happens two economies intersect the natural and the human. Then as poet and farmer Wendell Berry writes each economy is the other's hope of a durable and livable life. It takes time to know your garden well. It takes as long as it takes. This awareness is the foundation of my sixth gardening principle Garden Mindfully with full awareness of your body and breath and the body and breath of the garden itself. Even with a billowing sea of work all around you take the time to feel a spacious sense of leisure as you garden. This does not mean that you wind down into static immobility in order to follow your breath but find your own rhythm and your own pace as you work energetically dynamically in the garden. It means you're willing to live in the present moment and to adjust your pace.

[28:46]

You're willing to give up your idea of what it means to be mindful. You're willing to let the garden get under your skin. Listen to Thoreau in this topic. He says there were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes on a summer morning I sit in the sunny doorway from sunrise to noon. I grow in these seasons like corn in the night. Growing like corn in the night brings me back to my blue jay at Tassajara pecking at the corn as I concentrated right and only on what was right before me. True mindfulness offers a broad margin to life. A wide peripheral vision that includes awareness of the living jay and concentration on the corn seed. This kind of mindfulness practice begins by slowing down and becoming aware of the body, breath, and the mind. Mindfulness is a primary principle

[29:47]

and path for me because without it I'm lost in paradise and cut off from the living world. Mindfulness is core practice, simple. Spend five minutes every day just sitting still in your garden. Give yourself a broad margin and sink down into your breathing. Watch the ruby-throated hummingbird pull red nectar out of your full-blown salvias. Listen to the rain on the leathery purple collared leaves. Sink down and join the breath of the garden. I promise that you will feel that you will resurface refreshed. You're not leaving home when you take hold of mindfulness but coming home. The old texts from the time of the Buddha remind us that mindfulness practice is the unfailing master key for knowing the mind, the perfect tool for shaping the mind, and the manifestation of real freedom of the mind realized by being fully alive in the present moment. Dwelling in mindfulness, working in awareness, the garden comes alive

[30:48]

all around you and you become fit to meet the mystery moment after moment. My last principle is engage with the world outside the garden gate. This principle is very simple to realize since gardening is all about relationship. Let the garden lead you out. There's no way to garden without being aware of the cries of the world. My friend Catherine Sneed who's been teaching gardening to prisoners in the San Francisco County Jail for this last decade of her life says this principle most simply, most bluntly, gardens save lives so help people learn how to garden. There are many ways to reach out to the wider world from the heart of your garden. Share the bounty of your own crops. Give away zucchini. Take fresh brandy wine tomatoes to your senior citizen center and sit down and eat them with the ancient ones. Taste raw life together. Drool red pulp. That's for Martha. Drool red pulp.

[31:48]

Volunteer to help set up a community garden in your local town. Work in your public school to get a line of Russian sunflowers planted for hungry birds. You say there's no soil at your school, only pavement. That's what we heard at John Muir School in San Francisco. You say there's no soil at your school, only pavement. Okay. So then plant sunflowers with kindergartners in deep five or eight gallon containers like Diane did and create a garden of Eden rooted in black plastic pots. Let your imagination lead you out from the humming core of your own garden to the dusty world and plant paradise wherever you go. Thank you. EQ says it so much with such... Pow. Don't wait for the man standing in the snow to cut off his arm.

[32:50]

Help him now. So, I want to give you some breathing room around what I know is very dense, high cholesterol writing. I'm aware of that. You know, it's my mind which is that way. It needs to get on the treadmill and pump. But, um... Beautiful. Um... Last time after I read, Martin said, well, it's beautiful writing but it doesn't have a thing to do about Zen. And so we had a solid year-long dialogue ever since then. Peter grabbed him by the shirt and said, how dare you say that. It's fear. It's the ultimate compliment. I called Michael Wenger and I said, he said, I didn't know anything about Zen. I said to Martin, are you sure? We've been, you know, working hard to see how we... I mean, I really mean the team that I work with because I'm so well-endowed

[33:50]

with a wonderful team of people that help. Small teams, you know, small. But, um... really looking to see how does this come out of practice. And part of it is the whole mystery of, um... making what's not really the present moment the present moment or drawing from a history of tradition practicing in Zen center and presenting it as if it's happened just yesterday. So I think you'll hear that as I continue to read to you. I'm interested in were those principles clear? Good? Okay. It's a real important part of the book and took me months to write those. It's part of the problem and they were really fat and then they had to get on the treadmill. I can see where they're going to get on the treadmill again because it's been a couple of years since I read them. Anyway, they are in the first chapter the first chapter of the book is all about this place and about... a section about Harry Roberts

[34:50]

and one about Alan Chadwick and one about my root teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and what it means to practice with a root teacher while you're gardening and there's a lot of work about George Wheelwright and about how we... about communal work how it used to be years ago it's kind of thick with history and it ends with the principles of gardening. Should I do a little more? This is the tricycle piece and it follows the principles. It's called On Not Cutting Corners and it's dedicated to gardens for the Y2K crisis and it'll be coming out in early August. I'm a steadfast refugee from the computer age a modern Minerva TV born too late

[35:51]

and disinclined to type to send email or surf the net. I know that in the time it would take me to learn the computer I could become decent at budding and grafting disappearing strains of heritage apples a far more compelling task for my gardener's hands and mind. Even though I am a techno twit hiding behind the brocade skirts of black peppermint cool mint lettuce and burgundy amaranth from the roar of the 21st century I know about Y2K computer panic with all of its triplicate zeros and threats of real disaster. I know about it and also brood over the potential danger of worldwide shutdown at nuclear power and weapons plants caused by millennial computer failure. Closer to home Y2K panic is expressed as fear of scarcity and of interrupted food and water service. Since most of the food we eat in the developed world travels at least 1,200 miles and this is a verified truth my friends even in California. Most of the food we eat

[36:52]

in the developed world travels 1,200 miles before reaching our tables. This breakdown fear is quite real so I have a simple timely non-computerized response to Y2K panic. Join with your friends and neighbors and grow a small garden this fall this fall and draw your table closer to the garden. There's ample precedent for this suggestion. During World War II victory gardens were planted to help provide food during a time of rationed supplies. If there was a lack of arable land for starting these gardens breaking up tarmac and pavement was widely sanctioned so that fresh food could be grown and that's true. There was actually a provision to take out pavement if you couldn't if you didn't have land. Victory gardens not only breed good vegetables they also excuse me victory gardens not only bred good vegetables they also spawned a vital sangha of intertwined gardeners and strengthened the roots of urban suburban and rural life. Planting a Y2K garden in these times is similar to practicing tonglen meditation works by breathing in hot disaster

[37:53]

and exhaling cool bright light. So take into your lungs the smoky fear of computer shutdown and a real lack of food and water and breathe out confidence and generosity bolstered by gathering your wits about you growing food for those who are hungry and afraid. It's quite simple really. Winter gardens can be started throughout the continental United States in this season as long as you have a few months before the first heavy frost. Since it is a little late consider transplanting hardy open pollinated seedlings to get a jump on the season and if you must start from seed be sure to choose cold resistant varieties that mature in under 60 days. Begin by planting robust winter vegetables like Swiss chard red Russian kale Nelson's storage carrots and achiko sprouting broccoli all great in stews, soups and stir fries. For January salad greens praise be to Osaka purple mustard miner's lettuce mosh and minutina a crunchy salad green that regrows mightily after each cutting.

[38:53]

For new year flowers to welcome the turn of the millennium plant morning bride scabious clove scented stalk and flame colored calendulas that exude warmth and cheer. Then instead of protecting your garden see how much of it you can share or give away. In the 6,000 year old history of agriculture there has always been the lively tradition of growing for the hungry. Written in the biblical book of Leviticus is the clear admonition not to cut the corners of your field but to leave the crop standing to be gleaned by the poor the hungry and the stranger. So practice Tonglen meditation and dana paramita the old perfection of giving as you harvest your crops. On New Year's Eve do what we do plant a potluck dinner glean from the unlocked Y2K gardens in your community eat together practice sitting meditation until the wee hours of the morning and garden wholeheartedly without cutting any corners. I have to make up my mind

[40:08]

if agriculture's history is 6,000 or 15,000 years I want to see a little variation there and appreciate any help. 6,000 is spread 6,000 is spread there we go so agriculture must be more yeah I think agriculture's older than that who knows I better rectify it though, right? 15,000 that would be pre-Olympic right? yeah yeah we don't really know although we know the agricultural centers in the world and they're places where people sat where they sat down you know, where they sat together sat down tended the ground grew crops the garden books are divided into about 7 chapters first one's about the place then there's one about the soil one about fertility basically following the principles, really one about seed one about tending the garden that includes the pests and watering one about I can't remember

[41:10]

it's so complicated I think one about oh yeah one about irrigation that kind of work and then the last one's about facing the world connecting to the world so there are about 5 of them are done one of the biggest problems in the book is that I've done very little writing about plants actual plants which is interesting because years ago when Suki first came to work in the garden she she was reading the secret garden and asked me who I related to she told me she was relating more to Colin to the wild is it Colin? the wild being the wild boy you don't remember not Colin what's his name what's the name of the boy who's wild who's free that's Colin so Suki was relating and feeling his life where she said she used to be more

[42:11]

connected with the sickly boy who thought he couldn't walk you have to know the book if you don't it's an insider story and then she asked me who do you relate to of the characters and I said God I relate to the garden I don't relate to any of the characters I always felt like that was my identity was in the garden and with the plants which has been really interesting there's been very little emphasis on plants in the book so there's not going to be a chapter on irrigation that's interesting I forgot it the chapter that's missing is a chapter about plants because I've been feeling lately that I met Louise Halberg who's a butterfly gardener and I felt at the end of our encounter because she was giving all of her plants over to butterflies I thought she was charming and picturesque but her garden looked like hell I mean it was eaten to the quick because she was gardening for butterflies I began to see her as a rancher and me as a farmer I'm growing the plants

[43:11]

because I love the plants she's growing them for her livestock you learn a lot when you sit down with a daikon says to me there's only one secret to writing two or three simple words black on white so when you sit down to put black on white or pen on paper or however you want to do it you learn a lot about how you're put together so I have two more pieces that I wanted to read to you one is a piece that I wrote right pretty close after my mother died and it came out of a retreat that we did with veterans of the Vietnam War we did this retreat out at Fort Cronkite in a military base

[44:12]

and we spent Veterans Day out there practicing meditation and we worked with Maxine Hung Kingston who's a great writer she's the author of Woman Warrior and a wonderful teacher and she's only teaching now to groups of veterans she's only speaking about stemming the tide of war come up and it came out in the writing and on our last night together we read the work that we'd done that came out of meditation and writing so Maxine gave us one assignment and she said take an object from the natural world and put it in front of you and really look at it and then practice writing what you see use your senses call up your senses and then she said look away and write what's there underneath your senses underneath your sensual apprehension so my mother

[45:13]

died of dementia alcoholically induced dementia she drank herself into a stupor that lasted for a couple of wonderful years where she was very sweet and absolutely marvelous and open and friendly and she smiled at us like a toothless pumpkin but she didn't know who we were who her daughters were and she didn't recognize us she couldn't speak eat do anything by herself and she died last September a few a few months before this retreat so when it was time for the writing practice I looked out the window it was a stormy day on the headlands and it was November it was Veterans Day their Halloween pumpkins had been put out on an old wooden post and were decaying and I looked at the pumpkin and this

[46:14]

piece came up it's called Day of the Dead Compost Pile by Halloween at Green Gulch Farm all the cover crop for the winter season and the tulips and narcissus the fritillary and blood red regal lily bulbs of spring must be planted Halloween is the cut off point the hatchet falls on All Hallows Eve for after October 31st it's far it's too late to plant this is the time of year we celebrate El Dio de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead that day standing between Auburn, Trest Indian Summer and rainy black eyed winter when the veil between the worlds thins out and gardeners are called home to sleep in the long throat of rot this year we celebrate the Day of the Dead by making a huge end of the season compost heap in the middle of our autumn fields no being escapes the yawning jaws

[47:15]

of this Halloween compost pile today is our final chance to scrape all broken and shattered beings off the empty field and into one steaming mound we work all day long cleaning the field in a solitary corner of the field I pull broken sunflower stalks out of the exhausted row often these stalks are ten feet long with thin ghost-like necks at their summit snapped off necks broken by the weight of huge eyeless heads of gouged out Russian sunflowers these stalks are heavy as the grave and I haul them out of the earth lay them down in a crisscross mound for the base of our Halloween heap in the top of the second field Dave is pulling up carts and carts and carts of dry bean litter he lays out tangles of brittle bean vines on top of my sunflower stalks Vermont cranberry beans Trail of Tears and dragon tongue beans themselves have been harvested weeks ago they glow in their wide rimmed burlap sacks

[48:16]

standing in the corner of our seed room like burnished gems dug out of the bottom most shaft of dwarfen mines or like small enchanted eggs incubating in a vast prehistoric nest on top of the dry bean litter Allison stacks armloads of corn husks from the Flint corn rainbow inca and blue hopi corn that we will grind up into meal in a few weeks and bake into moist Thanksgiving bread these husks and sheaves of mother corn are the pared off toenails and old bunion skins of a sacred crop eight thousand years old the staple grain of the new world but today corn husks are fine fodder for the furnace of decay I mutter to myself and Allison hurls another barrel load of broken corn stalks and blackened silks onto the dung heap our Halloween compost pile totters between six and seven feet high already 25 feet long and growing like a black

[49:18]

segmented dragon worm sloughing off its skin and crawling out of the molten core of the earth Kevin backs up old Yeller our farm truck to the pile and he and Sunchild hurl shovelfuls of ripe green horse shit and moldy oat straw reeking drenched with horse piss onto the pile for the last few hours now we haven't spoken at all we find our work rhythm dictated by the old music that broods at the roots of hundred year old yew trees and pours out from the bowels of the earth in this season our day at the dead compost pile is a fearsome being with curved nails that have never been cut and long unpruned crone whiskers growing out of its nostrils laughter the pile already begins to steam in the cold evening air as invisible drifts of microorganisms fall on the exposed jugular vein of the last crops of the season night hovers

[50:19]

showing its ribs at the edge of the field we're tired now and we know it we worked hard all season and I feel it suddenly even though the ghost of long limbed summer still paces the field measuring the land for next year's robe she hums from memory her slow seductive song but I'm tired now and I'm tired of her I can't be wooed I'm tired of plump kerneled corn and striped sunflowers and I'm tired of burdened baskets full of oily grain and gleaming beans I'm not hungry now at least not for crops I've been gnawed out by death and decay when our compost pile is finished it's dark for a crowning touch we take all our old Halloween pumpkins and sit them in a crooked line on the crest of the pile I can see their silhouettes on the humpback spine of a compost mound these sagged in pumpkins with collapsed grins

[51:20]

beckon to me through the grey moss mold growing out of their broken tooth holes they call me calm they hiss alive with decay you belong to us my garden friend my young garden friends are already walking up to dinner laughing way ahead of me I hear the gates swing open and clang shut behind them high in the cypress windbreak that overhangs our day of the dead compost pile a great horned owl opens and closes her wings I put down my pitchfork wipe my hands on the front of my overalls and walk through that thin veil of steam that separates the worlds into the bright clean fire of decay and again EQ commenting

[52:24]

nature's a killer I won't sing to it I hold my breath and listen to the dead singing under the grass Allison pointed out to me that the chronology is not quite right in this piece so I promise I'll fix it so that's a taste of what I've been working on and if you're not too tired and if you'll allow me to indulge myself I'll read you what I wrote today because that would be good Natalie said you should read shit read what you think is not good

[53:25]

read what's what you think is what's fresh off the press go ahead and read it and just put it out and so this is completely all these pieces are fairly you know unedited they're worked but not so edited but what's hot off the press I'm hoping I can even read because it's such a mess but I'd like to do it and it's because it begins the plant chapter of the book and it's about it's called Black Bamboo Green Wind and it's a true story embellished but true truly embellished so I'll start by chastising myself with EQ it takes horse shit to grow bamboo and it too wait I'm gonna mess this up I can't read my own writing

[54:30]

what a what a pain what is that word sorry that's bad poor Layla Bachhorst who types all this stuff but she's she can read my writing better than I can she also usually corrects discrepancies like I noticed there's another one here of Korn's 8,000 years old oh dear but they'll get it won't they these editors will get that inconsistency it takes horse shit to grow bamboo too bad so is it okay one more yeah draw your chair says Eskat Peshti I'll draw your chair close to the precipice and I'll tell you a story so this is the story and you know I'm gonna I'm gonna run a lot of stuff together you'll notice Suki

[55:30]

and Liz and Emily and others that know the Garden Well will see that there's been a melding of chronology here but you'll have to it's called Inventing the Truth and it's a sanctioned practice that you can get away with for a little while this book said Natalie is a memoir thinly disguised as a garden book I think that's unfortunately true but I'll put in more facts from the USDA and hope it flies and I won't be on the Zen shelf I think I'll be on the gardening shelf Green Gulch Garden Book it's called I wanted to call it A Field Far Beyond Form and Emptiness Tony Burbank looked like that in Michael Katz the subtitle can be At Work in the Green Gulch Garden How About Gardening at the Green Dragon's Gate and she said it's not much better than that so right now

[56:32]

they're boringly calling it the Green Gulch Garden Book and it has to be in by January 3rd the year 2000 Peter said you should hope for a computer glitch it's going to help you pray for it curse the computers Black Bamboo Green Wind In 1982 we began the present Green Gulch Garden I worked with my friend and colleague Skip Kimura a long time student of Alan Chadwick's and a fanatic gardener Skip was not a Zen student he came to Green Gulch the year after Alan died to help us design and lay out a new garden Skip's sole practice was organic gardening and I was his primary or I should say and I was his sole apprentice and accomplice Skip plotted the garden methodically and unceasingly we were very different we are very different and we fought continuously

[57:33]

usually over conflicting tones and hues of lavender and soft peach or about whether or not to interplant short-lived perennials among the regal shrubs of the grand herbaceous border curiously the garden only got stronger when Skip and I locked horns the garden benefited from strife since Green Gulch is a meditation center we designed two main ornamental gardens dedicated to contemplation repose and resounding emptiness the herbal circle a round garden within a square washed with all the colors of the plant rainbow and beyond the rainbow and the altar garden or peace garden a quiet subtle world of pale white soft cream and deep greens these two gardens took their place in the central core of the body of the garden just across the road from each other from the first I was drawn to the herbal circle garden like a hummingbird pulled down into the long red throat of Drenciana Sage

[58:34]

entranced by the tucked bustles of the French roses and by the faint lingering perfume from Palabin's Korean lilac I was held captive hostage to this fickle well rouged garden throughout her prolonged year of gestation Skip sought refuge from the herbal circle by working in the cool green shadows of the altar garden he immersed himself in the subtle world of bark texture and naked branch of well rolled lawn and rough craggy islands of stone painting the garden from a complex palette of gray green merging into smoke green contrasted with pitch dark forest green squeezed out of the dripping needle tips of fog bound Alaskan fur now and then a surprise meteor of wild chartreuse plant material would careen down steering the cool facade of the peace garden and unblinking tropical iguana would step out

[59:34]

of a fiery pool of light each of these meditation gardens had to be contained they were separate worlds not meant to mingle to anchor the herbal circle we planted a formal hedge of classic yew a perfect foil for the overdressed plants of the inner circle the yew hedge became the stern chaperone of the herbal circle gathering all of the chattering exotics into the somber fold of his clipped embrace the altar garden called for a softer border a semi-permeable membrane of undulating green we chose bamboo Skip's delight we, excuse me he had just returned from a gardener's pilgrimage to Savannah, Georgia where a USDA testing station set up in the early 1920s was being disbanded Skip brought home a rare collection of Chinese bamboo a truck load full of phyllostachys 26 distinct species including crookstem timber and golden bamboo

[60:35]

did you bring back any black bamboo? I asked Skip as he unloaded the overburdened truck I wish, he said under his breath I'm not a fan of bamboo neither is Arlene I'm not a fan of bamboo I share the prejudice of many that bamboo takes over can't be controlled and invades every corner of the civilized world but black bamboo black bamboo is different elegant and mysterious with slender polished ebony canes rising to 30 feet I first encountered black bamboo waving its spring green banners of foliage in the center of Suzuki Roshi's garden at Tassahara 20 years ago I thought it was the most beautiful and exotic plant I'd ever laid my eyes upon Suzuki Roshi had only been dead for two years when I first saw his garden no one was allowed to work in this inner sanctum but the Roshi's Anja or attendant I don't know

[61:36]

if that's still true but I checked it out with Yvonne today and she said it was really true for the first years after there was a real protection of Suzuki Roshi's garden somehow I was assigned to help Anja Georgette do temple cleaning in Suzuki Roshi's inner garden one windy autumn day we worked on our hands and knees collecting fallen sycamore leaves from the floor of the garden it was a fruitless task good for your practice but fruitless since fresh sycamore litter rained down in windy torrents all around us as we worked during one particularly blustery gust I looked up to see the black bamboo startling against the inner dome of Tassahara's lapis lazuli sky a fire of black bamboo lust and greed ignited in my heart on that day when we planted the altar garden at Gringulch twenty years later we dedicated it

[62:36]

to the three friends of Japanese folklore these three friends are plants that represent primary virtues to be cultivated sho chikubai or pine bamboo and cherry pine for strength bamboo for flexibility and cherry for beauty and for the coming apart of beauty dedication to the three friends was expressed in secret as we planted pine, bamboo and cherry seedlings in the altar garden at Gringulch flexible bamboo was chosen as the guardian of the altar garden Skip rented a ditch witch and cut a two foot deep channel around the outer border beds of the garden and in this deep channel he placed corrugated fiberglass to stop the bamboo from running outside of its borders but bamboo represents flexibility and it taught us this virtue well especially as it kept surfacing ten feet or more from the outside of its fence line season after season

[63:37]

after season even when we pursued it with sharp machete and polished spade after two years the young bamboo hedge filled in and the altar garden rooted becoming a deeper glade of green we set a wooden altar up deep into the thicket of bamboo and enshrined a weathered granite figure of Jizo Bodhisattva the patron saint of children and travelers overhead the bamboo billowed and rolled freeing the liquid song of a Swainson thrush at daybreak a long time matriarch and benefactress of Zen Center died in the first years of the altar garden Nancy was a steadfast friend of the Green Gulch Garden she willed us a beautiful carved stone figure of a Buddhist arhat that had practiced diligently for years in her elegant Long Island home arhats are not afraid of hard practice they sit in meditation

[64:38]

day and night our rock arhat was no slouch he had a fearsome scowl of determination etched into his stone features even naughty children fell to hushed silence in his presence and tiptoed past the arhats you garden perch at the base of the bamboo border not far from the altar arhats practice by themselves often a corner so we complied with our arhats secret wishes I set him on a lovely low sycamore stump shelf and left him profoundly alone under the bamboo a month or so later in early summer I came down to the altar garden just at daybreak the arhat had been upended and was lying face down on the wet lawn looking most undignified I called skip over and together we righted the poor heavy fellow marveling that his meditation stump had been split asunder

[65:38]

a blast of sudden enlightenment? no I'm sorry to report only a vigorous snout of wild bamboo rooting around under the litter and poking up under the arhats apparently this sharp-nosed shoot had surfaced just under the grumpy meditator split his stump in two and goosed the noble one royally from below sending him ass over tea kettle into the world of foolish common people we brushed him off careful not to show our teeth remember that admonition not to laugh and show your teeth around our heads sorry that's for Linda okay I couldn't resist that will certainly be out of here very soon we brushed him off careful not to show our teeth as we smiled and returned the arhat to the floor of the bamboo forest where hopefully his practice has grown somewhat more flexible that's very mean

[66:42]

and it's a hundred percent true not long after this seismic event skip found a dried up knuckle of bamboo buried in the compost buckets from page street I heard him from all the way across the garden I think it's bark bamboo he said excitedly scraping old oatmeal and coffee grounds off his treasure it must be from Suzuki Roshi's garden at Tosa Haram maybe from city center I thought to myself noticing that the plant looked particularly dry and dead but skip took his find to the glass house and planted it in loamy compost rich soil and ministered to it all winter long while more orthodox Zen students were practicing Zazen in the Zendo skip dropped away body and mind and willed a dead bamboo clump back to life by early March a small red shoot

[67:45]

with black whiskers was poking up out of skip's folly unfurling its first black flag skip moved the revived bamboo to a deeper pot and then to a deeper pot still and the plant flourished by mid summer when it was planted out when it was finally planted out in the altar garden this black bamboo was as vigorous as any well loved amply nourished teenager it pounded its chest gave a loud roar and took hold now more than ten years have passed since that planting skip moved on years ago from Green Gulch to found a thriving two acre garden for profoundly handicapped people I couldn't have done it without my training at Zen Center he said wickedly later this garden

[68:46]

passed on to a local elementary school and is still pumping out voluptuous pumpkins and rich dark kale seedlings for kindergarten to fifth graders I think of skip every time I walk past the altar garden with its fifteen foot long waving patch of black satin bamboo growing just across the road from the north gateway leading into the herbal circle don't say dead don't say a lie whispered an old Zen master centuries ago holding up a bleached white skull in the empty light so it is with gardeners who persevere and are not fooled by appearances we just continue under all circumstances not taking no for an answer and receiving strength from a handful of dust blowing across lonely pine trees beauty from scattered excuse me beauty from shattered cherry blossoms on muddy water and flexibility from black bamboo moving in the green wind that's your wife's work

[70:00]

yeah that's a full day's work and I'm tired and I did it because you guys were here and I thought I should write for my friends write something true and I've been I've been studying the bamboo I've been circling the bamboo for looking at it coming up and I and watching Skip and last night I sat in the garden with Yvonne and Bill for about an hour and we looked at the bamboo and I and this book and it came up and so yeah it took all day to write that and the first two pages I'd done the day before so it's really only the last so the black bamboo that was in the garden at Tassajara died it did? yeah into the grocer's garden? yeah you're kidding no there's no black bamboo but Ed brought some back about two years ago tried to replant it because he went and stayed that summer stuff that has little black thing is not black bamboo

[71:01]

this has a black well you can see it in the garden it's just as I described it no it's not it's wind whipped and tired on the back it looks like it's been flailed by a petulant witch on the back on the ocean side but inside the garden it's very beautiful and a stunning plant I'm not sure how you have to ask Ed how he he worked really hard that year and a half he was down there trying to bring some back and where we have to ask Ed that's interesting Yvonne said that in the first years of studying that actually when it was his garden it really was his garden and it wasn't not many people came in that you know he really took care of it and tended it in a certain way he taught us when you're cleaning the garden don't sweep litter outside of the garden pull it towards you and then you can take it out of the garden if you want but don't think that you can throw anything out of the garden sweep it all everything in the garden that you want to get rid of

[72:01]

pull towards you put it onto a waste basket and take it to the compost pile that way don't try to get it out of your mind and a lot of those memories are recorded in the wonderful Tassajara Gardener's Log for those of you who have been lucky enough to garden at Tassajara can read that log it's a terrific history where is it? it used to be in the garden shed oh yeah there's a chapter in the garden book called Keep the Links Alive tracking the traceless garden which is about keeping records and I remembered writing in the Tassajara log and reading everybody's experiences it's a wonderful journal a little bit like the 10,000 year book peppered with zen exuberance and discouragement on the same page usually from the same gardener depending a lot on the underground moles and the blue jays those qualities anyway so every every plant has a history and story

[73:02]

thank you Mr. Iku you can't make cherry blossoms by tearing off petals to plant only spring does that if you have any questions I'm happy to do what I can for five more minutes and then it's time for bed you've had your dead night time stories I'm learning a lot about gardening and about practice in the book okay pretty soon you're only going to see me walking through the dining room carrying my food out and looking like a grumpy bitch this is your chance yeah

[74:15]

how long have you been writing for well for this period of time for five I've been working on it for five years but I'm not steady in my life as a writer never it's fresh I'm a reader I've loved I'm from my dad was a a long you know I spent my entire life seeing my dad bury himself in books in music and my mother too and my mother you know that was a big part of my life growing up with great books my mother read to us for hours and hours and hours when we were children we used to scratch her arm and if we scratched her arm she'd keep reading she was a really sensuous person we scratched her arm and she just kept reading we kept her going it's like keeping me in it's stunning thank you it's very poetic prose it's fat I know, thanks fat and fertile fat and fertile yeah squeeze in an oil pokes out

[75:16]

drops of oil yeah Pat whose photograph is that? I have a picture of Bapu and Mimi and Aaron with rose oh I should pass it around with rose petals on their lips I keep it on my desk in case things get too serious and then I have a picture of Natalie Natalie two years no, I guess it was last right before my mom died she invited me to do a retreat with her in New Mexico and I went and it was a zen and writing retreat and we sat together every day and wrote in the afternoon and it was a wonderful experience and at the end we read together at a cafe and it was the first time I'd ever read in public and this is a picture of her adjusting the mic so I keep that on my desk too adjusting my mic the crowd was very tolerant they were waiting for Natalie and they had to go through me you know how it is so we had a a good time and Steve Allen was in the audience he surprised us Steve Allen and Angelique were in the audience

[76:18]

we read in a little cafe in Taos and it was raining yeah sure oh that's a great question I'm so glad you asked that my dream always was for Michael to illustrate the book Michael Sawyer because he can draw fog he knows fog so we talked about it but you know he let me know a few years back that that was a good dream but I should look on and so I've been talking to Davis Tissell who's the illustrator who did the beautiful picture of the lithograph of the oak tree down in the dining room and he's doing some drawings and we'll see they've said from the very beginning that this book shouldn't have photographs because photographs are too literal and the book isn't although they're thinking for the cover they're thinking of a close up of a lettuce seedlings in the Speedling Flat a picture that Jim Bones took and I said to Tony what you'd forfeit the long view

[77:20]

of Green Gulch for ratty lettuce seedlings in styrofoam flats you can't really see the styrofoam it's just like looking down into the funnel of the lettuce and she said yes because it would be a mistake to think that this book is about Green Gulch even though as you can hear it's completely about Green Gulch so she said it's about the principles that influence a gardener so we can think we can look forward to seeing I don't know Emily or Liz will know what lettuce that is on the front it's a very dark red beautiful lettuce with ruffled edges that would be so cool if that were the cover and the drawings I don't know we've been experimenting with what they'll be I think I really want a friend that knows the garden and knows our practice to do the drawings like Annie when Fields of Greens came out Annie there was a woman working in the kitchen who was an incredible illustrator and Michael Katz took the risk with Annie and her drawings are so beautiful take a look at them they're living vegetables and Annie knew

[78:21]

because she worked with her so this was Annie's debut as a writer and the woman's debut as an illustrator and that's nice to have that collaboration you know Davis knows how to draw oscillators at morning that's good and he does a really mean I mean a really great wood rat he's really good at that not the Norwegian rat that we're dealing with right now but a little naughty wood rat that has a lot of spirit and spunk so that's the idea not to have photographs but there will be some drawings that show how to hold the secateurs when you're pruning the roast there is more practical teaching in the book than this too I gleaned for you I cut some corners anyway well really thank you for listening any other questions or comments before we chant Liz

[79:21]

it's a it's a good pleasure to to hear you have a deep and also wild spirit as you were talking I could feel how gardening is kind of strict parameters with the farm But it is only based on the wild fringes. That's what originated the spirit, I think, and keeps us all going. But somehow, while we're focused like this, it's wonderful encouragement to hear the rest. Thank you. You know, Raymond's sitting in the back, and Raymond was a student of Alan Chadwick's for many years, long before I was. I'm really happy you're here. Thank you for coming. Didn't Alan say to leave part of the garden wild all the time? Yeah. Yeah. And we used to do... Actually, he wasn't well enough when I practiced with him, which was in 1980.

[80:21]

He died in the spring of 1980, May 25th. He came to Green Gulch with cancer of the prostate gland. But cancer wasn't in his world system, so he didn't acknowledge it any more than I acknowledge computers. So they were just not in our world system. So every time he saw me, he said, I intend to be in the garden tomorrow. He never made it to the garden in person. So we brought a lot of the garden to him. But he used to do these walks out into the wild fringe to get ideas of how to garden, to deepen appreciation. Anyway. I hope that this will be a continuation of dialogue between us. I was really, really nervous. I'm very happy that you let me do this, Linda invited me to do this, and that I had the chance to share the work with you. And pray that I'll get it finished by January 3rd, because...

[81:25]

It's an arduous task to pull this off. Norman knew, Norman knew that it would be really hard. But it's much harder than I thought. And it's also a great honor and indulgence to be trusted to do this. And I appreciate your support and attention. It really makes a difference. Should we include her in the 5 p.m. dedication? As we get closer to January. I'm really enriched by hearing it. Thank you. It's wonderful. Thank you. I feel like I should close with EQ. Thank you. Maybe I'll do it next. Just open the book. Okay.

[82:36]

Good. Thank you. The mind is exactly this tree, that grass, without thought or feeling. Both disappear. Thank you very much.

[82:48]

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