I vowed it is the truth of the Thakur's words. Good morning. It's dark enough in here so it's hard to know whether it's morning or evening. My eyes are such that I'm never sure whether the glasses help or hinder in any way.

[01:10]

Last night as I was walking to my room after we finished our last sitting together, there's a section of path where I leave the gravel and walk onto the dirt, and I very carefully stepped onto what looked like path and was in fact a great puddle sinking to my ankle in water. Made me laugh. Nothing is what it appears to be these days. And I eased into bed feeling tired and achy to a degree that I didn't feel inclined to describe. And this morning when the alarm clock rang, I could feel some flicker of the sore throat that I practiced with yesterday being there,

[02:18]

and was grateful for having made some vow last night that when the clock rang I would immediately get up. And in the way that vow helps us get up in the morning, in fact I just got up. And almost immediately some deep sense of gratitude arose. I had some sense of being able to hear the plants growing. And when I walked into the Gaitan, I could hear the electricity with the lights on low. Maybe some of you have noticed the noise of it, which has at times before seemed kind of irritating to me. And this morning I thought, well, it's just another kind of energy coming along here

[03:22]

as the world is bursting open with all this growth. Day before yesterday when we walked down through the fourth field, past that extraordinary section of mustard all yellow and gleaming in the afternoon light. And coming back through the garden, all the pruned roses are beginning to sprout out their new growth. And heaven only knows what else is growing. There is a kind of mythology about what happens in Sashin. People often say something about the third day is difficult. I don't remember about the sixth day, except that this sense of lightness and gratitude arising is both a surprise and not a surprise.

[04:33]

Before I put on my robe this morning, the light on the altar in my room caught this tree tulip, which is in a vase on the altar, dark purple on the outside and on the inside white, with a center that defies description. And at offering incense at the various altars this morning, to my amazement, each stick of incense placed in the incense bowl stood straight up. None of this usual tilting, drooping, dropping ash all over everything. Three sticks in a row just went right in straight up. It seemed like magic.

[05:46]

And then when I came into the zendo to open the zendo, and suddenly didn't know whether I should bow or not, help arises. And as we chanted the names of the Buddhas and ancestors this morning, I felt that surge of energy which connects us way back to this stream that we're part of. And the image came up for me of the bullet train that takes you from Tokyo to Kyoto very fast, and with absolutely no uncertainty about where it's going. And it seemed like we were doing that together. And after breakfast, as I went back to my room under my giant, generous umbrella, Jamie looked at me and said,

[06:54]

but there's room under that umbrella for twenty people. But lowered down, it's a little bit like the hats that monks wear when they go out begging, which covers your sight line so that you only see what's immediately in front of you as you go about your rounds with your begging bowl. And it's a small wonder that meditating and wandering monks end up making poems and pictures and laughing a lot. I appreciated Mel's refinement of this business about doing our best. And I think that we all, at least some of the time when we say to ourselves or to each other,

[07:55]

let's do our best, that what we actually mean is something closer to what he was suggesting with doing whatever we're doing wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly being present. There's a great story which some of you may have heard that Jack Kornfield tells about an experience he had when he first came back from Burma and Thailand after practicing there as a monk for some time. And for some strange reason, he found himself in Las Vegas. And he went into one of these big rooms full of slot machines and various games that people can play and looked up on the wall and saw a sign that said, Lo and behold, even in a place like this, I can find the teachings of the Buddha.

[08:58]

Because on the wall was this great sign that says, You have to be present in order to win. Something like that. So maybe that's some way of thinking about what we're doing here in this big old hay room together for a week. I don't know about the winning part, but being present. Being present. So when one of us goes around in the morning to do the morning greeting, we walk around with our hands in our shell. And sometimes as I pass, the person I pass returns the greeting, and sometimes the person doesn't. And I have this wondering, are you here? Have you gone somewhere else and left your body behind?

[10:02]

We do do that sometimes. Yesterday at lunch, I was chewing my macaroni carefully, finishing each mouthful before I would take another spoonful. And I was so absorbed with chewing carefully and mindfully that I nearly dropped my spoon. And then a little later in the meal, I saw one of the servers coming towards me with the bucket for receiving the water which tastes like ambrosia. And at the moment that he began to hesitate as he approached me, I realized I had my cleaning stick still in my bowl. Oops, I forgot.

[11:08]

It's supposed to be cleaned and put away by now. So in each moment, making some effort to be present and awake, and then something slips. My mind gets tangled with some thought, some image, some preoccupation which is not inclusive or wide enough to include all of the elements at each moment. I felt such gratitude when the tea treat bowl did not get picked up and I thought, oh, thank you for joining me in making mistakes. And then this morning, mysteriously, they had all disappeared. It was very nice.

[12:11]

I had a funny fear that arises about making mistakes, that we won't be doing it right or perfect, or someone will find out about us. And yet, my experience is that with each mistake, there is a kind of stretching or I learn something. There's a kind of chance to stretch and widen each time. Yesterday morning, I woke up and had a sore throat and some thought came up as I struggled to get out of bed.

[13:19]

Oh, I'm sick. Kind of general blanket description, which has all kinds of associations with it, like stay in bed. I can't possibly do this. Somehow I got up anyway. Maybe another one of those vows made the night before and began to be a little bit more precise about what was going on. The more particular I got, the better I felt, in some strange way. Exactly what are the sensations that I notice at this moment? Some soreness with the throat and chest and headache. Not much energy. But amazingly, as we ate breakfast, I actually could feel some energy arise. And when I said something to Gil about how I was feeling and later to now,

[14:26]

each of them made some suggestion about how to take care of myself. And in fact, as the day went along, everything changed, including feeling a little sick. So as long as I was willing to stay current with myself, I didn't need to sink into a kind of giving up. Thank you. At the end of the chapter that we studied during the practice period when Kadagiri Roshi was here, the chapter of Dogen's On Birth and Death, there's that wonderful closing paragraph in which he says, It's easy to become a Buddha.

[15:27]

All you have to do is... There's this great list. Don't do evil. Don't cling to aversion and desire, etc. And one of the admonitions on Dogen's list that keeps arising for me, especially during this session, is the one about don't worry and think. And I know some of us puzzle about, what is this business about not thinking? Exactly what does that mean? What does it mean not to worry? But I think those kinds of thoughts about, Oh, what's going to happen if I make a mistake? I'm sick. Maybe I better be careful. Maybe I can't do it.

[16:27]

I'm so helpful. And in fact, what I notice is that when I get into a stream of such thoughts, I can feel my posture sink and my energy drop. And the discomfort in my legs and back increases. And a certain kind of distracted or restless mind arises. So maybe this is some of what Dogen is pointing to, to let go of. We have these discussions with ourselves about what we can and can't do. I can't possibly sit here like this for seven days. But lo and behold, here we are on the sixth day,

[17:33]

sitting together with some lightness in the room, along with incredible stillness. And if we in fact stay present with our posture and with our breath, each moment, what from some point of view sounds kind of impossible, becomes thoroughly and completely possible. And so instead of having that feeling of body weight sinking into the lower back and hips and sits bones, there's a quality of lightness and ease that becomes more possible. And we may be tired, and yet we find some ability to be here.

[18:45]

For me, anyway, more completely and thoroughly than was my experience when we began on Saturday. I remember many years ago when I went to Tassajara to work in the kitchen. One morning, as I was standing in the kitchen looking out the window, I had a sense that being in a place like Tassajara, or being in a place like Gringottsch during practice period, or here during Sashin, what we do is make our lives very, very simple. And we draw a kind of circle around ourselves, which allows us to notice as fully and completely as possible the increasingly finer detail of what is arising and dropping away within that circle of our experience.

[19:54]

And in living in this way for a while, we keep running into our minds. And of course that can happen in ordinary circumstances of our everyday lives as well. But we get going so fast, and we have so many distractions that sometimes we don't notice the running into our minds quite the same way. Similar to what happened for me when I was in India, and I kept running into my mind, in particular when I went to the post office or to the bank. Both exquisitely simple activities here, but not at all in India. And so all of my expectations about how it should be arose,

[21:01]

and I found myself being frustrated and angry and impatient and exhausted afterwards, every time. Until finally I began to laugh at myself, because I was so completely superimposing going to the post office in Sausalito or Mill Valley onto going to the post office in Bodhgaya, which is after all, even though it be the place where the Buddha was enlightened, is just this little tiny village, which gets periodically overrun with pilgrims and doesn't change at all, whether there are 200,000 people in town or several hundred. You still have to push and shove to get up to the window,

[22:04]

and if you don't push and shove, as I found out, you can stand in the line literally for hours while people push and shove in front of you. And then when you do finally get there, you have to hang on to the bars over the window to keep your place and scream and yell to insist that the man stamps your stamp so that someone will not later peel the stamp off your letter and exchange it for something or other. Or even more frustrating, to go to the bank to get some money. And a transaction which actually need only require one person and some bureaucratic note-taking and oneself may take five or six or eight or ten people passing the bank draft and the money back and forth

[23:07]

and making notes and entering it and checking on it and asking you why you want this much money rather than some other amount, and where are you going next and what are you going to do with it, and don't you know about robbers, and it takes hours. And in fact, you probably have to come back the next day because we can't finish it today. And in each instance, I would run into my mind over and over again around expectations and how it should be and devising systems for how they can improve their service to visitors, all of it. And it's not actually so different from what I'm running into this week in this room. And I feel like I'm dealing with some kind of eel,

[24:08]

slippery eel. I walk into the Zendo and I smell refried beans every time I walk into the room and I realize it's the incense that we're using, but there's this smell which I immediately associate with a Mexican meal with refried beans. It's not thought in the usual sense, but it does have to do with that slippery eel of mine and associations of that sort. Hearing the cows bellowing up on the hillside, as I could hear them last night and again this morning, and immediately have all these thoughts about, oh, it must be March. The Stewart cattle are back. We're hearing the bang of the garbage can this morning

[25:11]

and I think, oh, it's Thursday. This is the day the garbage men come. Instantly, some sound in the ear and then there are these thoughts and images and descriptions. Immediately slipping off somewhere else. I walked up to the bowing mat this morning and went to offer incense and then came back and my body knew that it was time to bow, but then this thought arises. Oh dear, what am I supposed to do next? Fortunately, the Doan had some sense that in fact I should bow to help me reaffirm what my body already knew,

[26:15]

which was it's time to bow. But that doubt or question that comes up, oh dear, what am I supposed to do next? Not trusting that sense that arises so often, which in hindsight you realize is exactly a sense appropriately of what to do next. So after we sit here together for these days, breathing together, we have found a way of being increasingly more still

[27:24]

and when our mind grabs on to some thought or smell or sound, we can notice it and perhaps a little more easily return to the moment. I wonder if we realize how deep the connection is that comes from sitting together and breathing together, a kind of connection we don't usually think about or notice, although I think we certainly have some direct experience of this connectedness. But it certainly is the connectedness of breath to breath

[28:28]

that happens when a baby is held by its mother, or in fact when any of us as an adult holds a young child, sometimes to comfort the child, but in fact to sit together and just breathe together. Kids, when they have their best friend over to spend the night and they sleep together, breathing together, or when we sleep with our mate or loved ones, how much of our connectedness comes from the actuality of breathing together. And of course, whenever any of us sits with someone who is dying,

[29:31]

that in the end becomes clearly what we can do together, to breathe together, even with an animal. Last week, one of our cats who has been rather sick, I knew, was dying, and she liked to be held. So when I went to bed, I wrapped her up in a towel and put her over my heart because she liked that feeling of the heart beating, and she started to purr, and so we slept together. And sometime during the night, she just stopped breathing. Not so different from the experience I had a few weeks ago when I sat with a friend of ours as he died,

[30:32]

and we breathed together for a while. And then at some point, his breath became very faint, and in a little while, it just wasn't there anymore. We talk a lot about bringing our attention to our breath, but we're also bringing our attention to this breath that we're breathing together as we sit here with the time that we have to do this. And I hope that we can stay present with each breath and not slip off to thinking about when the bell will ring or when session will end.

[31:35]

And that we can, in fact, just keep doing it, even on Saturday or Sunday or Monday. So maybe it's all right for us to talk about doing our best if what we understand is that we're talking about our willingness and our intention to be wholeheartedly present for ourselves and inevitably as a consequence for each other. And when we do that, we can be awake to all these surprises that arise before us,

[32:43]

moment after moment. All right. The Hopi Indians and the Tibetans, among others, always talk about the rain as auspicious. So here we are sitting here under this big roof being rained on with this wonderful, slow, steady, dripping rain.

[33:52]

Does anybody have something you want to bring up for us to talk about? No, they are cows that graze up on the hillsides for six months, beginning now. And they are very, very active. And they are young heifers that have been bred, so they are brought down before they have their... No, I guess actually they have their calves up there. Anyway, they're fairly young. So they get caught down below, and all the water is up high. And being cows, they don't know how to get back up there sometimes, so they start doing this bellowing. It's a sound that I so thoroughly associate with this time of year.

[35:06]

Because, of course, after the months since they were taken away, we have nothing like that. And then suddenly there it is again. Yes? I was thinking this morning. One of the thoughts I grabbed onto was that I couldn't be doing this without everybody here. And now I remember last night listening to the frogs and how they do what they do together. And they're croaking along, and suddenly there it is again. They all stop. I noticed that last session, that a lot of us burst into laughter because they did it so repeatedly. It gave me a nice feeling of connectedness with other people here

[36:16]

and what appears to be outside world. This is pretty short. Yesterday morning, after breakfast, I went out by the front lawn and there were nine robins sitting out there on the lawn. And for some reason, at that time in the morning, they were absolutely still. And it looked like they were carefully placed on the lawn getting ready to do Kim Hyun. And I thought, there are our teachers. They have these, for robins, very straight backs. They're a little sloped, but that's what's straight for a robin. And they were so alert. Maybe they were getting ready for the worms to move or something. But there is that sense of the world around us here right now,

[37:19]

which is very vivid. Okay. Okay.

[38:52]

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