I vow to face the truth and vow to talk it as words. Good evening. I'll say just a couple things about myself, just as a way of introduction. My name is Mark Lester. I took a one-year leave of absence from Rutgers in 1973 and then spent the next ten years at Zen Center. I was at Tassajara. I lived at Tassajara for ten practice periods and six summers and I was here in between. I lived here from 1978 to 1980 and I was working as part of the draft horse farming project here

[01:00]

and managed to survive, to tell about it, barely. In 1983, I was director of Tassajara and decided to go. It just seemed obvious at that point to leave and go to business school on Wall Street, which is what I did. I have two children who are 20 and 15. My son Jason was born when I was at Tassajara and I started a business called Brush Dance 15 years ago that makes cards and calendars and journals with spiritual themes. I was recently Shuso in the city last fall practice period and I've been co-leading company time retreats for business people

[02:07]

out here with Norman Fisher for the last five, seven years. It's been a while. And I'm planning to be ordained as a priest with Norman at the city center this September. So that's kind of a brief sketch about me. I've been studying these past several months with Norman, studying the koans and the mumonkan. I feel like it's taken me many, many... I feel like for the first time the koans have come alive in some way for me and I wanted to talk about case 38, which says... Wutsu said, It is like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window. Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through.

[03:08]

Why can't its tail pass through as well? I really love this story and when I was thinking about this story the first image that came up for me was thinking about being with my... the birth of my children and being there as my children each pass through the opening of their mother. First the head and then the arms and body and feet and there they were, but still there's some part of them that still felt connected to something else, something before they were born. In a way that something that was before they were born felt even more tangible and more connected to that in a way than this creature that just appeared. And I also think of the time I spent with my mother as she was dying

[04:17]

and breathing with her and that she was so present. I was really trying to be present with her with each breath. And then there was that last breath as I was sitting with her and kind of chanting with her, breathing with her, holding her hand and there was that last exhale and no more inhale and just being with her as she passed through and yet there she was, still there. So this sense of this koan, this tale. In Wumen's commentary he says, If you can get upside down with this one, discern it clearly and give a turning word to it, then you can meet the four obligations above and give comfort to the three existences below. But if it is not yet clear, pay close attention to the tale

[05:20]

and you will resolve it at last. I also, actually, when I was trying to think about what to talk about tonight I was also thinking about, partly it came up for me to talk about this case when I was thinking about Green Gulch and my relationship to Green Gulch. And in some way I kind of feel like I never left here, that there's still some part of me that remains. I was just walking down in the field sort of looking for that part. I was kind of combing through what used to be the old horse bins looking for some horse equipment. Of course there is, there's little pieces of plows and things all around. And in some way there's some part of me that still feels like, you may not know this, but there's a part of me that still feels like a resident here. And sometimes when I come into Green Gulch I just drive and park

[06:25]

in the resident's parking lot and I call it ex-resident's privilege. One of the stories I was thinking about, which I think relates to this feeling of this con and the turning upside down, is that a cousin of mine, my cousin Gary, who lives in Florida, he's a pretty kind of straight business guy. We were talking about Green Gulch and Green Gulch, and my experience at Sense Center, and he told me that he had blood pressure problems and was really concerned about his life and death issues and asked if I thought it would be a good thing for him to come to Green Gulch and learn to meditate and spend some time here. And I said, yeah, I thought it would be a wonderful thing. And it was this huge thing for him to rearrange his life to fly out from Florida and come spend a weekend at Green Gulch. This was several years ago, I think four or five years ago,

[07:29]

at the time when Norman was here and was Abbott. And I mentioned to Norman that my cousin Gary was going to come and asked Norman if he saw him to please make him feel welcome. So Gary told me after, he wrote me this long letter about his experience at Green Gulch. And one of the first things he said is that when he arrived here, he pulled up in the parking lot and there was Norman. And Norman came over and was very friendly and they talked for a few minutes. And Norman said, if you think that being here for a weekend is going to change your life, you're wasting your time. And Gary thought that was kind of a strange welcoming committee. And again, I think it's that, to me it's that sense of that tale. What does it mean to pass all the way through? What do we need to do to pass through? And then I think it was also that same weekend Norman lectured.

[08:33]

And Norman started his lecture that Sunday morning by saying, I've been practicing zazen now every day for the past 25 years and I'm not sure that it's made any difference. And again, my cousin Gary is sitting there. His letter was very funny. In thinking about this koan, what it's saying to me is that to practice means to be fully alive, beyond ideas and labels of success and failure, beyond our own fear, greed, grasping, even beyond ideas of coming and going, arriving. And every moment, there's also no avoiding success and failure and coming and going.

[09:38]

In Wu Man's comment he says, if you can get upside down with this one, that is really turning your world upside down and seeing things from a different perspective, a perspective beyond failure and success, beyond right and wrong. He says, only when we get upside down and see clearly, can we give a turning word. Only by turning our world upside down, can speech come from a place that's clear enough, unfettered enough to actually help others. And yet, no matter where we are in our practice, we have to do something, we have to say something. We're constantly missing the mark, constantly causing pain, constantly causing confusion, despite our best intentions. If it only weren't for that darn tail. Sometimes we cherish that tail,

[10:40]

sometimes we think if that buffalo could only go all the way through, if we could only get to that end point of practice where there was no more confusion, we had arrived. Sometimes we have such a foolish idea. This koan also made me think of a repeating dream that I have. It's a dream that I had a lot as a child and still every once in a while I have this dream where I'm standing on the moon and suddenly I leap off the moon backwards and I'm spinning in the air with my head going over my feet and I'm just both terrified and elated at the same time, but more, well, I'm not sure which, a little bit of both. And then suddenly I land on my back and I wake up and I'm not quite sure

[11:41]

whether I'm dreaming or whether I'm awake, whether I'm alive or whether I'm dead. And I'm lying there, I start to wake up and I'm lying there in a sweat, I'm actually sweating from all that work of having flown through the air, head over heels. And again, I think it's that feeling that Utsu is talking about of being upside down. He says, if you get upside down with this one, discern it clearly and give a turning word, then you can meet the four obligations. Again, in this koan he's spelling out the path. Get upside down, see clearly, say something or act in some way that is authentic. Meet our obligations by giving comfort. If you can get upside down with this one, discern it clearly and give a turning word, you can meet the four obligations,

[12:41]

which these are our parents, the place that we live, all beings, and the three treasures, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. I think in terms of this koan, these obligations are the window in this koan that we have to pass through. And that we can really only pass through and meet these obligations when we turn our lives upside down. In some way it's really difficult. It's amazing to me to see at my age how difficult it is to really meet our parents. And I continue to be amazed how much my parents are in me. And really fully embracing how much my own way of seeing things is both fettered and clarified

[13:44]

by what I inherited from my parents and my parents' parents. And that those seeds of my parents, how powerful that conditioning is, and how, again, the only way I feel like I can see that clearly and begin to work with that is in a way to turn upside down. And I was thinking about that sometimes I think it's... For many of us, and for me, we're first drawn to practice when we find, for some reason, that our worlds have been turned upside down. We get a glimpse of how much we're not really ourselves. And we get a glimpse of the possibility of actually being ourselves and finding a kind of real freedom, finding our true spirit, that we're not even aware how much we're not ourselves

[14:47]

until something happens that turns us upside down. And to me, this turning upside down helps me to see things with a fresh, open heart. It means seeing everything as a gift and staying in touch with a part of us that is somehow still connected to this mystery, this mystery that I was talking about when children are born, when we're with birth, this mystery of the connection of before birth and trusting somehow that the only way to really turn upside down, the only way to see things as fresh is to have our worlds turned upside down, which often can be unexpected, unpredictable and quite painful. Usually, we spend so much of our energy

[15:48]

wanting things to be straight. We want things to be clear and straight and avoid just how difficult and upside down our own worlds can be that it's so easy to avoid pain and difficulty. I was thinking of, again, in preparing for this talk, I was thinking of Harry Roberts, who, again, it's funny, I don't... I sometimes assume that, well, everyone in this room... How many people in this room know who Harry Roberts was? OK. So, most, but not everyone. Harry was a Yurok Indian trained shaman who was mostly Irish, but taught here for many years. He designed the gardens at UC Berkeley and he was quite a brilliant, difficult and crotchety man.

[16:52]

But one of the things that he taught me, he taught me how to weld when I lived here. Well, it's funny, I should just mention that things worked a little bit differently back when, during the time that I lived at Zen Centre, there was much less choice about what you did and where you went. And I was... I had just been living at Tassajara for a year and a half when one day I was tapped on the shoulder and was told I was going to Green Gulch to go work with the draft horses. And I thought for sure someone had made a mistake, that they must have misread my resume, that I was a pretty good gymnast, I did a lot of work with the horses, and they must have somehow saw that and thought that therefore I would be good with the draft horses.

[17:57]

And I had never been by a horse in my entire life. And I was suddenly in charge of this draft horse farming program here at Green Gulch, and my training was basically, I was introduced to these two horses, Snip and Jerry, and was told that my task was to learn how to farm. Maybe I... I wanted to tell at least one Green Gulch story, or tell lots of Green Gulch stories, but the story that comes up as most prominent, in a way, in my days is what I think of as my... And it's also very appropriate for this koan, I realize. Maybe a little bit of a stretch, but not too much. This was what I think of my most dramatic day at Green Gulch, was a day... Well, not only was I taking care of horses,

[18:59]

but we also had cows. Every day I was milking Daisy the cow. And we were also... Not only were we... We were also breeding horses and cows. It was pretty incredible what we took on. But Daisy had just given birth to a calf. And I knew... Daisy was this very sweet Jersey cow, and typically there's often... There's real danger during this 24-hour period after cows give birth, particularly Jerseys. I had read about it. And in fact, within a few hours of her giving birth, she suddenly went down on her stomach, which I had read meant that she was going to die within 24 hours unless we got a vet out here, and that it was essential that we keep her propped up,

[20:04]

that we not let her... Cows will die if they lie down. You don't see cows lying on their side. So this was probably like 1979, and this was right in the first shed, right before the first field. That was a milking shed. The garden shed. The garden shed, yes. And as soon as Daisy went down, we called the vet who said, you have to prop her up. And I was sitting in that shed with my back against the wall and my feet toward Daisy, sort of keeping her propped up, and of course right next to her tail. So that's how it's related to the book. LAUGHTER I told you it was a stretch. And a few hours later, the vet came and gave her this shot, and she just kind of propped right up and popped on her feet, and she was fine. And I wasn't so fine.

[21:04]

I was exhausted, and I kind of dusted myself off. And I was walking back to the guide town, and someone came running up to me, and said, there's a horse stuck in the pond. LAUGHTER They didn't say this, but the story would be perfect if they said, and you can only see her tail. And I said, what do you mean there's a horse stuck in the pond? Horses don't get stuck in the pond. So I ran back to the back pond, and Snip had been grazing in there, and apparently went to get a drink, and walked in too far, and kept getting kind of sucked more and more into the pond. And she was up, right up to her chest. Were any of you here for that? I remember that.

[22:06]

LAUGHTER We tried various methods of getting her out, all of which failed, until we called the fire department, who somehow got 20 or 30 people from Muir Beach, and everyone, all of the 40 or 50 residents here, we wrapped fire hoses around Snip, and everyone pulled together on these fire hoses, and pulled her out. Of course, tail first. So that was my most exciting, dramatic day at Green Gulch. I was starting to tell this story about Harry Roberts, who taught me how to weld. One of the things about coming to Green Gulch from Tassajara

[23:09]

is that I had never done anything with my hands. I had never done anything physical. And I realized that, again, looking back at my parents, my father was an electrician and a builder, and could fix anything, and was constantly tinkering with things. And I think he consciously... He didn't think that was a kind of worthy livelihood, and he wanted me to be a professional, so I think he showed me how to do absolutely nothing. So that's what I knew in terms of physical things, was absolutely nothing. And I came here, and being in charge of the horses, part of that was learning how to handle horses, learning to fix horse equipment, learning to sew harness, and part of that was learning to weld. And Harry was my welding teacher, and one of the things he said about welding was that...

[24:12]

He said that the secret of welding is to realize that the world is... that everything is actually liquid, and it just appears frozen, and that by applying heat to things, you return metal to its natural state, which is liquid, and then you can shape it and do whatever you want with it. And then, in his own way, he would let out this huge laugh, and he said, our lives are a lot like this also, that actually our lives are liquid, and that we just see them as frozen, we just have this feeling of a self, and this feeling of this being kind of stuck in this time and place, and we think that that time is linear, and Harry would say that when you see that the world is liquid, in some way we haven't as yet been born, and we've already died, and that that's the secret that we learn about our lives from welding.

[25:15]

Now, after... Again, I feel like in some way one of the main things about this koan is this turning upside down, getting upside down as a way of seeing clearly. And for me, after being at Zen Center for ten years, I chose to enter the business world, and in some way this was... Again, looking back, I'm not even quite sure how consciously or unconsciously I was making these decisions in my life, but in some way I think I chose to enter the business world as a way to be turned upside down. In some way it was the most difficult, most contrary thing I could ever imagine doing. It was contrary to every idea I had about myself, about what I thought I'd be good at, about what I thought I wanted to do. At the same time, it also seemed really natural,

[26:28]

because when I woke up one day, having been director of Tassahara, and realized that my activity was... I was engaged in business. Though I was a Zen monastic, a lot of my activity was involved in what would normally be sort of business activity. I was managing people, I was responsible for a budget, I was planning, and I just loved it. I felt so engaged in this process of both practicing, being in this monastic practice, and an activity that gave me a lot of energy. So there was also... It both seemed like the most incredibly foreign thing to do, and also had some real appeal. And of course I've had many what I think of as I should have stayed at Zen center days, or I should have gone to medical school days,

[27:31]

because in many ways it's been really both... I feel like each day in business, my world feels turned upside down, and I feel turned upside down. There's a famous quote by Dogen, where he says, when the Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When the Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. Again, this quote... I feel like this is a quote that comes up for me, this koan, this sense about something's missing. Why doesn't the buffalo go all the way through? Why is there that tail? What is it that's missing? There's no limit to our understanding, and at the same time, I feel like there's no limit to our confusion.

[28:33]

If we think we've gotten to a place where we have complete understanding, this is Dogen's... The Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind. What's missing? The whole buffalo passes through the window, head, horns, and four legs. Why can't the tail pass through? Our job in practice, I think, is to remain open. Usually, when we hear something, we're comparing it to our own ideas. We hear something, and it either agrees with our worldview, and we accept it, or it doesn't agree, and we reject it. The buffalo passing through the window, except for the tail, to me means to be open, to be open to what we don't expect. We expect it would make sense that the buffalo would pass through the window, that it would go through completely. How could it? How could it go through completely, except for the tail?

[29:35]

What's there to learn here? What's there to learn about our lives? One of the questions that I've been turning is this question, and I don't know where this question comes from, but it's this question that says, What is the impossible request that this life asks of me? I believe that we all have some unique gift, some unique mission, that it's no accident that we're here, that we're alive, that we're in this place at this time, amazingly, in the form of a human being. At the recent Mountain Seat Ceremony, I asked Paul Haller this question during the ceremony, and I thought his answer really touched me. Paul's answer to this question was

[30:36]

to keep an open heart, to be open to our own and others' pain and suffering, and also to be open to joy. How could it be that this tail doesn't pass through? Why is it so difficult to really love ourselves and to accept ourselves and to accept ourselves and others as Buddha? Why is it that we're so easily fooled by our own stories? Why are we fooled by this story about the tail not passing through? Being open also means being open to the truth of our own pain and difficulty. So often, we want to hide from our pain, from our shame, embarrassment and suffering. Yet, the more we look away, the more we become entangled in our own stories. And those stories, pain, failure and disappointment,

[31:40]

tend to turn us upside down. And that turning upside down changes the way we look at the world and can open us, help us see things, be fresh. Yet, it's hard to turn towards that pain, towards that tail not passing all the way through. I was thinking about a... I was telling Fu last week, the story on the path after last week's lecture, about a conversation I had with my son. That'd be great. Thank you. My son, Jason, who's 20 years old, we were standing in the kitchen and one day he said, he said, look at you, dad. You're old.

[32:43]

You're short. You're balding. You're starting to limp. Your teeth are crooked. You're not very smart and you're not wealthy. And I felt so proud of him. Thank you. He also said, just to complete his thought process, he said he didn't want to be anything like me. And I... No, because he looked at me and he said, you know, you have a job and you have a house and you have children. You have, like, all this responsibility. It's like, why would anyone want to do that? And I could only stand there and kind of nod, you know.

[33:48]

I don't know what the... But I felt so... I felt so loving and connected and so glad that... And we've had... In fact, he and I had a wonderful... He's working in my warehouse this summer. And I sat down for lunch with him in a Chinese restaurant and he looked up at me and he said, do you think of yourself as confident, as having confidence? And I thought that was a great question. I also think it's a lot like this koan. And my question to him that I asked... I answered his question with a question. I said, what do you mean by confidence? What is confidence? And he said, well, you know, you know... He said, I don't really... He said, you know, you're giving this lecture tomorrow night at Green Gold.

[34:53]

She said, you know... He says, I usually think of confident people as giving... He's like, I'm confused. Is it because you're my dad that I don't see you as confident? It's like, you're going to teach all these people something, but what have you ever taught me? It's brutal, I know. Again, it's that, you know... It's that darn tale. I said, you know, I feel like... I've really tried my best with you, you know, to teach you that I hope that I've taught you through what I do and who I am and that I don't really believe so much in... I mean, do you want us to set up lecture time? I somehow never thought that would be all that useful,

[35:57]

but is there something that you want from me? And he said he would think about it. Yeah, so I... In some way, when he asked me that question, when my son asked me this question about why did I do these things that I do, I thought, well, what's the alternative? I mean, we all... There's no avoiding responsibility. You can avoid the responsibility. You can... You cannot have children or you cannot have a house, and that's fine, you know, but you cannot avoid being responsible. And in a way this koan is talking about, our responsibility as practitioners

[37:00]

is the responsibility of seeing clearly and the responsibility of helping give comfort to other people. And there's so many ways that we can choose to... That could take many, many forms, and there's no... This idea, I think, that he has as a 20-year-old, that he can somehow... It's a wonderful idea, that you can somehow avoid all responsibility, right? Be the eternal child. And it's wonderful, because I also... And when he asked me that, I realized I... I said, I don't feel responsible for you. It's like you think that, you know, I've never... I don't feel like I've ever sacrificed... I don't do... I'm not working to make money to support him, because I don't think... He thinks that I think that way. He thinks that I'm working some job because I feel responsible. I said, I've always just done what I want, and I like what I do.

[38:00]

I like my life, and I'm... At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up. But I said, you know, you should not count on me to be responsible for you, because I don't... Because I don't... If you, you know... It's time for you to be responsible for you. But I felt, as he was... I loved his questions, and I loved the spirit, and I felt like, in a way, his questions were a lot like my questions, which is, what is responsibility? What is freedom? How is it that our own ideas get in the way? And what does it mean to act freely, to act effectively, and to act beyond these ideas of success and failure? In some way, this koan is about failure. It's about failure in terms of something turning us upside down,

[39:02]

something not meeting our expectations. The buffalo doesn't go all the way through the window. I was thinking of a... I'm part of a group called Social Venture Network, which is a group of business leaders from around the country. And this is a group of mostly very, very successful business people. So, of course, I didn't feel like I fit into this group. And there was a meeting. This was a couple of years ago. This was in a room of about 300 people who are running companies, but are trying to combine running companies with social responsibility. And this was a meeting that was being hosted by Ram Dass, who was really speaking from his heart and really got people to a very, very open place. And people in this room, each person started talking.

[40:05]

He would go around and give the person a microphone. And the first person started saying how much they felt that they didn't belong in this group, that they felt like an outsider. And the microphone went around, and every person started expressing how much they felt that they didn't fit, that everyone had this image that everybody else was a successful business person and that they all didn't fit. And in a way, it was this wonderful, almost this kind of group crying and acknowledgment of that all of us felt like misfits and all of us felt like failures. And it provided this wonderful opening to really get down and to turn upside down. It set the whole tone for the weekend so that there was real human meeting. And the conversation and the dialogue

[41:06]

was not about business stuff. It was about human beings and about real meeting and real suffering. Thank you. I thought that since... In fact, I intended to... I was going to come here for dinner tonight, but I was involved in this project at work of trying to find quotes about spiritual humor. And I kind of got into it, so I ended up staying a little bit too long to make it here for dinner. But I was thinking of how much I think... I think that laughter and comedy is such an important part of spiritual practice that often we miss, or that I think we could all use more of. I think there could be more of it here at Zen Center

[42:07]

and everywhere for spiritual practitioners. I was thinking of... One of the things I was thinking of as I was sitting and writing, I was thinking about Shikantaza, just sitting, and I was thinking about somehow some connection between just sitting and stand-up comedy. And I thought, well, maybe there should be a school of Zen called sit-down comedy. You know, something about... Something that combines humor and wisdom. And a lot of the kind of quotes that Brush Dance does, tries, and we try to do that, but it's so hard for any of us to really be funny. I don't know quite what it is. But one of my favorite quotes that we've published on a card is a quote from Teresa of Avila,

[43:09]

who is an, I think, 11th century Christian mystic. And she said, I know the universe won't give me more than I can handle. I only wish it didn't trust me so much. I think I'm going to end with a poem by Hafiz. Have you guys been studying Hafiz at all out here? You probably mostly know, right, Hafiz? I think... Teresa of Avila is 11th century. I think Hafiz is 12th? 13th? 13th century, right. I think, I think... 100 years before... 14th century. A long time ago. And I thought this, as I was looking through Hafiz's poetry, I thought this one was, went really well with this koan. And it's called

[44:11]

Someone Should Start Laughing. I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question, how are you? I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question, what is God? If you think that the truth can be known from words, if you think that the sun and the ocean can pass through this opening called the mouth, oh, someone should start laughing. Someone should start wildly laughing now. It's really just a phenomenal pleasure for me to... It's such a gift for me to be here with all of you. Fu has been inviting me to come and spend more time here, checking out the schedule in the Gaitan, and I'd love to start coming and sitting with you all in the mornings when I can.

[45:15]

There's a few minutes. I know that it's kind of close to bedtime here, but it's getting dark. But if there's anything that anyone wants to say or ask or do, there's a couple minutes. I'm curious to how the horse barring went. How was your learning curve? It was really steep learning curve. Well, I was admiring the rows of potatoes out there, and one of the most fun and exhilarating things we did with the horses was harvest potatoes with horses, with two horses, and the machine was like a blade. It was a real simple machine. It was holding two handles at about chest high,

[46:16]

which went down to a big rounded blade, and then there was a wheel that turned behind the blade. So you go up and you line the horses so they're straddling the row, and the idea was to walk slowly and straight so that the blade, when you are doing it, for the moments when that's happening, the blade is going... We learned a tremendous amount. We had a man named Harold Hart, who was this... He was driving teams of horses since he was seven years old in Kansas, and he ran the stables up by... What's the name of that town? Just south of Point Reyes. Oh, Lima. Oh, Lima. Right. There's a ranch in Lima that...

[47:18]

Harold Hart was our mentor, and when we couldn't get a horse to load on one of the trucks, Harold would come down, and he used the two-by-four method of telling the boys. It was not the Zen center. He would say, You guys are too gentle with these creatures, and he'd... A lot of things were wonderful about it, but it was hard to be a horse farmer and be practicing here, because the schedule... We were usually up as early or earlier than the Han, and down getting the horses and preparing the horses for the day, so it was really hard to follow the schedule. So there was some real questioning about being farmers, actually being farmers, and following the schedule. And there was also this real... I think though the learning curve was very, very steep, there was this realization

[48:18]

that this was a three-generation commitment, that to farm, that I felt like I needed to spend the rest of my life being committed to doing this horse farming, and that Zen center needed to be committed to that for over generations, and that it just wasn't... When we really faced that, we faced the truth of that, and my commitment wasn't there. It was like, I wanted to go back to Tassajara. And I loved it, and I felt totally devoted to it, but I think a combination of seeing the level of that commitment, and there was... It caused some real conflict within the community, and I got tapped on the shoulder one day and went down to Tassajara and spent the next several years working in the Tassajara kitchens,

[49:19]

and the horses soon were sold after that. I heard that the story that the Dalai Lamas visited had something to do with that. Is there any truth to that? I never heard that story. There were lots of sub-stories. One of them was that... This was during the Richard Baker days, the Baker-Rushy days, and in part, there was also a little bit of this feeling that Green Gulch was supposed to be a model, and that in a way, the horses and what we were doing, part of it was to raise funds, and part of it was... So there were multiple agendas going on. I thought it was a very sincere and wonderful attempt, but again, it just was... I think the infrastructure and commitments just weren't there to really pull it off. Again, there were horses, and we were breeding horses.

[50:20]

There were cows, and we were breeding cows, and there were chickens. At one point, someone calculated we were growing the most expensive eggs in the world. If you were to actually cost... If you were to include labor costs of a dollar an egg... Those potatoes were probably a dollar a potato. It was just so inefficient, and we were so over our heads in so many ways. Yes? Mark, were you here when... Did you also work with Steve Stuckey? He also talked about the horses and how it might take until noon to actually get them harnessed up, because you never knew where they were at on a regular day. Steve Stuckey, yes, was my close mentor. Was Nick your mentor? Nick handed the baton to me and left.

[51:20]

Yes. Yeah. Me and Peter Rudnick were partners in crime. We were both... That was our job for a three-year period. I always... Nick often reminds me that I forget that we're in the same bread lineage. Mark taught me how to bake at Tassajara. He gave me the book and said, I love bread. It was a magic book. It was very crusty. And what's great is that Nick now...

[52:24]

Nick is a much, much better, more sophisticated baker than I ever was or will be, so it's wonderful the way traditions are passed on. Thank you all very much. Our extension need Our extension equally penetrates penetrates

[52:46]

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