Residents' Meeting

Generally, City Center residents meet one Saturday morning a month to spend time together, hear information, share news and generally act like a community. I haven't attended a whole meeting in a while; both as tenzo and ino, I have been in the position of making a short report about what was happening in my area - as tenzo this often involved talking about the food in season, as well as reminders about various details of kitchen practice for everybody, as ino it tends to be about signing up for the next one-day sitting - and then heading off to work. Yesterday, apart from encouraging everyone to sign up for the next one-day sitting (next Saturday, please sign up before Wednesday, as that gives me a chance to get on top of the logistics before Friday night), I offered some words from 'Not Always So', introducing them by saying that since I seem to spend a lot of time correcting people's form, and that can sometimes be a drag for both parties, here was something that showed it wasn't personal:
"This morning when we were bowing in the zendo,  we heard a big noise overhead, because upstairs in the dining room people were pushing chairs across the floor without picking them up. This is not the way to treat chairs, not only because it may disturb the people who are bowing in the zendo underneath, but also because fundamentally this is not a respectful way to treat things.
To push the chairs across the floor is very convenient, but it will give us a lazy feeling. Of course this laziness is part of our culture, and it eventually causes us to fight with each other. Instead of respecting things, we want to use them for ourselves, and if it is difficult to use them, we want to conquer them. This kind of idea does not accord with the spirit of practice...
When we pick up the chairs one by one carefully, without making much noise, then we will have the feeling of practice in the dining room. We will not make much noise of course, but also the feeling is quite different. When we practice this way we ourselves are Buddha, and we respect ourselves. To care for the chairs means our practice goes beyond the zendo".
Of course it is pretty cool to be reading this in the dining room that Suzuki Roshi is talking about, on my way to the zendo. I said I would be listening out for the end of the residents' meeting from downstairs, and when it came, the noise overhead reminded of me of nothing so much as being in the Tassajara zendo and hearing the rain falling gently on the corrugated roof...
This is quite a well-known anecdote at Zen Center, and it is always interesting to be in the dining room and to see who does practise picking up the chairs every time, whether because they have heard it mentioned and remembered it, or whether they naturally think of not making a noise. Actually, when I spoke about this passage with Blanche recently, she said that she, to her shame, had been one of the people making the noise with the chairs; naturally, since that time, she has always lifted her chair quietly...