Interim

There is a sweet kind of irony in the fact of my last week as ino being interim; usually I welcome these weeks as a chance to recharge my batteries in the midst of the ongoing schedule. This time I have some free time ahead, and one or two people have suggested I should be wanting to cherish being in the ino seat for these last few days. Nevertheless I am enjoying some additional sleep, and will be devoting the extra time to making sure I have a lot of loose ends sorted out for Valorie not to have to deal with.
I do also find it helpful to step away from zazen occasionally, just to notice what happens if I don't sit for a couple of weeks; it is subtle, but I do feel a difference in how I respond to things, how my brain feels; it is nice to come back to the cushion with renewed purpose, as I did after my time in England a few months ago.
Also, when the weather is co-operating, as it was this morning, I have a chance to take pictures in the morning sun before breakfast, which is revitalising in and of itself:

Looking towards the Itasonten altar

One of the dining room statues

In the dining room

In the dining room

Okay, this was posed, but I have been meaning to do a shot like this for a while

A corner of the courtyard

Body And Mind Of Themselves

In a life as closely scheduled as ours, any deviation from the normal routine shakes us up in its own way. Having a holiday on Wednesday made it feel like we had three consecutive weekends, and the days of interim afterwards were a chance to breathe and unwind a little, to catch up on sleep as well. It is also always nice to come back to the routine, to align with the usual patterns, and at five o'clock this morning I was happy to cross my legs on my cushion and sit upright. I could immediately feel the unfolding of some residual tensions, and then I spent a lot of the two periods present again with the emotions from the difficult situations that had caused the tensions. I had been trying to tune them out over the weekend, but they were still lingering in my body, and while they were not resolved or dissipated by sitting, I did get to feel a little more spacious around them.
Even with the extra rest, there were noticably a number of people who did not make it to the morning schedule, and I wonder what is going on for them. Everyone has their own internal dramas and their own way of dealing with them. I am glad that zazen is one of the tools we have at our disposal.

Interim

I can only apologise for the lack of interesting words in the past few days; it feels like we are in a bit of a lull before the three-week summer retreat begins, made more concrete by Christina deciding we should have a mini-interim in the days after the July 4th holiday as a way of looking after ourselves. This does mean some more spacious and less focused time for me, and that does not bode well for the possibilities of entertaining writing.
I can report that we performed our monthly services of gratitude to Suzuki Roshi on Tuesday evening and yesterday morning, with a small knot of attendees; in both cases, the chanting of the priests in the kaisando was driving the chanting on the stairs, so I did not need to follow what was going on outside.
Yesterday was grand weather for a holiday, and I made the most of an extra day off by going on a bike ride (I know this is basically stating the obvious). I did not get to witness much of the fireworks at the end of the day, as I went to pick up a friend from the airport about the time they were starting, but I was catching glimpses of various colourful bursts around the city skyline on the way. As I reached the high point south of the city on 280, where you can look across and see the airport and the bay, I thought I saw another big array, but when I looked again, it was a large orange moon right over the illuminated buildings. Very auspicious. We did, unfortunately get tangled in the traffic jams of people leaving the waterside afterwards, which, since it was well past my usual bedtime, did strain my patience practice considerably.
Perhaps a few more recent photographs might mitigate the paucity of words.

The sun was up by the time I got to the roof yesterday

A corner of the courtyard, around the same time

The same corner from a different angle a few days ago

Rocks and Fault Lines

It has been a fine interim week, not least because I have taken some time off, and slept an almost unprecedented amount. Today is going to be quite full as I will be setting up Buddha's Birthday which we do tomorrow - a rare conjunction with a Full Moon Ceremony as well - and taking care of some administrative stuff which I am happy to have the head space to do right now.
I haven't even mentioned the comings and goings of the week: a number of the practice period residents left after sesshin, and people have been coming up from Tassajara after their practice period finished; as so often happens, there is a feeling of flux and energy around the building.
It is always invidious to ask someone who has just been through three months of intensive monastic training, "So, how was it?" The question is hard enough to answer for a seven-day sesshin, such are the ebbs and flows of experience. This morning at breakfast with Nada, Heather and Marcia, it felt much nicer talking about specifics; somehow we got onto earthquakes and the fault lines that run close to Tassajara, and from there, a short hop to the subject of rocks, which got me reminiscing, and also thinking ahead, as I am due to go down there in a couple of weeks to work on a rock project as part of the work period, along with a small group from Young Urban Zen (they may or may not get roped into the rock part, mostly they are going to experience the place). It actually took me a while to remember some of the rock work I had done down there, then I thought of this rock, which looks pretty innocuous in photos. In fact, after I had noticed a corner of it in the creek below the courtyard cabins and decided it was worth bringing out, it took a team of seven or eight people to haul it up on the rock stretcher. I don't know if they all thought it was worth the effort, but I certainly did, partly because it is like a miniature version of the rock at Suzuki Roshi's memorial site. At the breakfast table we marveled at how much effort it must have taken to get that one up the hill.

The 'small' version

The memorial site rock

In-between Days

As I have observed before - and if I am going to continue into a third year of being ino, I am either going to have to be more inventive in what I write about, or trust that people either haven't read or don't remember the older posts - interim is always a spacious time, as I have three extra hours during the day. Admittedly, the last couple of days, I have spent the first of these hours asleep, but I also get to drink coffee and read the papers before breakfast, and yesterday I realised that I did not have to rush to get to Rainbow and back in time for afternoon zazen, but could bike at leisure, and then bathe until the umpan rang for dinner.
There is also the slightly somnolent feel of the building in this week between Christmas and New Year - even with our visitors from Tassajara here - though I have to be careful not to be too lulled by this, as there are many details to take care of for the events tomorrow evening and on the morning of the first, especially since it takes place over the weekend, and we are doing some things differently to the usual. Hopefully I can stay awake past midnight tomorrow - that kind of a thing is quite a stretch for me these days.

Yesterday morning's beautiful skies before breakfast

Less colourful today, but equally misty

Extra Hours

I always have the feeling during interim that there are more hours in the day, as I am not obliged to spend three of them following the schedule morning and afternoon. I have also been having longer days - yesterday I woke up at four and remembered that I hadn't put the instructions for the interim doan at the seat, so I went and did that, and found it impossible to get back to sleep afterwards, though since I ended up watching English football highlights, I didn't feel like I was really suffering.
After I managed to wrap up a number of loose ends at work yesterday, we had a large and lively Young Urban Zen meeting, and several of us took the usual after-party conversation down to a neighbouring cafe, with the result that I didn't get to bed until midnight. I still woke up this morning early enough to take down my art show and pack my bags for Tassajara before breakfast.
I am, for the first time, trying to get down to Carmel on various trains and buses, which I feel a little unsure about, but rides did not materialise in the end. I look forward to being there in time for dinner, and assuming I am able to get out again, I will be back in the online world in time for the Saturday program.

Work, Rest and Play

I have been noticing a paradox during my working hours, which I was tempted to call the horns of a dilemma, but that would be overstating it: some days it seems like I never get away from sitting at my desk looking at the computer, fielding e-mails and occasionally phone calls; I look at the list of projects that I keep on hand, and it feels like I never get anything done. Conversely, when I block off time, as I did on Friday, to empty out the cupboard in the ino's office which holds the City Center talks archive on cassette (so many illustrious names from the past, and how will we ever get to listen to them again?), to realign the shelves so I can store the gear we use for our audio-visual enterprises these days in the lockable cabinet that previously contained the old sound system, while it felt like a most useful accomplishment, also left me feeling like I had been neglecting my 'real' work.
I also need to remind myself constantly that part of my 'work' is just attending the activities I am supposed to be at: the morning and afternoon schedule, the dharma talks. But then, even though I offered to do the sound for the entertaining poetry reading on Friday night, I didn't consider that work, since I hadn't promised to do it beforehand, and hadn't expected to until I decided it would be the best way to spend the evening, which it probably was.
There was a less pleasant consequence to the event, though. Having removed the microphone and receiver from the Buddha Hall so that both Matthew Dickman and Matthew Zapruder could read with clip-on mics - and mostly the new sound system was excellent - and having replaced them after the event, at ten o'clock on Saturday morning, coming up from zazen, I felt I should just check that the mic was working in the Buddha Hall again, and the fact that it didn't made me sweat. Even more so when the people who were in the dining room said they could hear it. If I had had five quiet minutes to think it through I would have figured out the source of the problem, but I didn't - I needed to go and pee, which is not a simple operation when you are in an okesa (and nor is poking around in the sound system cabinet), and everyone was waiting for the talk to begin. The speaker, Eugene Bush from Santa Cruz, had already requested that we not record the talk - which is a shame as it was wonderful - so I just had to ask him if he was willing to speak unamplified, which, graciously he was. As a long-time school teacher, he had no problem being heard throughout the room, and while he was talking I worked out exactly why there was no sound reaching the speakers of the Buddha Hall (I had inadvertantly pulled out a cable along with the receiver).
We are now heading into interim week, which I would perhaps have benefited from more if it had followed directly after the intensive, but which is welcome nonetheless. I am hoping to make it to Tassajara for a few days, although I am unsure how I am actually going to be getting there, and I am expected to return with some photographs.
We marked the beginning of this relaxed week last night with a party at one of the apartments up the street, to celebrate Tanya going back to school. It was a classic Zen Center party, where everyone knows each other, and people were either talking or dancing. Of the two activities I decided I would rather be dancing - along with Renee who was leading the fray, and Blanche who was gamely joining in when the music was more to her taste. Nadia and I were sharing DJ duties, which turned out to be a lot of fun.
I may have been optimistic about the weather the other day; I rode this morning through more drenching fog than clear skies, though it was nice enough here by the time I got back that I could spend a happy hour in the hammock on the roof reading a book, something that doesn't happen nearly enough.

Pancakes For Breakfast

One thing that is always true around Zen Center is that if you have done something once, unless you make an almighty cock-up of it, someone will ask you to do it again. At Tassajara, at the beginning of every practice period, former doans are drafted in to ring bells, be kokyo and soku, until the new batch can be trained up. It is a nice way to relive things you used to enjoy, and if you didn't enjoy them in the first place, there is the consolation that it is only temporary.
Romy the fukaten has been asking me for some time to show her how to make pancakes. It is a hard thing to schedule when I am in the zendo every morning, so interim is the ideal time. I wouldn't call myself much of an expert at this - I only did it once when I was in the kitchen at Tassajara - but as tenzo I probably did it half a dozen times, and then have showed other people how to do it. And it really isn't rocket science either. The main skill involved is getting all the other elements of breakfast taken care of so that once you fire up the grill, you can just focus on flipping. I think the essentials were transmitted this morning; I started off, and then left Romy to it, and we had a couple of hotel pans of tasty pancakes by seven fifteen, which, of course, people were excited to eat.
Now, at the risk of returning to find things not done for tomorrow, I am going to take off on my bike for another ride in the sunshine.

The Great Chiden Shortage

I knew that having Buddha's Birthday on Saturday would have an impact on my efforts to have a quiet interim week. The ceremony form sheets always need checking over to make sure they are clear and accurate, as well as the notes for the chiden; the flower chidens need to know to get extra flowers at the market tomorrow; parasols need to be dug out of one of the many closets, stocks of balloons and crepe paper verified - I hand most of this stuff on to the work leader, who does not have so much help himself this week. I went out and bought the cake for the altar this afternoon, which does not really qualify as a chore, as it involves walking down to Church Street, and, as it happened, bumping into a pregnant former resident of Zen Center.
The head chiden had informed me weeks ago that she was going to be away this weekend, so I had lined up her predecessor to take on the role of supervising the set-up in the park on Saturday, only for him to tell me this morning that his grandmother had died, and he might have to fly off to her funeral this weekend...I may have to come up with another plan to get the altar in place, though as I remember it, most of the work is getting everything over there to begin with.
I read through the ceremonial dedication, and there was a phrase that struck me as a little infelicitous. Naturally I turned to the Gyoji Kihan to see what it had to say about the matter. It tells me that we should be chanting the "Verse of Bathing Buddha (chant in drawn-out voice, without any melody)", though I don't see the text anywhere. The eko ends:

In more than three hundred assemblies, the rain of dharma moistened and bathed him from afar.
For more than two thousand years, the wind of merit has howled and continued to blow.
We humbly pray that the light emitted from the hair between Buddha's eyebrows shall benefit countless beings, and that his meritorious acts shall profit countless beings.

I was also reminded in the Gyoji Kihan that April 1st is the day when the braziers are to be shut down: "Leave no fires for heating. In sangha hall, from this day on head coverings are not to be worn when engaged in ritual procedures and folded hands should be bare".
Right now we do have the heating on, as the wind that is howling around the city today has come all the way down from Alaska, according to the forecasts at least, and it feels pretty chilly after our warm sunshine. I postponed my planned bike ride with the optimism that it will be warmer and less blowy tomorrow, and that I will not have to spend the day worrying about the shortage of chidens.

What I Did On My Day Off

For at least forty five weeks in the year, I am in the zendo six mornings a week, and out on my bike the other, so when interim rolls round I am usually ready for a break, especially coming after a sesshin, and a month when days off were pretty hard to come by.
But first there was another visit to Green Gulch for the Coming of Age group yesterday. It was a fine morning, and I had plenty of post-sesshin energy, and joy at being out and about again, and I was also feeling quite mellow around the boys, who were their usual boisterous selves, though once again I appreciated the conversation we had around the precepts towards the end.
There was also the matter of the monthly Suzuki Roshi memorials, which I knew would be sparsely attended. It turned out that I was doshi for both last night's and this morning's ceremonies, which I hadn't expected, and which I don't really feel senior enough to do, but faute de mieux...
I enjoyed doing them, especially as I had noticed being a little sad not to have the opportunities to be doshi during sesshin, and did my best to honour the formality of the occasions. One thing I did notice was that the statue we have in the kaisando, which is not universally loved - I have heard it said more than once that none of the commemorative artwork we have around the building really captures his spirit, mostly being too solemn and not catching the twinkling eye - is much more effective when you are standing in front of it for a few minutes: there is a way the eyes focus on you that I hadn't expected.
That done, and the weather being fine, I was itching to go out and ride, and I had all the fun I could possibly ask for, warm weather, no wind, quiet roads, wildflowers, birds, seals, as well as much evidence of rain damage on the roads. It felt like spring, and I can still feel the sun on my face. It was nice to have an unstructured afternoon, and to attend to some of the accumulated piles of things in my room.
I'll throw in a couple of photos to prove that I am still waking up pretty early, and that I am enjoying rediscovering the manual controls on my camera:

Interim

I am not feeling in the least bit guilty about not going to the zendo this week, and I am working on not feeling guilty about taking some comp time - I heard from Connie, my counterpart at Green Gulch, yesterday that she is taking three weeks off, which is all comp time - since we have just had three days' holiday and part of me tells myself that that should be enough lazing about, and another part tells me that I am not going to get downtime like this until the next interim.
Not least of the benefits of interim is that I have been managing to catch up on my sleep: I have tried staying up later this week, so that being up past midnight on New Year's Eve will not be such an ordeal - the last time I was awake at that hour was probably when I was in England, which doesn't count as it was a different time zone. While I am still waking up at four thirty or five, this is not entirely due to my body clock; it is the time the heating comes on, and having fixed the radiator in my room so that I have some heat, I get to hear the process, which is neither silent nor smooth, but the great thing is that I have been telling myself that I don't have to get up, and it has been working enough for me to drift back off to sleep.
We have had several 'storms' coming through, as forecast, though as I think I have said before, where I come from, we would just think of that kind of weather as a bit of wind and some steady rain, and certainly the results have not been as dramatic as the pictures and stories I have been getting from Europe, or even from the East Coast. They do, though, give me an excuse to post some more rooftop photos from the last few days, variations on the previous theme, in lieu of having any dharma activities to write about.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

Christmas Day - red sky in the morning...

Boxing Day

Yesterday

This morning

Back in robes

While it has been very refreshing to have a restful week - even if I did wake up around five or five thirty almost every day - it is always nice to put my robes on again after a hiatus.
Today we are back in the schedule, with a full zendo this morning, and an overflowing Buddha Hall, including a spider that I watched making its way from the mokugyo (reminding me of the famous story from Tassajara), all around the foot of the altar, which it proceeded to climb. I last saw it scampering along the picture rail near the ceiling...

There were several ends to interim this time - I went and sat on Friday afternoon as a prelude to the Suzuki Roshi Memorial before dinner; we had the second part of the Memorial on Saturday, and I went to 9:25 zazen, and the dharma talk, ending up with the newcomers' table at lunch, which was as entertaining as ever.
Also on Saturday, there was a tokudo for Alison  Kreider, whom I practised with at Tassajara a few years ago. Kosho did the ceremony at Sokoji, as he had Jared's, but there was a strong turn out from Zen Center, as well as the contingent from Austin - I think I counted about twenty priests. I was the official photographer, and this is the 'official' picture:

Interim

A couple of residents asked me today if I had got up for zazen, and I said no, I had woken up at five, but I did not get out of bed. This is interim week, and I am happy to take the week off from sitting zazen twice a day. I am also trying to make it a light work week without feeling guilty about it. One reason for this is that I had a friend stop by the ino's office last week and invite me over to the East Bay for a Saturday evening. I looked through my diary and had something happening either all day Saturday or on Sunday until October 23rd, so it is going to be a very busy time.
Today I managed to get eight talks from Tassajara onto the website, which does not completely clear the backlog I have had since the Genzo-e, but gets me pretty close. Hopefully Greg will be happy about this, as he has been encouraging me in this matter.

I also wanted to thank all the people who have been commenting on posts recently; it is heartening to know that people are reading this. I do get some nice positive feedback in person too. In fact the other day, after writing about my robes, when I went to the zendo for afternoon zazen, after I sat down I noticed that Roger, the doan for the session, seemed to be looking over from the next seat as I arranged my robes. When I was just about settled, he rubbed my koromo sleeve and we both had big smiles on our faces, without anything needing to be said - another intimate moment.