Up A Mountain, On The Ground

Just like when I used to take myself up the road to the ridge the day after a sesshin at Tassajara, after yesterday's sitting I took myself up Mt Tam this morning; there was a similar reward as well (see the last picture here), in getting above the greyness that had been unremittingly firm in the city and had rolled damply over the road at Throckmorton Ridge, into an entirely different climate with endless blue skies above. It was still early, so the roads were quiet, and at the top of the mountain, I had three mountain hares, a lizard and a skyful of swallows for company, as well as a handful of other riders.
It is familiar terrain for me, which helps, and I had confidence in my legs, having been building up my form since I got back from England - especially having been up Mount Diablo ten days ago, which is like Tam, but more so.
There are several distinct sections of the climb up from Mill Valley, each with its particular joys and challenges; the key to a successful climb is meeting each of them appropriately, without losing a sense of how far you still have to go. There is no way up a mountain on a bike except under your own power - no-one else can get you up there. Even at the summit you are not done - the road continues, drops down and back up a couple of times, causing tricky changes in rhythm, and the final ramp up to the last car park is the steepest and hardest section of the entire climb - as it is on Diablo, only more so there.
At the top, apart from basking for a while in the warmth, there is nothing to do but go back down, which might be easier on the legs, but requires its own effort of continued concentration as you manoeuvre the bike around tight downhill corners, balancing speed and safety, and the heat turns back into cool moist air. At the bottom again, riding along the bikeway to Sausalito, everything seems flat and simple, and it is hard to believe you have just been up and down a mountain.

It's hard for me to say anything about yesterday's sitting and the beginning of the retreat. I know that Teah gave a beautiful talk, and that the group sat well together with a peaceful schedule, but I spent the day in a cloud of my own suffering. I had come to realise that I had to let go of something I had been cherishing since the end of last year, and it hurt. It was a sharp and salutary reminder that all conditioned phenomena are unreliable and unworthy of confidence, but no comfort was forthcoming. Rosalie checked in with me after lunch and kindly asked if I wanted to continue in the ino seat, but, as painful and slow as the day was in the zendo, it would have been worse not to do anything.
I was surprised, then, after this day of sitting and silence and heaviness, to wake up feeling completely grounded this morning, especially since I have been getting re-acquainted with several wee small hours of the night this past week. It was not a conscious effort on my part, but the fact of it made me feel that I had made the right decision; just like it says in all the books, letting go of desire can be the most beneficial thing, and it was so relaxing after recent striving and clinging. I am grateful that the practice allows shifts like this to manifest, whatever happens further down the road.

San Francisco from the slopes of Tam - today, only the very top of the Mount Sutro tower was visible above the fog

Likewise, the ocean was not to be seen today - one of my favourite corners of the road

P.S. Mike, this may not have been what you had in mind, but it is what came up...

Head Space

Usually I don't mind a logistical challenge, and I am well served right now with the upcoming summer retreat (which I will still tag as the intensive, as it has been known in years past). Yesterday I was busy setting up a list of participants for the one-day sitting on Saturday, along with their various requirements, alongside a similar but subtly different list of the retreat participants and their commitment levels, which I categorised as 'full', 'fullish', 'morning and evening', 'morning' and 'limited', followed by their prospects for the sesshin at the end. This I enjoyed. What got my blood temporarily boiling was trying to reformat a previous schedule - a Word document - to reflect the schedules we are going to be following. Some combination of table and column quirks on Word which, even with all the formatting marks shown, I could still not understand, made the whole thing take four times longer than it needed, and is the kind of thing that has often brought about the wish to throw the computer out of the window (if anyone has the knowledge and patience to instruct me on this at a time when I am less busy, I would be most grateful). If you look back through all the times I have written about working on one-day sittings, my mood levels on the day have depended largely on the co-operation of the technology at hand.
In the midst of this, I do find it hard to switch my attention whole-heartedly to something else - even in zazen I am often unravelling little related puzzles and remembering that we needed a doorwatch for this morning, that I should email Teah to see what she wants to do for noon service, and whether we should do the meal chants for our silent meals. Nonetheless, I also spent a couple of hours this afternoon at a meeting planning for the Soundwave concert on August 25th, which promises to be every bit as fabulous as the Bold Italic event last year.
Today I will be wrapping up the lists, and also trying to find some space to think about the ceremonies involved in the August 13th anniversary celebration, for which I might be wearing many hats - ino, photographer, sound recorder.
I was typing this before going to bed, and then the power went out in the whole block. Luckily it was not quite dark out, and a few residents were milling about downstairs wondering if there was aything we could do. Typing the end of this by the glow of my bicycle light, it seemed that going to bed was the most sensible idea.

Sitting Together

After sesshin was over, and I had cleaned up and eaten dinner, I went for a brief walk outside. The fog had set in, muting everything, and I was happy to slip down the streets, taking in everything, noticing again how, whatever the stresses and strains of the sitting - and in this position they are always many and varied - invariably there is a residue of settled sharp awareness. I think this is noticeable to others as well; this morning, instead of having a talk, we had all gone out for an equally leisurely walk in the warm sunshine. I walked at the back of the thirty-strong group, some of us in robes with our flowing sleeves, watched how passers-by reacted to us, and held up for myself to examine as well this unusually public identity of 'zen priest'. As we filed by a furniture store, a young man talking to a couple of others bowed to us. He turned to me and asked if we were Buddhists. Yes, I replied simply. I love you guys he smiled, and I smiled back.
We ended the sitting this afternoon with a chosan (not to be confused with a shosan - check the labels for the various iterations of each). It was a fitting way to bring the small group together for a finale, and the feeling was sweet and relaxed. Overall my reaction to this three-day sesshin was not so different to the reaction I had last year: it's only three days, it's gone before you know it, but I enjoyed hearing how much it meant for others.
The brevity does not mean it is easy to prepare for - since we drop a one-day sitting in the middle of it, basically I had to set up two complete job lists and seating charts, and of course, there were twice as many variables to come and trip me up. I started earlier than I would ordinarily for a sesshin, and felt I was ahead of the curve right through to Thursday night, even with all the expected unexpecteds: people not on my list, people going sick, people who didn't think they were going to be able to make it and did, and vice versa, people sitting two days, or part of all three days, or some other combination.
I also had distractions in terms of conversations I hadn't anticipated about my next steps here at Zen Center. As I have been telling people recently, and as my experience has been, until I am actually sitting on an actual seat or behind a particular desk, there is no point saying anything about it, and another aspect of this weekend illustrates this: until Thursday, I was not completely sure I was going to be sitting the sesshin at all. Three months or so ago, I decided to schedule a Young Urban Zen retreat at Green Gulch for this weekend. I remember having the sense when I did it that I was tempting fate, but it seemed to be the most suitable time, and since there had already been some talk about me transitioning out of the ino position, I told myself that either I would not be ino in June, or that somebody would be able to replace me. It turned out that neither of those guesses were accurate, and while I might have had more expansive fun with YUZ at Green Gulch these past few days, and would have almost certainly made more of the good weather, while being more suitably attired for it, it was abundantly clear that I had, as I sometimes say, cooked myself a breakfast that I couldn't eat *. The situation being entirely of my making, I had no problem settling down to do what I was supposed to be doing rather than what I might wish to be doing. And that, for all that I look forward to a bike ride tomorrow, just as I used to look forward to running after sesshins at Tassajara, is what sesshin is all about.

Warm, but also windy yesterday

 * A friend of mine at school, intending to study philosophy, went for an interview at Oxford. Afterwards he told me the question was put to him, "Can God cook himself a breakfast he cannot eat?" I always liked this question, though I wouldn't dream of trying to answer it; it is the kind of thing that has kept me well away from western philosophy. Quite often the phrase came to mind while I was building walls at Tassajara when, having laid out a satisfyingly beautiful combination of rocks, I would realise that it was impossible to put anything on top of them to continue the construction.

The Seventh Pot

Having been ino for this long, I have become a bit blasé about one-day sittings, and don't prepare much for them before the Friday. This week I did go out and procure all the necessaries for oryoki sets, and spent time on Thursday scrubbing all the sticky labels off the bowls, spoons and chopsticks, which  is perhaps my least favourite ino activity. But it was only on Friday that I had a sense of exactly how big the sitting was going to be. January is always the most popular month, as I have referenced before, and, once we had collated all the lists, we were looking at hosting a hundred people. Well, 104 once we added in the teachers.
I know there have been sittings that big before, but certainly not in my time as ino. We filled every seat in the zendo, and the floor, and I had a lot of residents sitting in the gaitan. Nadia made sure we had extra seats in the hall as we did for New Year, which were certainly occupied for the 9:25 sitting. So Friday was another fifteen hour day making sure everything was done on the logistical front, and happily I think the initial sticker shock was the worst part of it.
There were some interludes to the preparations -  among our new residents, Alison duly arrived from London bearing a packet of Tunnock's as well as some English newspapers, which I hope to have time to read one of these days. I can report that the tea cakes are quite as I remembered. I was very happy to be able to give a couple to Jana, ahead of Burns' night, and she was thrilled to see some of her native foodstuffs again. I was also able to return at least some of the kindness of two of my regular chocolate donors.
On the more sombre side of things, we also commemorated the one-year anniversary of Lou's death: we ended evening zazen early, and came up to the Buddha Hall. It was full with old friends and residents, and people here for the practice period and the sitting. A number of us spoke to Lou first, remembering his great practice and not forgetting his crotchedy side, then we chanted the Dai Hi Shin Dharani, before offering incense at the end.

Today was much more relaxed than I had been imagining it might be. There was a bit of shoe-horning going on, especially in the Buddha Hall for service, and for meals. The residents who ended up in the gaitan didn't seem to mind being asked to forgo oryoki today, and amazingly we got through breakfast only five minutes behind schedule thanks to some classy serving, and the introduction of an unprecedented seventh pot for serving. Most importantly, the tenzo had prepared enough food for everyone. I counted seventy-five people eating lunch, all the upper and lower tans, and ten people on the floor as well. At dinner Blanche said she hasn't seen so many in the zendo since 1971, though I think she might have been exaggerating a mite. As always, once we got into the afternoon session, I didn't really have anything to take care of, so I could settle into some sitting - the middle forty minute period seemed remarkably short; I must have been having a good time.

And finally, the weather report. Those of you close to here will know that it has not rained since Thanksgiving, which is great for bike rides and being outdoors generally, but not so good for other, interconnected parts of our lives. Yesterday morning as we were sitting, the rain fell heavily, and I felt the kind of relief that you used to be able to feel palpably in the zendo at Tassajara when the first rain of the winter could be heard sweeping along the valley before landing noisily on the zendo roof. Certainly I was glad yesterday that I didn't have to go anywhere at all; by the end of the evening it was quite squally. Today started wet as well, then mostly cleared up with that blustery freshness. I am prepared to get wet on my ride tomorrow.

The thing itself, attempting to recreate the angle shown on the card I received

P.S. I see from the stats that someone has been looking for 'shundo zen'. Perhaps if they find any, they can let me know.

Notes From A One-Day Sitting

As breakfast dragged on, I began to wonder if I was going to get to leave the zendo before I had to come back. It was a close-run thing in the end: although the zendo was not quite as full as on the last couple of one-days, there wasn't enough cereal in the pots, so the servers had to keep making round trips to fill in the gaps, and I was watching the time just slip away and noticing how stressed I got. At lunch, by way of a contrast, since there is always something of a break no matter how long the meal goes, I was completely relaxed.
Other things that I noticed today: the Self-Receiving and -Employing Samadhi certainly sounds better with a few periods of zazen inside you. I haven't felt fully connected with it during our noon services this practice period, but today felt different.
While my wrist still got a little sore holding the mudra over time, my legs were doing just fine on the whole - perhaps they were glad not to be the centre of attention. During the afternoon, my brain became less of a solid obstacle, and the information in my spine was more readily accessible.
It was wonderful to have a full zendo chanting the Dai Hi Shin Dharani before dinner, and the Refuges at the end of the evening. Also wonderful to put a call out for people to help with evening dishes, and to go into the kitchen to see half a dozen people working away to get things done. Together, the sitting happens. Then we go our separate ways in the rainy evening.

On The Cushion

It was a beautiful day out there today, but apart from half an hour on the roof after lunch, I was just gazing at it longingly out of the window, and hoping that tomorrow will be equally warm. We had a big one-day sitting, which meant a long day of preparation yesterday, and a long day of sitting today. In the end, the preparations were as smooth as they could be, even with all the vagaries of our new booking system, and I was about an hour ahead of my usual schedule getting all the pieces of paper together; even the printers behaved.
As usual, I did not get to settle into the sitting until this afternoon. We had had some debate about changing the timing of Saturday mornings, and the Abbot finally conceded that we could try the shorter service today that we usually do on Monday. As it happened, with seventy-odd people to get in and out of the Buddha Hall and give soji assignments to - and most importantly, to feed in the zendo - by the time we got out of breakfast, it wasn't even worth me trying to take my robes off and get to the bathroom. I went up to my room, gulped some coffee, and went straight back to the zendo to make sure everyone could find a place for 9:25 zazen, and then took a break once the period had started, which always makes me feel just a little guilty.
During the first period in the afternoon I was verging on catatonic, as I have been during most afternoon sittings this week - probably due to not getting to bed early enough. Once I got through that though, I enjoyed the feeling of some habitual stuff getting blunted, and other ways of being getting sharpened, allowing my spine to unfurl and my shoulders release, feeling my ribs come into balance and moving my neck just ever so to give a more spacious feeling. Then at the last moment I had to step in as kokyo for evening service, and found that my voice was drier and more wobbly than I would have liked.
We had dinner in the zendo, which is rare enough that I was having to think back to Tassajara to remember some of the forms; many other people were probably experiencing it for the first time. Luckily, some attrition in the numbers through the day meant that we weren't as tightly packed as we had been for the other two meals.
Sitting in the evening is also an uncommon treat here, even if the first period after dinner always seems to go on a little too long, and wrapping up the day with the Refuges in Pali is always lovely, again evoking memories of Tassajara where every day ends that way.
At the end I even got some thank-you notes and verbal thank-yous; enough to send me off to bed happy.

Pilgrimage

I think it is safe to say that without my love of bicycles, I would never have come to live in San Francisco (and if you haven't heard that story yet, you will probably have to ask me in person, especially if you want the version that starts with a skiing trip I didn't go on in 1984), so to have a whole weekend where riding a bike is the primary focus of attention and Buddhism is the backdrop, is my idea of an all-round good time.
Having just scrolled back through the archives, I don't seem to have referenced the Buddhist Bike Pilgrimage, (update - well I did, but I couldn't remember for a while where I had, and the search function failed to find the word pilgrimage for some reason) but that was how I spent my weekend. Last year it was deemed that my place was in the ino's seat for the one-day sitting that begins the Fall Practice Period, but this year more lenient forces were at work, and I am grateful that Joan took over as ino for the day. I still had to put everything for the sitting together on Friday, with a few potential wrinkles with our new online registration system causing a little concern, and a late request that we have some assigned seating for the practice period also adding to my weekend workload.
I didn't have time to think about packing for the pilgrimage until eight-thirty on Friday night, and I was due to be out of the door at four-forty the next morning, so it wasn't until we actually got to Spirit Rock just as the new moon was peeping through the clouds that I started to be present for what was about to happen.
Eugene Cash gave a nice introductory talk about approaching the event with 'don't know' mind, which was rendered most poignant by the fact that he had a bad crash about twenty miles into the ride and had to be taken to hospital with some broken bones. I had been riding along talking with him just a little while before that, but we got separated on a climb, and then he crashed on the tricky descent.
Obviously, with the news spreading quickly by the time we got to the next rest stop, it cast a pall on the day, and the whole event, but there were many joys as well. It is a very social event, and having done it two years ago, I recognised a number of people, and met a few more, and got to hang out with some good friends, either riding together, or sitting in the pool on Saturday afternoon, and at meals.
On Sunday we started with perhaps unprecedented damp weather, but since the temperature is often nudging a hundred degrees out on the roads, it wasn't so bad, and the sun was out before too long. We got to experience some different styles of Buddism along the way, though I confess I felt like taking the weekend off meditation and ceremony, and didn't attend all the dharma offerings.
Today, though I am still feeling a bit tired myself, City Center is buzzing with the energy of a dozen new residents and the extra events associated with the practice period.  I expect the Young Urban Zen meeting tonight will give me a much-needed shot of vitality.

A No-Win Situation

I was distressed to read Zen Beginner's post about Saturday. I had seen the conversation taking place, and the resulting exit, but had no idea who had been the protagonist of the situation or that it was having such an impact. My first reaction was that I needed to have a conversation with the other party, which I managed to do today. I listened to what they had to say, and then put forward a couple of ideas of my own.
I once sat next to someone for a sesshin who was in a chair; sometimes they were very still, sometimes they were very fidgety. One period, feeling particularly irritated - I had a fidgety person on the other side of me as well, and was not settling - I decided to count how many times this person moved. My intention was to be able to wave this in their face after sesshin. The total ended up being around ninety distinct movements in thirty minutes of sitting, and I suddenly realised that there was a lot of suffering causing this to happen - I didn't say anything to that person in the end, but I did stop feeling irritated by them.
So my feeling about this story from Saturday was that the other person, who has some years of practice under their belt, should have tried to keep a compassionate mind towards the newer student, and if that was proving too hard for them, then maybe they needed to go and sit in the gaitan to have some peace.
One of the things I try very hard not to do as ino is reinforce anyone's idea that they may be a failure. I am sure that I have managed to make more than a few people feel bad, and sometimes, for someone who is in residential practice, that might be a helpful thing, but I can see how easily dynamics and perceptions can be reinforced and co-created. As Paul mentioned in his talk on Saturday, when you start to sit, it is common for these kinds of feelings to become more prominent as you are paying more attention to them, and with something as slippery as our practice, it is easy to think that everyone else must be doing it much better than you are. It simply isn't true; no-one is failing and no-one is succeeding. We trust that we are all trying our best, even if it sometimes doesn't look like it or feel like it.

Swings and Roundabouts

It turned out that the answer to the question 'Who can I get to ring the wake-up bell on Sunday?' was 'me', since the person who had kindly agreed to do it did not materialise in time. As I have mentioned before, if I end up ringing the wake-up bell it usually puts me in a bad mood for two reasons: first that things are not happening the way they are supposed to, and we are inevitably running behind schedule, though I wasn't so concerned about that part this morning, and second, that I will spend the rest of the morning schedule feeling sweaty and clammy, with Sod's Law dictating, as it did today, that I will have put on a clean jubon especially for the occasion. But, when I caught up with the person later, and they apologised, I said, 'Well, the rest of it went well'.
The whole weekend has been like that, good or bad depending on what kind of spin I choose to put on it: yesterday could be said to have gone pretty smoothly considering the numbers involved. I became aware of a number of mistakes I had made in the planning, a consequence of feeling overloaded during the latter part of the week, but we worked around them. Things mostly happened without drama. I didn't really get to settle into sitting, and I felt very tired and more sore than usual, which put me in a slightly odd mood by the time we got to the opening ceremony for the intensive after dinner, after which I wasn't good for much of anything apart from staring into space.
I still woke up at four this morning, as I have all week, which is not helping. Apart from the wake-up bell, the morning sitting and service were nice, and the tenzo had put out a lovely breakfast. Mark Cavendish won another stage at the Tour; I was starting to feel relaxed. I had planned to go off to Mount Diablo, and found I had a flat tyre just as I was leaving for the BART, and then, once that was fixed and I was on a later train, we were delayed by engineering works. None of that mattered once I was on the mountain, though - as always in such a place, life boils down to finding a rhythm for climbing and then seeing if I can keep the rhythm all the way to the summit  (you can add your own analogies here).
I am not sure that I feel fully rested yet, but I have made enough plans that we should be able to get through the first couple of days of the intensive, and then we shall see what happens after that.

Beginning, Continuing and Ending

One thing I appreciate about continuing to be ino is that the big events are less stressful than they used to be. One-day sittings are still fourteen-hour days with very little downtime, but I am a little more relaxed about how they unfold. This one went from having fifteen sign-ups on Tuesday to about fifty-five yesterday, with more being added right up to the last moment, but the logistics were mostly painless. We had plenty of people who knew how to do each job, so I could choose creatively, and also let some senior people have a day where they just sat and had no responsibilities.
I even had time yesterday to help the Young Urban Zen group get closer to a launch. This is something that arose from the big Zen Center meeting in January, in particular from a brain-storming session that afternoon. The fact that it will have taken five months to actually get it off the ground says something about how busy we all are and the kind of inertia that an organisation of our size inevitably possesses. Nonetheless, a lot of people have put in a lot of hours to trying to make this happen, and it was great to have a flyer printed out last night so I could announce the group after lecture for the first time. Since we don't have any text online yet, I will just say that it is going to be a group aimed mainly at 25-35 year olds who are establishing their lives in the city and are looking for a way to find meaning and community in the midst of everything. I am, I confess, outside the age range of the target demographic, but I hope to be on hand to lend a priestly presence, as we don't currently have any priests that young living at City Center - though there are a number elsewhere at Zen Center. So, tell your friends, or come along yourselves, starting Monday June 6th. I will undoubtedly be plugging this more as it gets closer to the time.
Even though the sitting is over, I still have some things to do, not least folding my robes and wrapping them so I can take them to Green Gulch for the culmination ceremony of the Coming of Age group tomorrow morning. This will actually be the first time the boys will have seen me in my robes, so they may get a bit of a shock. The ceremony will obviously be a time for reflection on the last nine months of meetings, and on what kind of transformations may have occurred in the lives of these young people. It has been a rich experience to be part of, on many levels, and I will be sad to see the group disband. Who knows if any of them will be coming along for sittings in the years to come?

Blossoms and Snow

One reason I was drawn to what you might call Buddhist philosophy for want of a better word, was that it cut through the absolute, while I always found Western thinking and writing to be circling frustratingly, and frustratedly, around it. But of course I find ample examples where the two approaches align around making sense of the human condition. Reading in the New Yorker about George Eliot (reminding me that I read 'Middlemarch' while crossing Europe in trains at the age of eighteen - having got through 'Pride and Prejudice' before I reached Paris, in the days before the Eurostar, I was glad to have something with a little more heft), the following two sections struck me: the writer of the article outlines "a notion that is at the center of much of Eliot's work: that individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are". And this: "In response to the enthusiastic reception of the first volume of 'Middlemarch', Eliot wrote, 'Hardly anything could have happened to me which I could regard as a greater blessing than this growth of my spiritual existence when my bodily existence is decaying. The merely egoistic satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by toothache, and that has been my chief consciousness for the last week'".

Our full week is done now. We had our Full Moon Ceremony on Friday morning, and a one-day sitting yesterday, neither of which I feel I have anything interesting to say about. Yesterday we finished with a shosan where Michael, Great Dragon, made quick work of people's stuck thinking, turning over concepts with a phrase, and in one case, a great shout.

In the realm of changes, California winter weather rarely disappoints. I have overused these past ten years the line 'rough winds do shake the darling buds of February' in writing to my family. A fortnight ago, we were basking in eighty degree weather; last weekend I was taking pictures of the crowds in the sun at Crissy Fields, and wishing I had taken my camera for the sunlit blossoms at Green Gulch. Today the happy crowds were up on Mt Tam, where the soaking of the last week left snow on the ground on the upper slopes. When I went out on my bike this morning, glad that the skies had cleared, I soon realised that I just had to go and pay it a visit. Luckily the higher roads were closed to cars, so there were just hikers and cyclists out testing their grip, along with the deer and coyotes - I thought of going to the summit, but ice on the road by the amphitheatre made that seem like a bad idea. It was wonderfully liberating to be out there with the quiet of the snow, with the familiar feeling of flatness once you descend to where the ground is bare. This snow will be even more fleeting than the blossoms.

The snow on Mount Tam reflecting the rising sun, as seen from the roof

The January Effect

Today I figured that my job was mostly going to be traffic control. I tallied up about ninety people wanting to sit, and somehow managed to allocate seats in the zendo for everyone on my list. Last night at the orientation I told people it was going to be chaotic and crowded and that kinhin was going to be a slow-moving adventure.
I think there was a part of me that relaxed around the prospect of the day because it was inevitable that it was going to be complicated by the sheer number of participants. I was also grateful for the fact that I felt much better by the end of yesterday, which I mostly attribute to Cristina's chocolate pudding (that's dessert to Americans) - I know there were other things in it, but the key ingredient was definitely the chocolate. The printers were also completely compliant yesterday afternoon during the great logistical paper-fest, which reduced my stress levels as well.
So, at five ten this morning, I started showing people to their seats, and while it was a bit hectic for a few minutes, I noticed with real appreciation that everyone had arrived early enough that by the time the second roll-down happened, the zendo already felt quiet and settled, which was wonderful.
We did pack out the Buddha Hall at service as well as lecture, and for breakfast we even had people eating on the floor cushions between the tans, which I can remember having to deal with as a very inexperienced soku many Januaries ago, but which I don't remember happening since then. Nevertheless the servers did a fine job, as did the lunch crew, where we filled every single seat on the tans to fit everyone in.
I was grateful to have the opportunity to be the doshi for noon service, and to be chanting the Genjo Koan with everyone in the zendo; I felt completely focused and energised during that.
All in all it felt like a strong day of sitting - we had changed the afternoon schedule from four thirty minute periods to three forty minute periods. The mathematically-minded among you will notice that the total sitting time is the same, but that the number of times we move around is changed, and to me that lends to a more settled feeling, although my legs were getting sore as we went along, as I am sure most people's were.
I was moved to see Blanche come into the zendo during the last period. She led the evening service, which was a well-being service, and after dinner, spoke touchingly at the beginning of our Practice Period opening ceremony. We all bowed to each other, stated our intentions and chanted the Pali refuges. Thus begins the Practice Period.

Sitting With Lou

It is thought that Lou is slipping away, and Blanche invited residents to come and sit with him across the road at Zen Hospice this morning; a few of us went after work meeting, cross-legged around the raised bed, with the purring and pulsing of the medical machinery; others were coming in as some of us left. I was glad to have the opportunity to be with him, and to support Blanche who has been at his bedside constantly for days.
City Center feels a bit depleted at the moment; many people are out with a flu-like sickness, including some senior people. We had just four of the regular six in our senior staff meeting this morning. I feel like I might be getting sick myself, which came on yesterday, so I am trying to take it easy today, in the hope that I won't succumb and have to leave organising the one-day sitting to someone else. I am also hoping to save my energy to be at the Full Moon Ceremony tonight.
The weather has been fine and clear these last few days, and the almost-full moon was out just before afternoon zazen yesterday; this was the view from my window:

Shosan

Shosan should not be confused with chosan. Nor should shosan be confused with Shosan - the ceremony is not the teacher; though perhaps if Shosan is doing shosan, they are one. In any case, tonight with Shosan we did a less formal shosan, which was a very sweet way to end a day of sitting. There were not so many bows involved, and again asking a question was optional, but this time, the questioners did get up to meet face to face with the teacher, in a dimly lit Buddha Hall. The wonderful thing about these ceremonies is feeling the moment being met, the person being met, the mood - which can go from high-spirited to deeply tender in a moment - being met, and all being held, lovingly. After we were done, we did prostrations and the refuges resonated around the room, which was very beautiful. Then we put everything away, thanked each other, and said goodnight. At least I did, I think other people are heading out to do something with their energy...
I was happy with the day; there was the usual quota of situations, people being sick, people going missing, having almost no time after meals to sit down, but I did get to focus on some zazen this afternoon, and that felt good. Everybody had a seat, everybody got fed, and as usual, nothing really bad happened. Not on the outside at least.

Sitting Long, Getting Tired

I know it is unreasonable to expect an event that involves upwards of sixty people and unfolds over sixteen hours to go without a hitch, and looking back, none of the things that end up being less than ideal are really a problem. There is a certain pattern to these things: someone calls at the last minute, just after I have breathed a sigh of relief that I have printed and copied all the bits of paper with the various informations on them, hoping to be included; someone else isn't sitting in their assigned seat, and when I ask them about it, says they were not planning on sitting, and had told the Abbot and the Tanto so, but luckily agrees to do the job that I had assigned them; people appear unexpectedly, people disappear unexpectedly, people want to talk to me, people want to talk to each other.
As before, a certain amount of pressure on the ino is lifted once we get through the morning program, though there are still the meals to pay attention to - they were all a little long yesterday, so less break time than scheduled - but this time, once we settled into the afternoon schedule, I found my legs were already sore. Happily they remained just sore, so I got to focus on trying to sit upright. For the last period, at eight thirty, Paul asked us all to sit facing out; for me that is no different, but the room feels much smaller when everyone's attention is directed into the room rather than towards the wall. It is always nice to end the day with the Refuges; there was a lovely deep tone in the room as we chanted, which brought everything to a harmonious close, and I went straight to bed, thinking about today's ride - no organisational stress, less pain in the legs, and only the traffic and the rain to contend with.

Study Hall

I am taking my time working my way through 'Taking Our Places', as it is all very valuable material. Here was something I read that seemed especially appropriate this week, from the chapter on vowing:
"It also helps to do such practice in the midst of a community so that we can find encouragement and support to carry on with what we know is the right thing to do, even though sometimes our energy and commitment may flag. When that happens, the others in our community pick us up and help us along - and we do the same for them. This is why religious practice over the millennia in all traditions has been communal, and includes observances to be carried out at appointed times of the day, week, month and year".
We had one such appointed time last Saturday, where we marked the beginning of our Fall Practice Period with an opening ceremony at the end of our one-day sitting. Paul had already observed in his lecture that hardly any of us has the discipline to complete a one-day sitting by ourselves (I would include myself in this), but that together we encourage each other. Practice period opening ceremonies at City Center usually involve everyone standing in a circle and stating their intention for the practice period. I have been trying to find a way to delineate the distinction between an intention and a vow, and I haven't come up with a good answer yet, but would be happy to hear suggestions. My stated intention was to try to meet everyone from a place of love and compassion and to trust that they wanted to meet me from the same place. As I looked around the room I was very happy to realise that I knew everyone's name in the circle, which strengthened the feeling of community for me; at the sitting there had been a few people I didn't recognise, including one woman who was visiting the city from Hong Kong, has found us through our website, and had wanted to experience sitting with other people; she said she had had a wonderful day.
As an aside, I notice that this is the one-hundredth post, which is a little milestone in its own way. I would like to thank Greg for getting this blog underway, and Dana for encouraging me to take it up, everyone who reads it in the four corners of the world, and those who write in with comments, all of which are appreciated. Here's to the next hundred.

Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha

It turns out that our Indian summer kicked off again on Friday, just in time for me to be busy inside for two days. Even with some experience of them now, big one-day sittings take a lot of organising, and this time I had a few complicating factors: a Coming of Age group leaders meeting in the morning; a request to change our morning service to resemble a more traditional Tassajara-type service, which involved a certain amount of cutting and pasting and reformatting; a couple of residents who came to tell me after four o'clock, when I had already begun the task of printing up all the various pieces of paper, that they wouldn't be sitting, so I had to re-allocate other people to the jobs I had given them; also forgetting to follow up on one of the notes in the ino's guidelines for one-day sittings, which is to check who is the Friday nightwatch and then not schedule them for anything early in the morning - I had the person who was on nightwatch down as fukudo, which would mean them ringing the wake-up bell and hitting the han for zazen...
All in all, I was still putting things together until nine o'clock; I went straight to bed, got up and had another very long day. For the number of people involved, over seventy including the kitchen crew, things went pretty smoothly; probably the worst thing was that we finished morning service early, so we had a wait downstairs in the zendo while breakfast was served up. I did notice my face starting to relax after lunch though, when the most of the variables have been taken care of. Before tea I went round and offered posture adjustments to the zendo. So far no-one has declined the offer, though I had expected someone I usually think of as prickly and self-protective to do so this time. There were one or two unyielding shoulders, but mostly I could feel tension dissipating at my touch, and generally no-one needed more than a gentle straightening. Of course I have to do my own adjustments internally, which is an ongoing effort.
It was hot - it was 92 degrees on the roof after lunch - so unsurprisingly I was sweating from the time I started chanting in morning service until I finished cleaning up the zendo a little more than twelve hours later. I wanted to get that done so I wouldn't have to worry about doing it yesterday; I was looking forward to an unscheduled day. We did have the Tassajara-bound folks gathering for breakfast and their departure; I helped get the food out first thing in the morning, and said hello and goodbye to them as they disappeared off to the valley until the week before Christmas, but also I was impatient to get out on my bike and I didn't wait for the stragglers to arrive from Green Gulch.
Yesterday was the warmest day I can remember riding in for a long time; the sun was just starting to hit the roofs in the Marina as I crested Pacific Heights, there was an iridescent twist of fog along the Golden Gate, and the moon was setting during the first half of the ride, until I rode up Lucas Valley to the big rock. The fog hadn't moved by the time I came back over the bridge, at about the time that the Tassajara students would be descending from the ridge to the monastery, which put paid to the idea I had had to sit on the beach for a while to make up for having only spent an hour and a half out of doors over the two previous days, but once I got back, I spent time on the roof here instead.

Chocolate Pudding is Wonderful

This was the title I suggested to Blanche for her wonderful talk this morning. I have heard most of Blanche's stories a number of times over the years, but when they are delivered in a skillful and timely matter as they were this morning, it doesn't matter. There was a great story from Tassajara, which included the line about chocolate pudding, and which I hadn't heard before, about sympathetic joy, one of the four Brahmaviharas.
I got to experience some of that (the joy, not the pudding), this afternoon. As is often the case, during the first period after work, it looked like a lot of people were a little tired and slumped, so I suggested to Blanche that she might like to offer some posture adjustments, which she did during the following period. Since I sit facing out, I didn't get an adjustment, but I remember clearly from other times that feeling of Blanche's hands on my shoulders, warm and very loving, and so I was getting to feel that vicariously as Blanche laid her hands on people around the zendo, and I could see how their bodies reacted, softened and straightened, and the energy in the room changed subtly. The afternoon wore on, and the schedule carried on pushing us gently towards stillness...

Upcoming events

There are several things coming up that are currently occupying my time. First of all, a one-day sitting tomorrow. Since it is a recent addition to the Zen Center calendar, it is moderate-sized rather than big and crowded, but it still requires a certain amount of logistical work in terms of finalising the names of participants, and giving them all jobs and seats. A lot of paper gets generated in all this, so I tend to leave the printing until it is late enough in the day that people are unlikely to change their plans, though of course things always happen...
On Sunday I go down to Tassajara for a few days, and I can definitely say that I am looking forward to this. I have been asked to take photographs of various places and events, so I might post some of the better ones here afterwards, as this has been quite bereft of photographs of late. I know they are having their Full Moon Ceremony there on Sunday night, which will be wonderful, although doing all those prostrations in full robes on a hot evening is also going to generate quite a lot of sweat.
When I get back, it will be time to start focusing on the Genzo-e sesshin, which I am also looking forward to tremendously. I have done several of them over the years, and they have been among my favourite sesshin experiences, with a unique combination of plentiful sitting and in-depth study. I was thus also very excited to see, when I got back from England, that there was a new book by Shohaku Okamura about the Genjo Koan, which I will take down to Tassajara, and hope to have time to read to help get me in the mood.
Incidentally, I was sitting with the Abbot at lunch, on the rock in the courtyard, which happens from time to time, and the conversation somehow turned to kensho - I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember how, but it wasn't one of those heavy 'zen' conversations (later  - I remember that it was via Kapleau Roshi and 'The Three Pillars of Zen'). I mentioned the book on Hakuin, and also referred to the questions that I wrote about it my last entry. 'But of course you don't read my blog' I said to Paul, whereupon he admitted that he didn't even know that I was writing one. Self-promotion has never been my strong point, but it may be now that I have at least one new reader, and I am sure I will hear about it if I say anything that runs contrary to the true teaching...

Preparations

We begin a three day sesshin here tomorrow night, going through to Sunday afternoon, and on Saturday there is a one-day sitting mainly for residents, and I have been trying, with the help of the hard-working front office staff, MacNeill and Caren, to collate all the information I need.Today and tomorrow is mostly going to be given over to the seating charts, the job charts and all the other little details. And then I won't actually be sitting, as I leave for Europe tomorrow lunchtime; after twenty two years of cohabitation, my brother and his girlfriend decided to get married, and chose this weekend to do it, and I was given permission to miss the sesshin so I could attend. So I am getting very involved in something I won't be involved in, and I am hoping that I can leave everything for Keith, who is going to be the acting ino, in a good enough state that he doesn't have to worry too much about how everything is going to happen. Of course things are going to keep changing, especially since the sitting is almost an autonomous event within the sesshin, but I can try.
I am not sure that I will be adding to the blog while I am away, since it will be a vacation from being ino, but we'll see. There will be many opportunities to practise, especially when I am around my family, and I may even do a little sitting, though I like to take occasional vacations from that as well, and my body needs one right now...