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.

Saturday Shenanigans

There seems to be something unsettled in the air, above and beyond my own emotional turmoils. Maybe the unseasonal rain is part of it, the weather positively English in its cussedness at the moment. In the building, at a time in the middle of practice period when things usually feel pretty stable, there are comings and goings. We added a departing ceremony to the morning schedule at the last minute, as it was the only time that would work for the departing student. The fact that I was leading Dana around on her jundo was quite poignant to me, as she has been ino here in the past, but also, when I was first living in the building, she was one of the people whose generosity and kindness as a more senior practitioner really gave me the confidence that I was in the right place.
It added a little to the busyness of the morning, as we already had the Suzuki Roshi Memorial on the slate. I was thinking back to the last time we combined this with a different ceremony, and to my surprise it was exactly a year ago. Plus it was an oryoki morning, but somehow we managed to get through things on time. I had a few other things to take care of - our usual kokyo is on vacation, so I had to take attendance and find someone to be kokyo for the memorial as I was in the kaisando on food offering duty (at least that part went very smoothly today, though it somehow came upon me almost as a surprise, I was so pre-occupied with other thoughts); on the serving crew, the head server had gone away, happily finding her own substitute, one of the servers had gone away without finding a sub, another had done night-watch so had switched with someone from next week's crew who would be away next week... I was kokyo for breakfast, and then doshi for the next period of zazen; this was when I was most glad we weren't running late, as I had a chance to sit and drink coffee before someone from the Saturday sangha came and asked for help filling all the jobs as not many people had shown up today. I gave posture adjustments during zazen, feeling at least grounded enough to do that, with mixed results as usual.
Lecture started badly for me, as one of the power switches for the equipment had been turned off, so there was no sound for a few moments while I traced the source of the problem. I am still getting accustomed to the set-up, and to sitting at the back of the Buddha Hall. Paul sounded pretty quiet to me, but there was very little room to manoeuvre between audibility and feedback, and I was constantly tweaking different levels to try to find a combination that worked better. - again, mixed results. I didn't really take in much of the talk, but was glad to hear him bring in Rilke, Naomi Shihab Nye (as I said later to Laura who was running the Livestream chat next to me, in the future, you will be supplied with these links ahead of time so you can add them to the chat box as they come up), and a story he had mentioned to me yesterday when we talked, of the person who decided they didn't want to date someone, but who, it transpired, had nonetheless sent the undesired person three hundred emails...
Finally, someone Joan is working with wanted pictures of the sangha here, so I took a couple of pictures at the morning work circle in the lobby before breakfast. They are a bit scruffy, and they are not the posed shots, but they also capture something of the spirit of the moment:

And now, having interrupted my writing of this to get out and run some errands between showers, I am going to going and find Caren who wants to interview me for her blog before she leaves. I will try not to say anything too provocative.

One Thing At A Time

Waking up early this morning, I noticed how light it was getting before the wake-up bell began. I went up on the roof to take a picture, and remembered doing the same thing exactly a year ago. A different kind of day today though:

 The shuso twisted her ankle yesterday, and we decided last night to have someone else ring the wake-up bell. I had a note on my door this morning saying she didn't want to do the jundo even. I opened the zendo for her after breakfast, which I never mind as it gives me an extra few minutes to drink my coffee after oryoki - and no-one senior had showed up for breakfast, so I had to open the zendo then as well.

Arlene gave a very sweet talk to a full Buddha Hall, which I cannot link to as I quickly realised that there was nothing being recorded - I guessed that in dismantling the equipment to test for the funeral, I had managed to inadvertantly disconnect the record feed, and since she started the talk with a request for silence for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, I couldn't start pulling the cabinet out and rummaging in the back for a stray cable. Laura was particularly upset that this prevented us from livestreaming as well, not least since Arlene had people expecting to hear her over the internet.

The newcomers' table was mostly filled with students from CIIS, some of whom had some very insistent questions that I did my best to confound, but as always I enjoyed meeting the people who came. 

Then another test of equipment, in the brief window of time before the EPP programme took over the Buddha Hall for the afternoon - and to my joy, with a minimum of fuss and almost no swearing, we managed to do a complete transmission chain from camera to laptop to livestream to laptop to projector and sound system. 

Now it is time to put another hat on - I go over to Green Gulch for an overnight with the Coming of Age group before coming back for the funeral rehearsal tomorrow morning. I sat in the bath, shaved my head and gave some thought on how to present the precepts to twelve year olds, and whether I bought enough chocolate to make smores on the beach tonight.

The Weekend Starts Here

On Saturday mornings I feel like I am on duty for six hours straight, from morning zazen through to the end of lunch; even more so when we have nenju during Practice Period.There are three events most Saturdays that tend to bring about the 'on duty' feeling, since the early period of zazen and service are usually more like straightforward weekday mornings, but after these we go on to oryoki, followed by the 9:25 period of zazen, and then the talk.
This weekend we have around fifteen people taking part in a three-day Recovery retreat, bringing their energy to the building, and I think all of them came to oryoki this morning, making it a little busier than usual. Oryoki is a very ceremonial and ritualised activity, and I know that it can cause great anxiety to some people (this is also true for those who serve - I know people who are probably executives with any number of people reporting to them and no end of responsibilities, who seem to quake in their boots at the idea of serving hot cereal to the assembly). I always enjoy watching people who are new to eating oryoki working their way through it; some of it is instinctual, and some of it definitely isn't, but I like to see people paying attention to what is going on around them, and figuring out some of the forms and signals. In the end, everyone usually gets fed and their bowls washed one way or another.
On a good Saturday, like today, I just have time for some coffee before going back to zendo for the 9:25 sitting.
I have come to recognise a number of the regulars at this sitting, often people who only come for this period. I don't know many of their names, but I am always happy to see them, especially as I know they can thread their way through the formality without my needing to help. We often have brand new people who come at this time as well; again, not everybody necessarily knows the forms, the bows on entering, which way to go, which seats are reserved, and I keep an eye on unfamiliar people as they progress to a seat. As I think I have written before, I try not to jump up and intervene, even if someone wanders across the altar, which we do not usually do, because I don't want them to feel weighed down by having done something wrong before they have even sat down....there is a fine line I continue to investigate between making people feel comfortable and welcomed by helping them, and by allowing them to find their own way. I used a passage from Suzuki Roshi's 'Not Always So' for a discussion at last weekend's Beginners' Sitting, partly to absolve myself of the responsibility of having to give too much instruction: "Rules are only needed when we don't have much time, or when we cannot help others more closely in a kind way. To say 'this is the rule, so you should do it' is easy, but actually that is not our way. For the beginner, maybe, instruction is necessary, but for advanced students we don't give much instruction, and they try out various ways. If possible, we give instruction to people one by one. Because that is difficult, we give group instruction or a lecture like this. But don't stick to the lecture. Think about what I really mean".