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.

Wake-up Bell

Usually when I wake up, I keep one eye on the clock and one ear on the sounds of the wake-up bell starting downstairs; this morning I woke a little earlier than usual, so, thinking I had more time than usual, I didn't notice that nothing was happening until it was already five o'clock. I ran downstairs in my kimono, and ran the wake-up bell around the building as fast as I could manage, and had Jay start the han while I took over his job of taking attendance for the morning.
I noticed that I was quite agitated, as I can often be when things don't go as smoothly as I want them to, and as I sat in the zendo, I thought that this was not so much due to the regular fukudo not being there on time (I am grateful that this is the first time it's happened in eight months of being ino), or the fact that I had to do it myself (I could have gone looking for someone else, but that would have made it even later), as I always used to enjoy running the bell; what bothered me was that it was already warm, after another hot day yesterday, and I knew that I would be bathed in sweat and feeling clammy for another three hours until after koan class with Paul, which is pretty much how it turned out - and the fact that both my jubons are now disgusting and I will have to wash them. At least they won't take long to dry on the line in this heat.

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.

More Moon

Once again, coming upstairs after dinner last night, there was the moon rising , visible through the windows at the end of the corridor. As you can see, the weather is getting better...

Harvest Moon

The chiden notes for the Equinox Ceremony warn that it can be windy at this time of year, and it certainly was yesterday afternoon as Gretchen valiantly tried to keep things upright while she was setting up the altar in the courtyard. Luckily the heavy Buddha statue that we use, and some of my rock collection from Tassajara did the job. We had a good turnout, including members of the board who were meeting in the dining room during the afternoon, but then surprisingly, not so many seasonal words as usual. We did have what I suspect is a first - a contribution read off an iPhone. As Ingen explained to me later, he didn't have the poem memorised, and all his books are in storage, so he went online with his phone, saved it in notes and read it from there.
This morning we had a strong Full Moon Ceremony as the sun rose, and I had another lovely silent conversation with Tara. It can often be the way that the kokyo is not as relaxed during the ceremony as they had been during rehearsal, and this happened with Anna today, as she acknowledged, but then as she said afterwards, if you come away thinking 'I did great', you have nowhere to go. That said, I was fairly happy with my performance as kokyo at the Equinox Ceremony - I have trepidation about being kokyo outside, as your voice disappears into the air rather than resonating around the room, but I felt quite strong and relaxed during the eko, allowing myself to savour the words.
And just for good measure, another rising moon photograph from last night:

Wax and Wane

Between the wedding and the tokudo last weekend, and the one-day sitting and the beginning of the practice period this Saturday, we have a nice confluence of ceremonies, just so there is no feeling of longueur - tonight we celebrate the Autumn (Fall if you must) Equinox, and tomorrow morning there will be the Full Moon Bodhisattva Precept Ceremony. So if you are not reading this in China or Chile, Ireland or Italy, there is still time to come along, and if you come for the Equinox Ceremony, you can bring what we always call 'seasonally appropriate words', which usually means poems, although some people are happy to improvise. And since the weather in San Francisco is doing many interesting things right now, photos of the moon from yesterday after dinner.

Good Disciples of Buddha

Susan made a lovely observation in her speech after the wedding, that it was entirely due to Djinn and Richard's love for each other that everybody was gathered there. Yesterday the community gathered at Green Gulch for a tokudo, so you could say that it was due to the sincere practice of the three ordinands that we were all there. It was a very sweet ceremony; something about the way the Robe Chant resonated around the zendo, and the harmonious chanting of the three Ms - Mary, Maria and Michaela - brought out the beauty of the occasion. Afterwards it felt like a huge family gathering in Cloud Hall and then in the dining room. I was glad not to have to do anything other than attend and take pictures; here are a selection, including a rare coming together of the three inos, which I was very keen to have documented - Greg took this picture for us.

The preceptors

Michaela with her father

Mary

Maria

Maria

Cloud Hall crowds

Three inos - Kathy (ZMC), Shundo (CC), Connie (GGF)

Stats

Usually this early on a Sunday morning I am reading the papers waiting for it to get light enough to go and ride my bike, but since the papers had not arrived, I turned to this instead. I love these stats that Google gives me.

Page view by operating system from the last month:

Windows    984 (66%)
Macintosh   394 (26%)
iPhone           58 (3%)
Other Unix    26 (1%)
iPad              20 (1%)
Linux             2 (<1%)
iPod              2 (<1%)

Page views from the past week:

United States  266
Japan               18
Singapore        10
China                8
Germany           8
Russia               6
Canada             5
Denmark          3
Ireland             3
Argentina         2


Once again I am amazed at the global reach of this blog, and it would be fun to discover whether it is the people in Singapore who are reading on iPhones and the people in Argentina on iPods...