So decades ago, in the late 1970s, I was living at Green Gulch Farm in Marin County. A temple named So Ryuji. It was a dragon with its head in the and its tail down into the sea. And it was a gulch or a valley between two ridgelines. Between two ridgelines. Ridge is like... ridges of hills or mountains.

[01:04]

Like a line of mountains. And the man who had been at Green Gulch and sold Green Gulch to Zen Center. built a series of ponds to manage the flow of water off the hillsides and to provide ponds for irrigating the growing fields that we have. Der hat eine Reihe von Teichen gebaut, um das Wasser aus den höher gelegenen Gegenden zu kontrollieren und damit Bewässerung für die niederen Ebenen anbieten zu können. And over time these ponds would fill up with silt from the runoff of water and they had to be maintained and cleaned.

[02:08]

Silt, I don't know. Silt is like water mixed with earth and debris. And so we hired somebody. It's a very big job with... large tractor and crane and dump trucks, a big operation to clean these large ponds. And we hired someone for this, because it's a huge task. You need big machines with trucks and cranes and excavators and so on to lift these big ponds. and the man who did this main work in this tractor with a large crane and a clamshell that picks up the earth his name was Jack and he was about 70 years old

[03:14]

About how old I am now. I thought this was really old. And he was, I think he had emphysema or he had a lung problem. So he had two tubes to his nose and he always had an oxygen tank with him. So here's this elderly gentleman. And he always wore his baseball cap with the name of the construction company to which he belonged. who appears to be in very poor health, can't breathe without an oxygen tank.

[04:36]

But he's operating this huge piece of equipment the way a surgeon might use their scalpel. Because even though this is very big equipment, the job was very delicate because these ponds were constructed. If we broke the wall of the pond, we could create a big problem. And he could place this big, huge piece of this bucket, this clamshell, he could place it perfectly. So each morning it was my responsibility to meet with him.

[05:56]

And once he got up into the cab of the tractor, he couldn't get up and down very easily, so I would leave the Zendo in my robes and climb up and get in the cab with him. And we'd have coffee and bread and jam and we'd talk about what he was going to do for that day. And after a week or so, and I really liked him right away. And so I asked him after about a week, I said, Jack, isn't it hard for you to do this work? I mean, you're not in such good health and And after a week or so, I asked him, Jack, isn't it difficult for you to do this work?

[07:10]

You're in such a bad state of health. And he said to me, there ain't no hard. He said, if you can do it, you do it. And if you can't, you do something else. He said, but there's no hard. Buddhism talks in general about two kinds of difficulty, of suffering. The first kinds of suffering is you get hit by a truck. You're a mess. It really hurts. Buddhism can't do a whole lot about that kind of suffering when you get hit by a truck.

[08:11]

But the second kind of suffering, or what we may call a kind of incompleteness, So our ideas about ourself and one another and this world once we get hit by a truck. These sometimes decades-old beliefs we have about who we are, who one another is, what the world is. manchmal jahrzehnte alte Glaubenssätze, die wir darüber haben, wer wir sind, wer die anderen sind, was die Welt ist.

[09:20]

Und wie eine Geschichte, die wir uns immer wieder erzählen. Und Praxis bedeutet aufzuhören, dass wir uns diese alte Geschichte immer wieder erzählen. The suffering we often experience is an interruption in our narrative. Something's gone wrong with the story that we've been telling ourselves about how we're supposed to be. What our life with others is supposed to be. So practice begins with noticing this narrative, this story we've been telling ourselves. I am a completely incapable person.

[10:36]

I am incredibly competent. I'm an incapable person doesn't allow the light that is our life to continually shine forward. I'm incredibly competent. It doesn't allow our vulnerability and our openness to other sides of ourselves. This soft underbelly of our being, which wants to be scratched, wants to be patted and caressed. So the first thing we need to do is we need to notice that we have a story that we tell ourselves.

[12:05]

And then the second thing is we have to notice that we believe the story that we're telling ourselves. I... Many of you know I worked for a period of time in government. And we used to write press releases. Something happened and then we tell people what they're supposed to believe about what it is that happened. And the most dangerous thing was when you started to believe that the press release that you wrote was true. The difficulty in our life is not necessarily just the story. But that we give it the right to determine who we take ourselves to be.

[13:16]

What gives our story that right? This is really hard. I can't do this. This is really easy. What went wrong? I should always be able to do this. The practice is to shift from our identification with our narrative To what's actually happening here. It's about a kind of non-elaboration. No second activity.

[14:33]

As best we're able just to enter this situation as we and one another are together. And then out of the situation we make some hopefully intelligent decision about what to do. And I say hopefully because again the world is continually appearing. And it's being open to the information in the next minute that we're getting.

[15:44]

This is Dogen's placing ourselves fully in immediacy. It means establishing our practice in our difficulty. In our delusion. In our problems. We don't want to establish our practice in our problems. But unless we're able to include them in this immediacy, in this current arising, Unless we're able to recognize them. they'll continue to shape how we relate to ourselves in each moment.

[16:58]

So Dogen says, ordinary beings are deluded about awakening. Buddhas are awakened about delusion. It's not to deny or separate ourselves from ourselves. But to be awake to them doesn't mean that we constantly have to be embedded in our difficulties and our problems. Somehow recognizing we're suffering, recognizing our difficulties,

[17:59]

accepting our incompleteness our experience tends to be more open and less incomplete So it's not necessarily that once we can begin to recognize our limitations, we become really happy. It's not changing an unhappy self, now we can be a happy self. But it means we can begin to be, we can begin to self-reference less. We can begin to shift from an observing self to a non-interfering observing mind.

[19:27]

Which is in the very act of engagement with this life a feeling of a kind of joyful mind. Even in the midst of circumstances that are difficult, that are not happy. there's a wider sense of what this life and this being is.

[20:39]

Not just continually being caught in our narrative. There was a man named Milton who was practicing with me at Tassajara in the summer of 69. Do you remember Milton from North Carolina with horn-rimmed glasses? No. And he was Milton's... was maybe in his mid-fifties, and I think he was a university professor in North Carolina. Anyway, he went to see Suzuki Roshi, and he said, you know, it's just, I'm just not comfortable with all this bowing and ceremony and

[21:46]

I'm going to go back to North Carolina and just practice on my own. What do you think? And Suzuki Roshi said to him, Milton came, I was in the dining room, I remember, because it kind of knocked me back a bit. Suzuki Roshi said to him, it will be the same wherever you go. The possibility Being able to establish our practice in our limitations. Facing them directly.

[23:04]

Not being trapped by ourselves over and over again. Shifting as we're able to this less self-referencing mind. A feeling of Physical and emotional clarity. Not being so caught. There ain't no heart. Just this moment we're making over and over together.

[24:30]

Thank you very much.

[24:32]

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