So since it's wildly springtime and has been for a month or two here,
I want to talk about Tending the Garden of the Heart.
And I'd like to start with a story that's a bedtime story I used to read to my daughter from Arnold Lobel,
For those of you who know the stories about Frog and Toad.
So you can just listen,
Then you can go to sleep after this if you want to.
And it goes like this.
Frog was in his garden and Toad came walking by.
What a fine garden you have,
Frog,
He said.
Yes,
Said Frog,
It's very nice,
But it was hard work.
I wish I had a garden,
Said Toad.
Here are some flower seeds,
Plant them in the ground,
Said his friend Frog,
And soon you will have a garden.
How soon,
Asked Toad.
You know,
This is us,
Right?
Quite soon,
Said Frog.
My daughter told me I shouldn't read this because I'm not patient enough,
But I said,
Quite soon,
Said Frog.
So Toad ran home.
He planted the flower seeds.
Now seeds,
Said Toad,
Start growing.
Toad walked up and down a few times.
The seeds did not start to grow.
Toad put his head close to the ground and said loudly,
Okay now seeds,
Start growing.
Toad looked at the ground again.
The seeds did not start to grow.
Toad put his head very close to the ground and shouted,
Seeds,
Start growing!
Frog came running up the path.
What's all this noise,
He asked.
My seeds will not grow,
Said Toad.
You're shouting too much,
Said Frog.
The poor seeds are afraid to grow.
My seeds are afraid to grow,
Asked Toad.
Of course,
Said Frog.
Leave them alone for a few days.
Let the sun shine on them.
Let the rain fall on them.
Soon your seeds will start to grow.
That night,
Toad looked out his window.
Drat,
Said Toad.
My seeds have not started to grow.
They must be afraid of the dark.
So Toad went out to his garden with some candles.
I will read the seeds a story,
Said Toad.
Then they will not be afraid.
Toad read a very long story to his seeds.
All the next day,
Toad sang songs to his seeds in the rain.
And all the next day,
Toad read poems to his seeds.
And all the next day,
Toad played music for his seeds.
Toad looked at the ground.
The seeds still did not start to grow.
What shall I do,
Cried Toad.
These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world.
Then Toad felt very tired and he fell asleep.
Toad,
Toad,
Wake up,
Said Frog.
Look at your garden.
Toad looked at his garden.
Little green plants were coming up out of the ground.
At last,
Shouted Toad,
My seeds have stopped being afraid to grow.
And now you will have a nice garden too,
Said Frog.
Yes,
Said Toad,
But you were right,
Frog.
It was very hard work.
So here we are,
You know,
And coming to sit in meditation and try to learn how to meditate,
Which can also feel like very hard work,
You know,
And you're trying to fix yourself and change yourself and so forth.
You go to the gym and you go to therapy and then you meditate and all that stuff and hope that it helps.
Yeah,
Good luck.
In the teachings of the Buddha from many years ago,
Early one morning,
As the story is written,
While out on his alms,
He was sitting in the middle of the room,
And he was sitting in the middle of the room,
And he was sitting in the middle of the room,
And he was sitting in the middle of the room,
And he was eating,
As the story is written,
While out on his alms round,
The Buddha approached in the spring a plowing field,
Owned by a rich Brahmin who was distributing food to all the workers.
And when the Brahmin saw the Buddha,
He kind of dismissed him and said,
I work,
O monk,
I plow,
I sow,
And having worked the fields,
I eat.
You too should plow You too should plow and sow and then you can eat.
Don't be a beggar basically.
And the Buddha replied,
I too plow and sow and having done so I eat.
And the Brahmin said,
You claim to be a plowman but I see no plow.
Tell me what kind of plowing is it you do?
And the Buddha replied,
Trust or faith is the seed.
Composure,
The rain.
Mindfulness is my plow and yoke.
Compassion is my guide pole and mind is the harness.
Wakefulness is the plow blade,
Well guarded in action and in speech.
I use truth to weed and cultivate release.
Wise effort is the oxen drawing the plow steadily toward freedom without regret.
This is how I plow and it bears the fruit of deathlessness,
Of freedom.
Whoever plows in this way will become free of all the sorrows of the heart.
And so the Brahmin said,
Ah,
I see you really do work the fields.
You are indeed.
And he said he was going to offer food.
And as the story goes on,
He had them bring this fine food and put it into the bowl of the Buddha.
And as it touched the metal of the bowl,
The alms bowl,
It hissed and it all like steam and it all kind of flew out of the bowl.
And if any of you are old farmers,
You'll understand why.
Because if you plow a furrow in a field,
At the end of that furrow,
If you were to touch the plow,
It's very hot,
Cutting through the earth.
And so in the symbolism,
Anyway,
Of the story,
This was his bowl and he had done his plowing and you couldn't even put food in it because it would all steam out of there.
And the Brahmin said,
Okay,
Dude,
I get it.
You've done your plowing.
Recently,
This Saturday,
A good friend of mine,
Sultrim Malayoni,
Who is an American Tibetan nun,
Lama Sultrim,
Who I've known for almost 40 years,
Taught a day here of the practice of turning difficulties into awakening through visualizing them as demons or some kind of visualized form of a being that wants something and then feeding the demons,
Basically,
Was the practice.
It's a Tibetan Chod practice.
And she'd been through a really hard time in the last few years.
Her husband,
Who she adored,
They had a wonderful marriage and had built this beautiful Tibetan center in Colorado,
Died very suddenly a few years ago.
She went for about a year to Tibet on pilgrimage to try and remake her life and then came back and then went again to do some practice.
She said,
Kind of looking for herself after her life had sort of been so in a kind of shocking way,
She had planned to be married and do this whole journey together,
Had been taken apart.
And she went to see a famous teacher,
The 17th Karmapa,
Who suggested since she was doing the practices of facing change and death,
That she go to the ten difficult places,
Which meant that she did a pilgrimage in Nepal and Sikkim and parts of India to charnel grounds.
She went with a couple of friends and she would go and put on her lama robes,
And she's quite,
She looks,
She does the lama part really well,
She looks very good with it,
And sit there with her beads and her robes and so forth,
Alone in the charnel grounds.
And the charnel grounds are serious,
You know,
There's blood and body parts and dogs that run around where the bodies haven't burned completely,
And sit all night and meditate and offer herself the practice that she was doing,
Was to sit and say,
If anything difficult arises,
I offer my body and spirit that something good will come of it,
That my being and my spirit will bring compassion to this world no matter what.
She said it was one thing to sit in America and teach this practice,
You know,
In Colorado in this nice Tibetan temple that's got indoor heating and you know,
All the kind of comforts of sort of the concierge practice of the US,
Right?
And it was another,
And then she said one night I was in this charnel ground and this guy came with a machete and he was chopping things up and I'm there and it's dark and I'm sitting,
And she said,
And the level of fear was so intense and because of it the practice got so deep,
Because I had resolved I wasn't going to get up,
Plus which I couldn't run,
There was nothing else to do,
So I had to say,
All right,
I surrender,
I offer myself,
She said,
And then I just got filled with the joy of freedom,
Of not holding onto a single thing.
And it was really interesting having the conversation,
I was both horrified and inspired at the same time in some way,
And I've done practice like that,
Not in India but in Thailand and Laos and sitting in the forest in charnel grounds,
But what was inspiring really was the depth of her dedication.
Yes,
There was really deep understanding that came,
She seemed freer,
And having known her for all these years,
For 40 years,
She seemed softer,
Less judgmental of herself or less expecting the world to be some particular way,
The world is the way it is,
Of joy and sorrow and praise and blame and gain and loss,
And the point isn't to make the world different,
Although you have to offer what you can to stop injustice,
To feed those who are hungry,
To serve the world,
But it's not your job to change the world,
To fix it,
It still will have praise and blame and gain and loss and pleasure and pain,
It's just woven that way,
And there was some very deep freedom and compassion,
She just seemed wiser because of it,
And it made me appreciate like these stories that I started to read,
The plowing sutra and the story of frog and toad,
The kind of dedication over time that we offer,
The tending that's asked of us,
That we offer to the practices of compassion and care inwardly and outwardly,
That allow us to become the most beautiful human beings that we can,
Which is really what we're asked to do,
You're not asked to be somebody else,
Nobody's ever been like you,
You're as weird as they come,
And you're unique,
The universe has never produced anybody quite like you before,
But in your weirdness you're asked to become magnificent really,
And magnificent with your gifts that you develop in yourself,
In Zen they say there are only two things,
You sit and you sweep the garden,
And it doesn't matter how big the garden is,
That is to say you sit to find a place of stillness and inner freedom and very deep compassion and forgiveness,
And then you go out and you tend the garden of the world and you offer what you have,
If someone's hungry you feed them,
If there's injustice you respond to it,
Whatever it is that is in front of you shows you what's needed to be done,
And it's not because you're some great person doing it,
But because it's family,
It's just us together.
And I think of that statement from Martin Luther King where he said something like,
The arc of history may be long,
But it bends toward justice,
And I've been involved recently with some of the events in Burma,
As that country is trying to become democratic,
And what happened there is that with the lifting of the horrible military dictatorship of the last half a century,
Then all the buried unfinished ethnic conflicts and religious conflicts have started to surface,
As happens in other places,
It happened in Yugoslavia,
Or it happens between the Shia and the Sunnis and the Alawites in Syria and so forth,
And so Burma is trying to figure out how to live with this religious diversity and ethnic diversity that's never really been addressed,
And some of it is very painful because there's recently been a lot of anti-Muslim violence,
And some Buddhist monks fomenting it in parts of Burma,
And violence toward other ethnic groups and so forth,
But also quite recently there has been a whole movement of young people who are printing t-shirts that say,
There will be no racial or religious conflict because of me,
And they're passing them out by the thousands in Burma,
You know,
And certain of the best of the Buddhist elders are reminding the culture of their history of tolerance and dignity,
And that that's really at the root of what makes a wise society,
And when President Obama went there in January or whenever it was to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi in government,
And stood up and said,
I'm moved by the timeless ideal of metta,
Of loving kindness that we as human beings can dedicate ourselves to live together with compassion and care for one another,
And then he said,
And I come from a country where not that long ago I would not have been allowed to vote or to be a full citizen because of the color of my skin,
And we're still working on that project,
You know,
For 200 years from this history to try to make a place of real justice for everyone,
So I come here to encourage you in the same project for your people.
And so,
Yes,
There's tremendous difficulty,
And it's not clear what will happen in Burma or Egypt or lots of other places,
Or the U.
S.
For that matter,
But there's something hopeful.
When the Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning,
One of his practices is to recite the Bodhisattva vows,
And the version that he uses is from Shantideva,
This wonderful Buddhist sage and poet,
That says,
May I be a raft or a bridge or a boat to help those cross the flood?
May I be a resting place for the weary?
May I be medicine for the sick?
May I be food for the hungry?
May I be a lamp in the dark night to illuminate the path?
May I offer myself for as long as earth and sky and sun and moon and stars endure and longer until all beings together can awaken to the great freedom that is their true nature?
Something like that,
Some little vow like that,
Right?
And what's most compelling about it is there's like no time limit on it.
Okay,
Well,
I'll do this for a few years,
And then maybe I'll get a new job or something like that.
I'll move to another place or take my resume and see if they want the Dalai Lama to work somewhere else or something like that.
It's as long as earth and sky and sun and moon exist and beyond.
And what it is,
It says that you set the compass of the heart to that which really matters in the deepest way in this mysterious human life you've been given.
And you meditate as he does in the morning.
You quiet the mind and bring a sense of compassion and openness to the heart.
And then you listen.
You learn how to make yourself what you want the world to be.
You learn how to somehow find the center of forgiveness and justice and peace and well-being in yourself.
And then you get up from that stillness and you express yourself in the world,
Which is your gift.
And people do it in every different way.
It can be through music and art and dance and business and technology and parenting and literally gardening.
You will each find your own way.
But here you are.
You've got this mysterious human incarnation.
And when you come to meditate and spiritual practice,
Yes,
There's something about reducing stress,
Right,
Or so forth.
That's all right.
It has its value,
Especially in a pretty stressful,
Speedy society.
But that's just the beginning.
Really,
It's much more about quieting yourself so that you can ask,
What matters?
Who am I?
How do I live with this mysterious life I've been given?
And what will fulfill this incarnation,
This mysterious gift of life?
And when you stop and listen,
There's a sense of connecting,
As Frog and Toad's little story points to,
To some greater rhythm and trusting something much bigger than your small sense of self.
Pablo Neruda,
The great poet,
Says,
You can pick all the flowers,
But you can't stop the spring.
And there's some way in which,
As you quiet,
You can also feel that there's a wellspring of life force itself that is who you are,
That you're a part of.
The same force that pushes the,
You know,
Green sprouts through the cracks in the sidewalk in an unstoppable way.
And that you're part of that mystery and that you have the right to offer yourself beautifully to the world.
The point isn't so much to perfect yourself.
I don't mean you're going to,
You know,
Make your body free of disease.
Yes,
You want to take care of it as best you can,
But aging,
Sickness and death are also part of the game in incarnation.
Anybody not have that?
Raise your hand,
You have your eight dollars back,
Right?
It's just part of him,
It's just having a body.
The body isn't who you are.
You get it.
You get to use it.
So you want to use it well.
So it's not to that,
And you're not going to perfect your personality.
You already know that.
Hopeless,
Right?
And you're not really going somewhere.
Where you are is where you're going.
You're going to the eternal present.
The point is not the future of humanity,
But the presence of eternity.
And there's something in Buddhist teachings that's called pure perception.
Nelson Mandela talked about it at one point where he said,
It never hurts to see the good in someone.
They often act the better because of it.
Pure perception is to see that even in the difficulty of the world,
There's a place to plant a seed of forgiveness,
Or a seed of justice,
Or a seed of attention,
Or a seed of truthfulness,
Both outwardly and within your own heart.
From nobly born begin the Buddhist texts.
Do not forget who you really are.
Do not forget your fundamental dignity and your fundamental capacity for freedom wherever you find yourself.
And tend that.
You'll forget it,
But don't forget it.
Remember it.
Tend it like you would tend your garden,
The garden of your own heart,
Because it's available to you anytime.
As Victor Frankl wrote,
He said,
We who lived through the concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others and giving away their last piece of bread.
They may have been few in number,
But their very existence proves the last and greatest of human freedoms,
The freedom to choose your spirit irrespective of the circumstance.
They can put your body in prison,
But no one can imprison your spirit.
And so to meditate,
Yes,
You quiet the mind,
Yes,
You open the heart,
Rest in loving awareness,
Is to really find and sense that freedom of spirit,
And then tend it,
And tend to what wants to grow and open and blossom through your life.
Now,
As you do,
Guess what will happen?
Trouble.
You already know that,
Right?
It's just how it works.
Obstacles,
You could call it what you want,
You know.
Here's the Buddha saying,
Faith and mindfulness is the seed,
But then what about weeds,
Insect,
Drought,
Right?
All that happens too when you're plowing.
So you plant your seeds,
And then as the Bodhisattva,
You know,
May I be a bridge,
May I be medicine,
May I be food,
You plant your seeds,
You face yourself in the direction of dignity and compassion,
Connecting that with yourself,
And then you take it a day at a time,
A step at a time,
A moment at a time.
In business,
Obstacles,
Not enough capital,
Key employees quit,
The market changes,
Competition becomes stiffer,
Your supplier gets bought up,
Entrance rates rise,
Right?
What do you do?
Okay,
I give up.
It doesn't work that way.
You meet obstacles and you bring attention and care to them and find your way.
Parenting,
When they're really little,
They just put everything in their mouth.
When they're a little older,
They take the car and run it into things,
Especially if they're boys,
Right?
Or they,
You know,
Whatever they go through.
You have children,
You know all about it,
Right?
You have to socialize them so they don't hit each other with blocks,
Right?
They hurt themselves when they're playing sports or riding their bicycle or whatever,
And then they go through puberty and it's all over,
Right?
You have to deal with independence and sexuality and all those things that you had to deal with.
And the point isn't that they don't go through that,
But that it becomes the practice of tending your garden with love,
With patience,
With your own inner sense of dignity,
And then somehow there's a communing of that with what you tend.
In love relationships,
It's the same,
You know.
There are the good days and then there are the days where one of you doesn't want to be the grown-up,
Basically.
It's your turn to be the grown-up.
Or where all the wounding and the stuff from the past comes up and gets triggered and you have to breathe and be patient and compassionate.
And then you come to meditation,
It's exactly the same thing.
I mean,
It's why we call it practice.
You sit and like the cartoon in The New Yorker that showed the car going across the great,
You know,
Utah desert with the billboard that said,
Your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles,
Right?
It's kind of like meditation,
Right?
The mind secretes all the thoughts and you just notice it,
You know,
Or your loneliness comes.
And I think it's the poet Hafiz who says,
Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it season you like few ingredients can.
Let it cut more deeply.
And let the loneliness take you to a place of being solitary and alone and free in that aloneness,
Which is both connected to the world and therefore unafraid of losing it.
Don't run from it.
Otherwise,
If you get a little bored or a little lonely or sad or all the things that come,
All the unfinished things,
And you run away from it,
What do you do at home?
You open the refrigerator,
Right?
Or you go online or something to distract yourself.
You can't be with yourself.
So to sit in meditation is to take this seat halfway between heaven and earth and say,
I will be here in the fullness of this human incarnation and hold it with wakefulness and loving awareness and compassion.
Yes.
And it changes you somehow.
Not,
Again,
By changing your personality or something,
But I think some years ago Thich Nhat Hanh,
Wonderful Vietnamese Zen master,
Came here to teach a couple times or a few times.
And there were like 3,
000 people on the hillside here,
And we built a stage,
And everybody was there,
And someone was instructing them and following their breath or eating an apple mindfully.
And then it was time for Thich Nhat Hanh,
The Zen master,
To come.
And I remember watching him walk up the road,
And Thich Nhat Hanh,
Well,
Richard Baker Roshi,
Who was the abbot at San Francisco Zen Center when Thich Nhat Hanh first came to San Francisco,
Described Thich Nhat Hanh.
He said he's a cross between a cloud,
A snail,
And a piece of heavy machinery.
I thought it was a great poetic description,
Because he's quite slow in a certain way,
But also completely unstoppable.
So he walked up the road with this kind of deliberate and beautiful mindfulness with each step.
And you could feel all 3,
000 people go,
Like a breath go out.
This is what it looks like to just take a step and just be exactly where you are,
To eat when you eat and step when you step and be so fully present.
And it was gorgeous.
It was absolutely gorgeous.
And so it's not that you're trying to be someone else somewhere else,
But that you can bring yourself so fully into the present,
Tending what's present with loving awareness,
With mindfulness,
In some deep way,
Which is what your meditation practice starts to teach you.
Now,
It's also important that it not be idealistic.
So Zen Master Santhony,
Another great Korean teacher,
Who is a teacher and friend of mine,
Had a big center in Providence.
He was actually an interesting character,
Because he came from this quite famous Korean lineage of many Zen Masters over a long time.
And he decided to come and teach in the West,
And somebody sent him a ticket,
And he ended up in Providence,
Rhode Island,
Which is where his main center was started.
And then he's got 50 other centers that he sort of developed from before he died.
But anyway,
And he didn't really know how to teach Zen or speak very much English,
So he got a job in a laundromat near Brown University.
And he would work in the laundromat fixing the machines and helping people,
Things and stuff like that.
And then the students would come in,
And there he was in his gray Zen robes,
And he would say things like,
Oh,
You must clean inside as well as outside.
Very,
Very simple.
Not a lot of language,
But very,
Very simple.
And they got really intrigued.
Who is this guy in the gray robes and the laundromat?
And pretty soon they started to listen to him,
And he said,
Oh,
You come over.
I'll show you how to clean inside.
And started this whole big Zen community.
But anyway,
They say in Zen,
When you walk,
Just walk,
And when you eat,
Just eat,
And when you sit,
Just sit,
And to really be fully present where you are.
But one morning,
Sansanin was sitting in his Zen center,
Eating his morning rice gruel or whatever they serve for breakfast,
And reading the morning paper.
And one of his students had the temerity to complain and say,
Master,
You tell us when we eat,
Just eat,
You know,
Or when we walk,
Just walk,
And here you are eating and reading.
You know,
This doesn't seem like the Zen you're teaching us.
And he looked up and he said,
When you eat and read,
Just eat and read.
Because it's also really easy to take your ideas of the garden or of spiritual practice and use it to judge yourself and say,
I'm not good enough,
And this is the way I am,
And create some whole new ideal of perfection that's sort of like the house and gardens variety of what your garden's going to look like.
And it just doesn't look that way.
Even for house and gardens,
It only looks that way on that day with the proper lighting and a really classy photographer and bringing in some special plants that you put in for that moment.
Yeah,
It looks really good,
Right?
The next day,
It's not that it doesn't work that way.
So it's not about that kind of perfection.
It's not about the outer perfection.
It's really the perfection of presence and dignity and love that matter.
So in Santinim's lineage,
His great grand teacher said this,
Just to make it a little tougher because this now makes it sound a little too easy,
He says.
He says,
Don't wish for perfect health.
In perfect health,
There arises greed and wanting.
So the masters say,
Make good medicine from the suffering of your sickness.
How's that?
Take what your body is offering you and make the medicine of courage and compassion.
Don't hope for a life without problems.
An easy life results in a judgmental and lazy mind.
So the masters say,
Accept the anxieties and difficulties of this very life you've been given.
Don't expect your practice to be clear of obstacles.
Without hindrances,
The mind that seeks enlightenment will burn out.
So the masters say,
Attain deliverance in the midst of your disturbances.
Don't expect to practice hard and not experience the weird.
That's what it says.
Hard practice that evades the unknown makes for weak commitment.
So the masters say,
Help hard practice by befriending every demon that arises.
And it kind of goes on like this.
You know,
Don't expect to finish doing things easily.
If you happen to acquire something easily,
The will is made weaker.
So the masters say,
Try again to complete what you are doing and do it fully each time.
It goes on.
It's really an admonition or an invitation to a kind of courage.
And any decent gardener knows this.
You don't just plant.
You might not have to sing and read poems to your seeds.
But you do have to weed and you do have to water and you do have to fertilize.
And you do have to tend.
And if you do,
Something beautiful happens.
And to meditate is to tend your own heart in that same way.
And it doesn't mean to be judgmental about it,
But the weeding part is to say,
These repetitive thoughts,
They don't actually have my best interest in mind.
I think I'll let those ones go.
I'm not going to believe.
Thank you for your opinion.
You know,
You can acknowledge them.
There's the judging mind.
Thank you.
That's the judging mind.
And then come back and say,
No,
Let me rest in compassion.
Or this problem with my body that I've been trying to avoid or frightened of or something.
Let me see if I can actually pay attention with a loving awareness without so much judgment.
Notice the fear that arises.
Tend to that with the same compassion.
And really be respectful of what the body is asking.
So that you take your very life as the field of practice,
First this way,
And then in the relationships,
In your family,
In your love relationship,
In the schools,
The communities,
And the body politic,
In the world that you are a part of.
When you begin to sit quietly,
One of the things that you notice is all the ideas that come about whether you're doing it right,
Who you're supposed to be,
How it's supposed to happen.
As I said,
You don't want to be idealistic about it.
But there it is.
You're sitting there.
And you know,
What arises is the judging mind or the fear and anxiety or the self-doubt or the trauma from the past.
My mother never loved me.
You know,
Maybe it's even true at some point.
But you can be awfully loyal to your suffering and kind of keep it going.
And it turns out if you pay careful attention,
What you notice is that almost all of this is just a story.
There you are sitting minding your own business,
And then the storytelling machine says,
You know,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Fox is going to put on a production about your life,
Your childhood or your relationship or your body,
And we're going to put it in living color,
Right,
And scare you,
You know,
Or judge you or whatever.
And really,
It's quite amazing what it does.
So after one of the retreats that we have every year down in the desert in Yucca Valley for the last 36 years,
This wonderful place out in the desert in Yucca Valley in Joshua Tree,
One of the retreatants who was quite,
It had been her first 10-day retreat,
And she was quite pleased to have gone through that whole retreat process and gotten very still and quiet.
She went to the airport,
Palm Spring Airport,
To fly out to back to wherever it was that she lived in Minnesota,
I think.
And then she wrote me this letter after about something had happened.
So she got to the airport,
Went into the little airport shop,
Got some magazine to read on the plane,
And then got a bag of cookies.
And she went into the boarding gate area and sat down.
There's a couple of seats and then one of those little kind of tables and then a couple more seats.
You know how it is in the airport.
And she put down her bag and her reading and sat for a moment and then picked up her reading and then looked over where she put her stuff down,
And the guy sitting on the other side of the table opened the bag of cookies and took one out.
Well,
She'd been meditating,
So she just noticed,
Hmm,
This is pretty weird,
You know,
Okay.
But she just looked and she looked at him and he smiled and he offered her.
He said,
Here,
You all want one.
So she took one and then he took one.
Okay,
This guy's a little.
.
.
And then he ate another one and she ate one.
There were,
You know,
Like half a dozen cookies in there.
There was like one left.
He held it up.
Okay,
You want this one?
She ate it.
So it's like,
Okay,
Pretty weird,
All these thoughts about this.
Finally,
They announced her plane.
She gets on,
Takes her seat,
Puts her purse underneath the seat.
And as she's getting herself settled,
She opens her bag and in it she sees her bag of cookies,
Which were the same kind of cookies.
And she'd had this whole big story,
You know,
Where she's taking the cookies and whose cookies are they really,
You know.
So the mind is actually quite unreliable.
And it has no pride.
And all you can do is remember like the Dalai Lama's vows,
That in this moment let me plant a seed of compassion.
In this moment let me plant a seed of dignity and presence.
In this moment let me use whatever is the success or the failure as a place to do this practice,
Which is why you quiet yourself in meditation so you have that capacity and that presence to do it.
Kathy Snead is a woman who started in the San Francisco jail 20 some years ago.
She went to visit some folks in the jail.
And of course our American prison system is horrible,
The prison industrial complex.
We have more people behind bars locked in these cages.
It's both like almost a slave system of poverty,
Racist poverty prisons.
It's also the default mental hospitals of our society now.
It's really something quite terrible.
Anyway,
So she went into the county jail,
Saw people in there languishing in certain ways as people do.
But there had been a big farm as part of the San Francisco county jail.
In the old days both some of the prisons and some of the mental hospitals when they still existed had farms where people would grow food.
And so she decided to start a garden project.
And she went out and she got hoes and rakes and seeds and things like that gifted to her from various places.
And they had an old greenhouse and she invited some of the people who were in prison there to come in and start to plant things.
And for a number of them it became incredibly important.
They'd have their row,
They'd plant,
They'd water,
They'd do all that.
It was like they could do something positive with their life and their time.
It became so important.
She writes about how there was this great big guy who'd done all the working out with weights like a lot of guys do in prison and all the tattoos and stuff.
She was showing someone around near where he was working.
He said,
Now don't step on my babies,
On my little plants.
Be really careful.
In fact,
It got so important for some of these guys that when they would get out they would commit some minor crime to get sent back in because they want to get back to their garden.
So then she had to start the neighborhood garden project.
So they had something to go to when they got out.
But we all want to do this.
And in some way the practices of loving kindness or compassion or forgiveness or just returning to the breath with this breath calming the body,
With this breath quieting the mind is the tending of your garden,
The garden of your heart and the garden of your life.
It's pretty mysterious.
Thoreau says,
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,
I have great faith in a seed.
Convince me you have a seed there and I'm prepared to expect miracles.
We don't control a lot of things really.
I mean you can choose to a certain extent where you live or work,
But not completely as you know.
And you certainly can't choose what the people around you do and how they'll behave.
And in fact if you notice when you sit you can't even choose very much what your own mind does.
Stop thinking you tell it.
Does it work?
Does it listen?
I don't want to feel these feelings.
Does it listen?
But what you do get to choose is the spirit with which you receive this mystery that opens for you.
And that spirit is everything.
It's amazing.
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven premiered on May 17,
1924 in the great opera house in Vienna.
It was Beethoven's first stage appearance in 12 years and the whole of the city was excited and the theater crowded.
And while Beethoven was conducting at center stage the performance on the side was quietly being directed by Michael Umlaut who was the Kapellmeister,
The choirmeister.
He instructed the singers and musicians to ignore Beethoven who was totally deaf and who was quickly turning the pages of his score and beating time for an orchestra that he could not hear.
The violinist Joseph Bohm who played that day gives this account.
Beethoven directed the piece himself.
He stood before the lectern and gesticulated furiously.
At times he rose,
At other times he shrank to the ground.
He moved as if he wanted to play all the instruments himself and sing for the whole chorus.
At the end of the symphony as the audience erupted into a standing ovation Beethoven was still several measures off and conducting wildly.
It was the lead singer,
The contralto,
Caroline Unger who walked over and gently turned the composer who couldn't really see what was going on to face the cheering crowd and seeing their reception yet hearing nothing he stood there and began to weep.
So you give yourself to life and you don't know the results.
You can't know that.
The results are not given to you.
What your gift is,
Is to act with beauty or dignity or compassion,
To plant those seeds,
To act without attachment to the results because that's not in your hands.
But you get to plant the seeds and your meditation and your training and your art in some way is to learn how to quiet and connect yourself to what really matters so that moment by moment you can live in this world in a magnificent way.
