As I opened the computer to write, it dropped in that there are three components or areas of content in our Practice that I’d like to talk about. First is Zen Awareness Practice itself. It is the foundation for all we “do” and it’s “for us.” We practice to be more present, for our own transformation, to have the possibility of realizing our inherent enlightenment. Is this selfish? Not at all; it’s the greatest contribution we can make to the world.
However, if we’re not paying attention, practice can become self-absorbed. Spiritual practice is glorious once we get past the most virulent of the ego resistance. We’re seeing things we’ve never seen, understanding what we’ve always been confused about, leaving behind old karmically conditioned suffering, increasingly living in light and love. Can’t blame a person for wanting more of that all the time!
And so Practice offers ways to pursue light and love that aren’t “self-absorbed.”
What follows will likely feel redundant for those who have been around a while. Fortunately, we all understand that as Suzuki Roshi famously stated, “If you lose the spirit of repetition your practice will become quite difficult.” My intention is to make apparent how all of what we engage in as a Sangha fits together.
As a Sangha, we knew early on that we wanted a place for retreating, to get away from the bustle and noise of our lives in the city—such as they were at that time before computers and cell phones—into the quiet spaciousness of nature. We found ourselves smack dab in the middle of 320 pristine acres of some of the most beautiful nature on the planet. For the next 30-plus years we made a couple of those acres in the middle of that forest our Practice home, loving it and caring for it until climate change made us realize we could no longer be there and we were, blessedly, able to return it to the Mi Wuk tribe from whom it had been taken so long ago.
I fell in love with St. Francis the first time I heard about him. To me he is the quintessential “person of Zen.” As soon as I was able, I made a pilgrimage to his city of Assisi and immediately fell in love with it. On one of my many visits to Assisi, attempting to see how we could have a Peace Center there, I met a young Franciscan friar, Brother John. We were part of a meditation group made up of visitors from around the world, all of whom shared a love of Assisi and Francis. Except John. John was there essentially as a student, learning how to be someone devoting his life to the Church.
As we all got to know one another, John gathered his courage to ask us if we would be willing to offer assistance to the impoverished slum in Zambia in which he’d grown up. He suggested that it would be very helpful if everyone could donate an amount each month that he could get to the folks back in Kantolomba. Then he turned to me and said, “Since you’re an American and Americans have all the money, will you come to Kantolomba to help?” He had a number of ideas about what would transpire once we “rich Americans” got there, most of which didn’t happen, but something quite unexpectedly marvelous has evolved, as most of you know, and which many of you have taken on the responsibility to maintain.
As a Sangha we realized that giving assistance to people living in wretched poverty could be very helpful for us in keeping a perspective on our own lives. Do we really want to complain about how hard our lives are when we are in close relationship with people who have no clean water and no electricity, who live in tiny mud huts without decent roofs to keep the hut from collapsing in the rain, and who are slowly starving to death? That larger perspective helps us to stay in gratitude, and, as we know, gratitude wants to give. That perspective also helps us to be in touch with the generosity and kindness that self-hating voices would like to tell us we don’t have. (If you don’t know the whole story or would like to visit it again, you can find it here.)
Leaving the Monastery for Sequim we thought we’d carry on pretty much as we had for the last few decades. Not to be. The 25 acres we purchased weren’t suitable for the infrastructure required to replicate the Monastery, and there was a growing clarity that continuing to offer monastic practice was not our future. Four exquisitely beautiful acres right on the edge of Sequim came on the market. Would that be a better fit for us? Seemed so, and so we bought it. Time to put the 25 acres on the market. If you’ve been here, you know that those 25 acres are as breathtakingly gorgeous as anywhere in the world. People regularly say that coming to the Farm is like being in Switzerland or Bavaria. Surely this will be snapped up as soon as it’s listed. Right? Not a single offer. Only two people even looked at it. Yikes.
What now? We threw ourselves into cleaning up the human messes on the four acres, got it into pristine condition, and held the first Summer of Sangha. Glorious. And, definitely not sustainable. We had no ability to get out of the exciting weather changes Western Washington is known for. Cold, windy, rainy in the morning, hot and sunny in the afternoon. Need shelter from cold, need shelter from heat, and we had neither. (And, no one ever complained. In true Zen fashion folks shivered when cold and sweated when hot!)
Let’s build a gazebo to solve these issues! From design to finished construction took the entire next summer and we were not able to use it once. Is there a message here? If so, what is it?
About that time, we had an offer that felt almost too good to be true. We got a volunteer who wanted to move to the 25 acres and farm it. And, the methods he wanted to use were those of regenerative agriculture, something we’d wanted desperately to use at the Monastery but never had the resources to implement. For those of you who are not familiar with regenerative agriculture please take a look at this video (password: commonground). It will explain much about the process itself as well as some of the tangential programs, all of which are aiming to offer as much compassion and lovingkindness to our Mother Earth as possible.
Not sure how this is hanging together, or even if it is, but this seems to me to be our whole spiritual/awareness practice program. We practice with all the tools available to us to awaken to our True Nature. This we do together as a Sangha. Then we extend that to folks on the other side of the world who are exactly like us but without our privilege. As an example of our parallel lives, Theresa and the cooperative members are looking for enough land to lease to be able to grow their own maize so they don’t have to use the funds we send over to purchase mealie meal. They are taking responsibility for becoming self-sustaining in small and big ways, making good use of the availability of clean water, electricity, solar, and internet.
Back here at this Farm we’re full-tilt into “Not to lead a harmful life nor to encourage others to do so.” Yes, we’ve always been careful of the myriad creatures we share the earth with, but now we’re in that place we’ve always kidded about—nothing is more pathetic than a Buddhist with a house full of ants. Only this time it’s wire worms.
Turns out not tilling the soil or using pesticides, insecticides, commercial fertilizers and such makes for very happy living conditions for all sorts of underground dwellers. One group of these dwellers has as their primary happy place areas of land that have been left, undisturbed, in grass. We have lots of that! There we were, all of us living happily together right up until we decided to plant lettuce in those very places from which we had removed the grass and brought in our clods of soil to make raised beds.
Can those little creatures be faulted for assuming all this was being done for them? If you went out in your backyard only to discover someone had planted it with vegetables, wouldn’t you think those vegetables were for you? Exactly what they concluded about that lettuce. Munch, munch and no more lettuce. Hundreds of lettuces. What to do? We’re on their turf. We moved into their home and want to change how things work. It’s not hard to see this is what has happened all over the earth. We want something new for us, something different, and everything else must pay the price.
Can we find a way to live together peacefully? We hope so. Apparently, they like potatoes. We’ll put potatoes in the ground and hope they decide to shift their attention away from newly planted lettuces to the potato decoys. We can then move them far away from the cultivated area to an environment more like the one they had before we arrived. We’ll plant mustard and marigolds, which they apparently don’t like to be near, as an encouragement to move a few feet over into the native grasses they preferred before we came along to offer them tasty new varieties.
Here we have the “opportunity” which comes with choosing regenerative agriculture over more conventional methods—finding the place that is most compassionate for all, a nonseparate orientation in which, to the best of one’s ability, all Life is revered and enjoyed, respected and welcomed!
 The first currants bloom in the nursery |
With the Farm we have 25 acres of opportunity to experience Love in Action. Spring is bursting forth in all its glory and the days are filled with scything, raking, weeding, and mulching, caring for what has already been planted and preparing the soil for the hundreds of new plants that are readying to move from the greenhouse to the ground.  Lettuces in the greenhouse waiting to be transplanted |
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 Scything is a daily task. |
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All these practices make up regenerative agriculture and jyo is inspired to help bring them to the larger community. Engaging teachers and students to learn more about these ways of being with the earth, assisting people to turn their lawns into something more sustainable, partnering with more restaurants and organizations along with setting up a city-wide drop-off point for folks to bring their food scraps so all those scraps become compost rather than ending up in the landfill where they produce greenhouse gases which are so destructive to the environment.
As mentioned last month, we applied for a grant that would enable us to purchase the electric loader that would take turning the compost piles from backbreaking labor to an easy few minutes of fun. Well, we got the grant and we have the loader and it is all we’d hoped for and more. JG, short for Jolly Green, is truly worth its weight in gold. S/he (which is not clear just yet) will allow us to make the composting operation as big as we choose. This will be very good news for the other organic farmers who don’t have the ability to make good compost for themselves with this level of efficiency. Compost can now be made in a few weeks rather than many months.
JG makes it look easy!
| We’re looking for more grants—a very new area of pursuit for us—to assist with the growing list of needs. Two items we didn’t feel we could wait for are a carport that is replacing the large tent that was lost in a big wind, under which the farm hands shelter through that changeable weather previously mentioned, and a shed that will house JG, gorilla wagons, wheelbarrows, tools, etc. | 
Group under the new carport
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You know when someone says, “We really hate to ask” that they’re not planning not to ask because they so hate to ask, right? They’re gonna ask. And, yes, that is the case, but this isn’t an ask along the lines of fundraising or a capitol campaign or the sort. This ask is, “If you have some extra bucks and you’ve been wondering who might be able to use them, we’d be very grateful to receive them.” I know this is a difficult time for lots of people. Not just the cost of everything rising quickly, but the uncertainty about the future. So, please, don’t feel any pressure about this. Just if you have a little extra, we could put that extra to very good use.
Given all spoken about above, we have come to a decision about the Four Acres. Not only do we not have the time and energy to maintain it, we realize we have no need for it. Letting it go will allow us to focus on the Farm as well as give us much-needed funds to support the work in Kantolomba. The current world economy has raised the cost of everything in Zambia to the point that it’s requiring nearly twice what it did only a year or so ago to assist the community there. Even with the Cooperative doing everything they can to support themselves, the shortfall is still dramatic. Letting go the Four Acres, getting it into the hearts and hands of those who can properly care for it, will free up so much energy of every sort to pursue these new avenues opening up for us.
Getting FAZC ready for sale
Years ago I heard someone say that if you want to stay in relationship with someone, don’t just try to do it through talking together. Find something you want to do together, a mutual interest you can engage with and participate in together. Perhaps that would have been an easier, more straightforward way of saying what I’ve gone on about for all these pages? Participating together. Sharing things we care about. Assisting and supporting those who could use some extra, whether on the other side of the world or at our local Food Bank. Doing our best to care for the earth and the environment. Supporting one another to end the suffering in our own lives, freeing us up to bring lovingkindness and compassion in larger and larger degrees to every aspect of our lives. To me that’s what this is all about. We are not here to learn to love. We are here to realize we are Love. And, since what we practice is what we have, well, we can see how it all works nicely together.
In gasshō,
ch