This morning, I want to explore together with you aging as a spiritual practice, some considerations and aspects that particularly arise with age and how I practice with them. So I'll be sharing poems this morning that are for me, each Dharma teachings. I sometimes experience a poem, the right poem at the right time, as a, like a pelican soaring in the sky, and then that moment where there's this plunge to the water, this sudden deep dive, that kind of a moment that a poem can bring, like a Manjushri sword cutting through, thus

[01:03]

So hopefully these alms will find their way. In 2009, I was Shuso Head Trainee at the Zen Center in LA. And for the entering ceremony of that year of practice, Roshi Egyoku presented me with a fan. And on the back and the front of the fan were written in Japanese and in English, see as is. See as is. It's a very powerful exhortation. It's sort of, it's really my daily practice reminder. See as is. So what I want to share in my practices today around aging and the accompanying poems, that's the structure on which they all are hung see as is.

[02:08]

I could stop there. I'll keep going. I want to say just a few things about age. The topic is gargantuan. There are a quadrillion books written from every point of view. I'm not going to be doing that today, but I do want to say, just to set the context, that we Each experience aging very differently depending on so many factors, our genetic makeup and legacy, our mental conditions, our physical conditions and challenges, our socioeconomic condition, racial and cultural factors, availability of support in various communities or non-availability. So those are all impacts on how we age.

[03:16]

That said, we all know that we're going to get old and that we will eventually die. We chant it. We talk about impermanence as a central aspect of our practice and our knowing. And I think at the beginning, it's more we know it, but we don't necessarily know it. We will be dying, but it's way down there, not here. And eventually with passing years, with passing life, with losses of dearly beloved ones, irreplaceable ones, maybe the end of certain dreams, either by realization of them already or by the non-ability for them to be realized. Changes in our physical capacities and conditions, it all helps us to get more aware of this great matter.

[04:19]

Buddhist teacher Lou Richmond speaks of I was very interested in his choice here, and it's interesting for me to think of. He speaks of wistfulness as a defining mark of aging. Not as strong as regret, but more atmospheric. The sense and awareness of time passing, future possibilities possibly narrowing. And he calls this the flavor of aging. So to speak of flavor, when I was a freshman in high school in the days when we were invited to memorize poetry, I memorized this poem, famous poem by Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay. And at the time, I was 13 and I understood the poem to be talking about autumn and the beautiful, fragrant, poignant beauty of autumn and changes of the season.

[05:30]

Now I hear it very differently. Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaves a flower, but only so. An hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Flavor. So one. Aspect of aging that I wanted to touch on briefly is ageism. I mention this because we as a Sangha are in the process of learning and exploring true inclusivity together, and when there are subtle microaggressions that happen that other people, or separate them, or separate us from them,

[06:45]

So Rhonda McGee, who's leading our course on Many Cultures, One Sangha, speaks of all the isms and schisms of our world. And ageism is one to keep an eye out for. We're a youth-oriented culture. Our tendency in ageism, like all ageisms, is to separate from those who are aging very subtly, to bypass them without seeing their value or contributions and capabilities, to, in effect, sideline them, to allow them to be invisible or even irrelevant to other them. So, ageism can be very subtle in speech, so that the intent of what one is saying is very different from the impact that can happen.

[07:52]

One example of that is I recently was watching a Zoom, on Zoom, a presentation at Upaya, and the lead speaker was Joanna Macy, who many of us know personally and love and or have read of her or been in her classes. She's an extraordinary teacher among us, a great blessing and gift and exemplar in so very many ways. And when she gave her, finished her talk, which was the same as I've just described, a very inspirational talk, the convener of this particular conference was expressing gratitude and said, oh, Joanna, you are so wonderful at 95. She's wonderful.

[08:52]

She was wonderful at 30, 60, 70, 80, 95, and may she continue on, but she's Her wonderfulness is not that she's 95 and has managed to live this long, because that can just be genetics. Her wondrousness is her wondrousness, her thusness. So it's that kind of subtle, you look terrific for 70. Okay. Thank you. So, enough said on that, I think. What I'd like to do now is speak of some of my own practices that I do that are components of aging, but not restricted. They could be done at 30 as well, but they serve me now, I would say. So the first practice that I do is before I begin sitting any time, every single time that I sit Zazen, I start with

[10:00]

saying some variation of this. May I see that which I do not yet see. May I hear that which I do not yet see. May I see what needs to be released. May I know where I am not forgiven or forgiving. So I say it variously, but my intentionality is may I open to see as is. I do it kind of as a We could say it as a koan at the beginning, and I'm not expecting a deus ex machina to come down and say, okay, Penelope, this is what you need to do. It's not from that place. It is from a place of, may I open? May I just open? And then respond. So... second practice and very central in my life, and it has been for over 40 years now, is writing poetry as practice.

[11:10]

So I read poetry every day and I write poetry every day. And sometimes I'm writing then after I write the poem to polish it, to craft it, to maybe send it out somewhere or another. But I'm speaking of writing poetry as practice so that I'm hopefully ego free. I don't have an agenda and I can allow the poem to find its way and say what is to be said to bring forth what's to be brought forth. And very often from that place, I receive things I need to hear. It feeds me to do that. There's a mystery. and a grace in this process that I don't understand, don't actually need to. I'm just grateful that that is so. So I'm going to read a poem that I wrote many years ago.

[12:14]

Not my best poem. It's not about quality of poetry here. I'm speaking of gift given to me in the writing of this poem, which was written during my daughter's senior year of high school. She was in college applications and so on and so forth. I printed this one too small, so I removed my glasses. The end of the time of mothering. She knows when her work is done, the end of the time of mothering. She sniffs them each once more, then shakes her coat and moves off without a backward glance. The mother bear watches her cubs grow large, muscles elaborating beneath their fur, their gyroscopes internal now, no longer referenced to her.

[13:14]

It's a habit, this watching, eyes everywhere, correcting, saving the best morsels, every moment connecting, encircling. I watch my child readying to leave no cautionary words. I will never speak. I have been rehearsing this moment for years. Along with writing poetry, journaling is also another aspect of my practice. And very often, older people in general use journaling as a form of memoir, a kind of recollecting, regathering together, kind of harvesting experiences of their lifetime, and sometimes to publish as memoirs, sometimes to give to their grandchildren to be shared, but it is a way of retrospective

[14:30]

life viewing. And so sometimes when I'm doing that and writing toward the past in that sense, special events will rise up. But more deliciously for me, what will happen sometimes is a memory of a very simple and daily event like sitting in the very small breakfast nook in my family growing up with my mother and my father and my brother. and looking out the back window toward the bird feeder and the bright red cardinals coming in the winter to the feeding station. Just a sweet, small memory. So journaling in that way is very evocative and can be its own form of gratitude practice. When I was in graduate school I was studying to be a clinical psych person and we studied necessarily Eric Erickson and his very famous epigenetic chart which is basically his theory of eight stages of life development and for each stage there was a challenge and then there was also a hopeful

[15:56]

outcome or resolution. And the last of the eight stages he called integrity versus despair, with the hopeful outcome being wisdom. That made sense to me for many, many years, still does, but I want to add an addendum because I think he missed something. He's gone. I can no longer contact him to say this to him, but I'll say it here, which is there is this recollecting, there is this ingathering, there is this coming to ease with one's life and hopefully garnered wisdoms along the way. And then there's this, and now, and here, this moment. It's not all done. It's still doing. Life is still doing until it isn't for me.

[17:03]

So there's a wonderful haiku that I found by Isa, who accesses this. She says, this world of do is, yes, a world of do and yet. Isn't that lovely? This world of do is yet a world of do and yet. It's not a pressure, but it is an invitation to be here with all that is, which includes challenges of memory, challenges of physical condition, etc. Still here. still this, still now what's here, what's possible. So I was a chaplain for some years in Los Angeles as in hospitals and hospices.

[18:03]

And when I traced back the strands that brought me to becoming a chaplain, there are so many. to name, but I want to say a few because I think it's, in a way, seeking sense, interesting for me to say. I come from a medical family. That's one strand. The second strand is that my most beloved Vapi, my grandfather, when he was dying and in the hospital, was calling my name. He kept calling for me to come, and in those days, children were not allowed in hospitals. And certainly death was something you had children go outside and play in the yard. You didn't go to funerals, and it wasn't very much talked about, at least in my background. So I grieved that for years, that I could not be with him and be present with this great love of mine with him.

[19:08]

And another experience was when my father was dying and lying in the hospital that he had been the head of the board of and the chief of pediatrics for and sort of a Napoleonic figure striding the halls and was now very small and shrunken and dying. And we had between us an enormously painful unresolved issue that had been egregious in my life. And it had been, we had papered it over, so we had this subtle, superficial relationship. And so at his dying, I'm standing at his bedside, and I said, oh, Dad, you're going to be fine. I'll see you in the morning. And he died in the middle of that night. And the terrible, painful learning of not having taken that time, even that time, to pelican time to say, you broke my heart.

[20:18]

We have to talk. We have to say this aloud before you go. We have to clear this. So that was a teaching. So that when my mother died 15 years later, It was a whole other experience of being with her for two months, clearing up all whatever gunk was in our relationship, doing a lot of laughing and a lot of crying and a lot of singing of Scottish songs, which she felt to do, and writing out her whole funeral service. But it was a very sacred, sweet time. So those, among other things, brought me to chaplaincy and the great the great privilege of it. But when I finished being a psychologist, when I closed my practice down, I wanted to give myself an open period of time to see what wanted to come forth next.

[21:20]

And during that time, I went on a practice period to Green Gulch. And while I was there, during that practice period, this poem came through, which I considered was the, I got as the turning place for me to enter chaplaincy. So the poem was this, it matters. It matters that one fallen leaf swept down this minute stream has come to rest against the small rock mid flow. so the water must pay a toll, a tuneful ripple magnified in the otherwise silence. It matters that other yellow or rust-flavored leaves are falling into the water before me, maybe one every minute or so, kicking everything toward its final arching descent.

[22:24]

They glide like swans, forming slow clusters. Just now that one bronze leaf, its stem a rudder, its mass a furled sail flows by stately a tiny tall ship. It matters that I am here to bear witness as some living being will do for me one day. So for all those who have worked at bedsides of people who are dying in any capacity, volunteering or with loved ones who are dying or chaplaining or medicaling in some way, it's an enormous privilege and a very alive process to be allowed to companion people through the process. And sometimes the exchanges are like that pelican dive.

[23:28]

There's no dross. It just goes right to the heart of the matter in the time left. In my experience as chaplain, I never once heard somebody, as they were talking about their life in that time, speak about that they had been the founder of a startup company that had earned a million dollars or that they had climbed Mount Everest. or they had won five Academy Awards, nothing like this. It was always, the topic was always relationship. We would say Sangha, always without exception. So the depth, the meaning of relationships, the gifts of them, and for some people, and it was very obvious really, they were quite at ease in the face of their coming death. For some, that was connected to a spiritual or religious practice.

[24:29]

And for others, it was a sense of acceptance of their life, experienced the satisfactory, completed, a sense of closure with their loved ones. It was very palpable when that happened. So here's a poem that describes that by Raymond Carver, who was, at this time when he wrote this, dying of cancer, this is one of the last poems that he wrote, called Late Fragment. And did you get what you wanted from this life? Even so, I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. And this other one, which will be familiar to you, from T.S.

[25:40]

Eliot, from the Four Quartets. Little Giddiness is just part because it's long. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the very first time. Through the unknown remembered gate when the last of Earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree, not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick, now, here, now, always. A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

[26:46]

And all shall be well. that all manner of thing shall be well. So for other people that I met in chaplaining, they spoke of unfinished, painful, and unresolved relationships, just as I had with my father. Or a failure on your part to be vulnerable or to take risk. in a relationship, or to atone for wounds that they knew they had given, or to forgive wounds that they had received from others. So it was in a state of, you could say, dis-ease. So part of the companioning of being with them was as well as possible to support them, to open into these concerns, to see them, to feel them clearly.

[27:50]

And in some cases, to be able to make reconciliation directly, maybe making a phone call 40 years later to someone and working through in that phone call, just plummeting to the depth and accessing and working through the issue. In other cases where that kind of connection wouldn't be possible for working at being with it, seeing it clearly, whatever the issue was, finding some way to atone and come to closure, come to ease. So sometimes a part of that process was a learning or opening to self-forgiving, which is important. I sing in a special choir for people who are dying, who are terminal in their condition.

[28:57]

And one of the songs that we sing, when it's appropriate to the person, your particular faith tradition, and also other factors that we might consider, this is a song we sing, I'll spare you my voice and I'll tell you the words. For all I leave imperfectly, I sing forgiveness. For hurts unhealed, love unrevealed, for all that remains unfinished, I wrap it in mercy and lift it to God and sing forgiveness. Forgiveness. I've got to speed up a little. So another of my practices is chanting for ancestors.

[29:59]

So I have a daily practice before I sit of recollecting all my ancestors, going back way further than I can even name them. And then starting with ones that I can name, but for example, my maternal grandparents whom I never met, when I say their names, John Lawther, Christine Sinclair Lawther, and even in the saying of the name, just as when we chant the names of our San ancestors, they come into body. And I try to pause. I do this also for family, direct family members who have died. and for all the Beloveds of my life who have died, and that list is getting very long as I continue in my life. So I tried to stop just for a moment so each person comes into me, and I into them.

[31:01]

And the value of this practice for me is really knowing the non-separation, the through threads, the gifts that are passed back and forth, the Dharma, the non-separation, and it's a practice I cherish very much. Susan Moon, when she was here a few weeks ago, spoke of Thich Nhat Hanh's Five Remembrances, which is also a practice that I do every day. I chant the five remembrances. I'm of a nature to grow old. I'm of the nature to grow sick. I'm of the nature to die. Everything and everyone I love is of a nature to change and to leave. My only possession is my action. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

[32:04]

I want to mention another one. I'll quickly say that at a retreat I was once at, you can do this with your partner, with your beloved friend, with parents and children. You can do it with a stranger, as long as you call them beloved. So the idea is three parts. You stand in front of the beloved with your hands on their shoulders. You look, you say, I hold my beloved in my arms. Wonderful. Then, in the moment, with your arms down, with still looking, I know we are both of a nature to leave and be separate one from the other. And the third step as the first, I hold my beloved.

[33:12]

in my arms. Wonderful. So in the sake of time, it's going to talk about the practice of curiosity and carrying myself lightly and practicing carrying myself lightly and laughter and chagrin, fun chagrin at the Tense time that I've lost my keys in two days and all these things that happen, my aches, my pains, my vows, my challenges with all that. To be able to play and be irreverent is very important to me and to keep humor, curiosity, not knowing enlivened. So here's Lewis Carroll. from Alice in Wonderland. I'll just do a few verses here. You are old, Father William, the young man said, and your hair has become very white.

[34:18]

Yet you incessantly stand on your head. Do you think at your age this is right? In my youth, Father William replied to his son, I feared it might injure the brain. But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, why I do it again and again. You are old, said the youth, and your jaws are too weak for anything tougher than suet. Yet you finished the goose with the bones and the beak. Pray, how did you manage to do it? In my youth, said his father, I took to the law and argued each case with my wife. And the muscular strength it gave to my jaw has lasted the rest of my life. Okay, and the last one, and then I'm going to stop, is, and perhaps most importantly this practice, is that of letting go, of seeing what no longer is, what no longer fits, what may no longer be possible.

[35:25]

Suzuki Roshi says, you don't let go of things, they let go of you. I love this. Let go of things. Let go of you. This is a very important component of aging process, letting go of roles, letting go of ideas, letting go of shoulds and oughts that have been present. Virginia Woolf says, I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Isn't that beautiful? Beautiful. Aspect of the sun. So I can no longer go on. I can't kneel anymore. I hurt my knees. So unless we learn to raise the bells, that's gone. And I love to do the bells. I love it. I love bowing. Today I did three. There are days when not possible at all, and I have to calculate it. But I love to bow.

[36:27]

I love this practice. So seeing what is, what's possible and accommodating, letting go and accommodating and seeing what's still valent. I'm a cross country skier for a quadrillion years. I used to do back country cross skiing. Now what I do is I still can cross country ski in tracks that are pre-made. for me on flat ground. That's how I cross country see, but I still get to be in the woods. I still get to smell the pines and hear the birds and the great silence. That's as it is, seeing as it is. I'm going to end with this extraordinary poem by Stanley Kunitz, who wrote this poem at age 100. He died at age 101. The Layers.

[37:32]

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. And I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe. out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered. How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind, the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face.

[38:45]

Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road, precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus clouded voice directed me live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, No doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. So, I guess we have time for questions and thoughts and let's realize, please.

[39:51]

Yes. Thank you for your beautiful talk and for how much heart you put into it and the poetry was really wonderful. I got sort of caught on the word wistful, which was way back. But when you read the Kuhnitz poem and some of the other ones also, I just wanted you to talk a little bit about the balance between kind of looking past or back and being present. Well, I'll do the short version. Could people soon hear this question? No. Ellen is asking, help me, Ellen, if I do it. to explore a little bit more the idea of wistfulness in aging and being present.

[40:59]

I think that's the soup. I think that's the soup of it, honestly. For example, when beloveds die that are irreplaceable, irreplaceable, that, that's painful. That's pain in the heart and it stays. It doesn't, you miss, I experienced that at least. That's a bittersweetness. That's just one. Certain roles that I would love to be able to play and can't, I physically can't, is, is, a letting go that has a wistful sometimes a wistful or sweet bittersweet quality to it on the one hand and at this end if i stay with the practice of it just as kunitz is saying right at the end i'm still not done i'm not done with my changes or with my life until that last very slow breath yeah that's

[42:14]

This is how I take it. Yeah, thank you for your question. Hosan, did you want to come here? I'm just absorbing and reckoning with my own teaching, which I am not shy to admit. So this gives me lots of angles from which to look at it. I have lots of questions, but I don't think I have any particular questions at the moment, but I'm really grateful. And I think gratitude is, if we're lucky, gratitude is part of the, also a very main flavor of the soup. Yes, yes, thank you.

[43:20]

Judy, is that Judy? Yeah. Thank you. I was wondering if you could do it loud, Judy, because you can't. Okay, I'll do my best. Actually, can you just come closer to the right? Yes, that's a great idea. First, I was just a request. Could you say again that short phrase that you said was at the beginning that you said that your talk is about that. There's something about what it is or something like this. What was on your fan, I think. Oh, is that what you're saying to see as is. That was the fan. See as is, right, almost like a koan. Like a koan. A koan, yeah. So what really stays with me is how you lifted up adaptability of relating to the forms of practice, and then they change.

[44:35]

and how to maintain the integrity of, I guess we could say, in terms of this koan. And I'm wondering in that regard, what your understanding is of zazen as, if you will, the essence or the heart of our practice, or maybe that's my sense of it. And I'm just wondering how you relate with Zazen from the perspective of forms of practice change, and at the same time, what is this practice? What is Zazen? What's your relationship to that as you, let's say, keep changing?

[45:36]

What's coming right up, what rises first, is I don't know that my relationship to Zazen or the centrality of Zazen in my life and practice has changed. I don't experience it changing, although clearly what rises up in the process is that it can be different at all times. If we want to talk about forms, here I am with Alan's music thing in front of me, because otherwise I couldn't see what I wanted to say. I can't look down and up and down. It's disorienting for me. Sitting in a chair, Joe has brought me cushions for my feet. These are all external adaptations, but that reflect my inner and outer condition. But I am interested in I would have to ponder much more to see if there's something that I experience as different or new, except to the degree that each time we sit, it's new, it's other.

[46:52]

But that's my best. I can't find the difference. Do you find a difference? Well, I just think it's... To me, it's an important question, if you will. What is Zazen? Oh, okay. Yeah, so just in that regard. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Hi, is it Russ? Thank you, Lou and his heart. I don't know about the gentleman who convened the talk at Upaya spoke to... Joanna is an admiring tone. At 95, you presented this really great talk. That's how I heard it. And I could also hear, geez, I'm 95, I'm not dead yet, and I'm going to present myself. That's really great. I'm thinking about the reverse, where a parent or an older person would look at a child and say, wow, how precocious, how mature for that age.

[48:01]

Or a young entrepreneur has a big business, like, wow, they were a billionaire. you know, 19 or something, and how our view of aging, depending on our perspective and our kind of tender parts, will either be encouraged or diminished. Let's get more of a thought about the two sides of looking at age. My question is, you introduced your last poem, which was extraordinary, by an author who was 100 years old. and you lived to be 101, but you didn't highlight the ages of the other poets, and I'm just curious about how you're not 100 yet, so you're not at ages, but I was struck by that. What was the impulse for identifying that person's age? Well, thank you, because you also bring up something else I don't know.

[49:01]

People could hear that, but it's around the issue of ageism. You can be ageist with young people way easily. I mean, that's a given. At both precocity or lagging in development or making judgments, you're too young to know or to understand. Those are all actually ageist statements as well. I did not hear, I did not receive. It was not a man, it was a woman, but the person who was thanking Joanna. It was singling out of the age linked to her wonderfulness. It isn't necessary to know her age in that context. People live to be 95. partial genetics and just good luck if they're healthy and are living to 95.

[50:01]

It's not a wonder that they are 95 in any other sense. Their wonderfulness is in the quality of their essence and their being, for me. And so with Stanley Kunitz, I was struck by that at that age, it's quite unusual for somebody to be writing. poetry like that. And then that he died the next year was orvalent for me. I don't think of it, though, as he was wonderful at 100. I think he was a wonderful poet all the way through. So there's a subtle difference for me. Maybe it's just the difference in intent and impact. I don't know. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, you're welcome. I know we're getting close, and I didn't look over here at the Zoom, so I can't see if they're... There's a question from Barbara Joan.

[51:02]

Okay. There's a question from Barbara Joan online. Okay, please. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to... Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Great. And I am grateful for having heard you. I... wanted to offer that what I received from what you did was your reverence for your own practice and what a gift that is to me. And thank you. How dare you do it? You take it away. Things are numberless.

[52:03]

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